|
|
Topics: Beauty, Suffering, Compassion
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the
door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man.
"Why, he's hardly taller than my eight-year-old," I thought as I
stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his
face lopsided from swelling, red and raw.
Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening. I've come to
see if you've a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this
morning from the eastern shore, and here's no bus till morning." He
told me he'd been hunting for a room since noon but with no success, no
one seemed to have a room.
"I guess it's my face... I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says
with a few more treatments . . ."
For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me.
"I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early
in the morning."
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. I went
inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old
man if he would join us.
"No thank you. I have plenty." And he held up a brown paper bag.
When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with
him a few minutes. It didn't take long time to see that this old man had
an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for
a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who
was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
He didn't tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence
was preface with a thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no
pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer.
He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children's room for him. When I
got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little
man was out on the porch.
He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his us, haltingly,
as if asking a great favor, he said, "Could I please come back and stay
the next time I have a treatment? I won't put you out a bit. I can sleep
fine in a chair." He pause a moment and then added, "Your children made
me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't
seem to mind."
I told him he was welcome to come again. And on his next trip he
arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big
fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen. He said he had
shucked them that morning before he left so that they'd be nice and
fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. and I wondered what time he had
to get up in order to do this for us.
In the years he came to stay overnight with us there was never a time
that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.
Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery;
fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every
leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail
these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly
precious.
When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a
comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning.
"Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You
can lose roomers by putting up such people!"
Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could
have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear. I
know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we
earned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with
gratitude to God.
Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse, As she showed
me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden
chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was
growing in an old dented, rusty bucket.
I thought to myself, "If this were my plant, I'd put it in the
loveliest container I had!"
My friend changed my mind. "I ran short of pots," she explained, "and
knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn't mind
starting out in this old pail. It's just for a little while, till I can
put it out in the garden."
She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was
imagining just such a scene in heaven. "Here's an especially beautiful
one," God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old
fisherman. "He won't mind starting in this small body."
All this happened long ago -- and now, in God's garden, how tall this
lovely soul must stand.