An old, grainy photo of a back porch shows a kitten on the stair. The screens are torn, the walls dilapidated. Only the concrete stairs are sturdy.
For some reason the memory of this photo broke through the fog of my everyday life in The OC. Mine was one of those families living in poverty housing. All these years advocating, I’d never made the connection– a sudden epiphany!
We lived in a town of about 4000 people in southeast California. An agricultural Mecca. And as close to hell on earth as you can get. Just about everyone was dirt poor so the social stratum was a little muddled. Still, we knew to be embarrassed.
Our house was old and my grandfather was sick. The money coming in went right back out to pay medical bills. He wasn’t handy and the rest of us didn’t have a clue where to begin. The house had been built fifty or sixty years before. It probably hadn’t seen any repair since then.
It may well have been a fine home once, providing shelter for a large farming family. Built square, it was completely surrounded by screened porch. The porch is where people slept in the heat. The screen protected them from bomber-sized mosquitoes. It helped somewhat to keep out the cricket plagues. But it was no match for the cockroaches. Nothing is.
Inside, the building was divided into three portions: the entertaining room, the kitchen and a community sleeping room. No indoor plumbing! That came later. When it was so cold that your snot froze on your upper lip, everyone gathered in the one room to sleep in shelter. By the time my family arrived, the porches had been enclosed into smaller sleeping rooms. We had air conditioning.
The walls were plaster pasted onto slat boards a few inches apart. As it aged, the plaster gave way. Gaping holes dotted the rooms and ceilings. We joked about covering our heads in the house. A hard hat would have been useful then.
The floors were simple wood covered with linoleum. Beneath the house was a root cellar about six feet deep. The door to the cellar gaped enticingly to a young girl who never had the nerve to pull it open. Down there was cool, damp earth. There were also bodies of animals. The dank earth had appealed to them too. Sometimes the smell of life sadly ended permeated the house for weeks.
When we want to wallow in self-pity, we talk about the bath room. Sometime early in my life, the wooden floor around the toilet had begun to rot. Ever so slowly, the floor gave way. You could look down into the root cellar between your feet. Precariously perched upon a porcelain seat, you could only hope the pipes would hold the entire apparatus together. There aren’t too many times when one can feel superior with a memory like that.
My grandmother was an unhappy woman. She kept the family together with an iron will and a quick hand. Don’t even think about mentioning dust-bowl refugees in this family. You’d sooner eat alkali. (Which btw, is the pie I made as a kid – no mud pies.) She was educated and proud. Her kids would be the same if it killed her. Or them.
Early in my childhood, Gramma reached the point that she could no longer bare visitors in the house. Our poverty was shameful and meant to be hidden. At some point, friends were no longer welcome. Maybe it was the wobbly toilet that finally did it. Grampa’s return trips to the hospital and life sustaining medications kept the wolf at the door and the house unrepaired.
I’ll never forget the look on her face. I’d had an accident at school, tripping over a lobbed softball and twisted my ankle. The school secretary had let me lean against her as she helped me home, just across the street. Gramma was mortified. I’d let the lady into the house. I completed high school without ever having a friend over for dinner or a sleepover. Which meant, by the law of reciprocity, I didn’t go elsewhere.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? No, I don’t believe that for a minute. Every shameful moment slowly eats away at self confidence – a million tiny deaths. And yes, I may have succeeded to spite my beginnings, but you can’t help but wonder, what could have been? If we’d set aside our pride and asked for help? If it hadn’t taken me almost 40 years to learn what cannot be done alone?
The respect I have for the families who walk into our offices and say, yes, give me a hand with this, is unfathomable. How strong of character for a man and father to admit that he could use a little help creating a fine home for his family? What an amazing woman who stands beside him, doing whatever she must for her children’s success.
The least we can do as those who assist such fine families, is to respect their boundaries, leaving their family pride somewhat in tact. And we can be enormously grateful for what they represent for our world’s future.
No comments:
Post a Comment