Years ago, on a cold winter afternoon in the mid-1960s, a young boy was walking home from school in Seligman, Mo., right up the road from us about 20 miles. He saw something next to a barn he wasn’t accustomed to seeing and ran home to share the news with his mother.
“Mama, there’s a neegra living in that old barn next to the railroad tracks.”
His mother gave him her full attention and asked what he saw and when he saw it. Then she said, “You and your brother get in the car right now and wait for me.”
The boys did as they were told, and in a few minutes their mom came out and started the engine. She drove to the barn, told the boys to stay in the car, and hollered for the man who appeared from inside. “Get in,” she told the man, and he did. In the front seat she had a pile of what she had collected in a hurry – a blanket, food, and what money she could scrape together. She put the blanket around the man and said for him to help himself to a baloney sandwich and a banana.
“You’re not safe around here,” she told him.
The woman drove her two sons and the homeless black-skinned man 90 miles to Springfield, where she let him out, downtown. She handed him what money she had, gave him what food was left, and told him to keep the blanket.
More recently, we were in a restaurant next to a table of four. Their conversation indicated that the older couple were parents of the 50 or so year-old woman and in-laws of her husband. The older woman looked neither with it nor out of it. She had kind but vacant eyes.
When the meal was finished, the server brought the check and four mints. The daughter opened a mint and offered it to her mother. Three times. “Mother! It’s a mint! For you!” Each time she announced that it was a mint, her voice trebled right up, as though hearing were the problem.
Finally the older woman took the mint from her daughter, looked at it for a moment, put it in her mouth and swallowed it.
“Mother! It was a mint! You’re not supposed to swallow it whole!”
The daughter was ready to call Air-Evac, and pleaded with her husband, whose cell phone suddenly rang. The husband said, “I don’t know who this is,” and answered it anyway while his wife prattled, “Ted, mother swallowed the whole mint! Do something.”
Ted got up and left the table to talk to someone he didn’t know.
“Daddy! Mother ate the mint without chewing!”
The father looked at his wife and touched her cheek with the back of the fingers of his right hand. “Maybe it will kill her. I hope not.”
He pulled out his wallet, and with shaky fingers trolled for a credit card and placed it on the tray. The server swooshed in and instructed the man to sign a tiny, shiny piece of paper. The son-in-law hung up, verified that his father-in-law had tipped, and said it’s time to go. He and the daughter led the way, while the old man pulled his wife’s chair out and helped her up. When both were steady on their feet, the woman took the mint out from under her tongue, wrapped it in the original cellophane, nudged it under her saucer, and smiled at her husband. They tottered out of somewhere they likely never wanted to be to be driven back to somewhere they did.
There is no earthly reason these two events crowded into a cranium that hasn’t been backed-up in years, other than watching presidential candidates cauterize each other instead of listening, providing, inspiring, and relating. We don’t have to be unkind to anyone unless we want to be.
Maybe we should just take what’s offered, a baloney sandwich or a mint, and hope for the best.
Mary Pat Boian