All’s Well That Ends Well?

Image from Free Pic

by Craig Bennett*

One of the best friends I ever made was a neighbor living in the same apartment complex where I wound up not long after I became divorced. She was fifteen years older than I was and had dealt with cerebral palsy from the time she was a child. Virtually everything she had to do was made more difficult by her CP. But she had graduated from Temple University with a degree in journalism, wrote speeches for a few politicians in Harrisburg and one in Washington, married, bore three sons, and divorced her passive-aggressive husband when she’d had enough of a toxic marriage. She turned out to be one of the most interesting individuals I had encountered in many a year. As a friend and neighbor, I became her transportation to and from many events and places and consistently enjoyed her company.

But one of Alice’s sons was a constant thorn in her side. He had become a street kid, was addicted to drugs, and would beat on her door in the middle of the night and raise a ruckus, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to turn him away to spend the night seeking shelter somewhere else from the cold, the rain, or possible human predators. Then he would steal from her, berate her for various alleged maternal sins, and leave without so much as a “Thank you.” He was obviously very angry and resentful about something, and he blamed Alice for that anger.

Then one day she and I were going somewhere (I have no recollection of where), and she asked me if I would mind if Tom, the son in question, would ride along part of the way. Wherever he apparently had to go was much too far to walk and wasn’t served by any kind of public transportation. I was not especially eager to do any favors for someone who treated his mother the way he was in the habit of treating Alice; but, rather reluctantly, I agreed. When we reached the rendezvous point where he was waiting for us on the corner, I pulled over and threw the door open. (For some reason, Alice must have insisted on sitting in the back seat of my humble VW; but I remember what I’m about to relate very clearly.)

When he got in and settled into the front passenger’s seat, Alice introduced us. And I felt immediately that I liked this kid. It really threw me. How could I feel so positively toward this person in view of everything that I knew about him: his abuse of his mother, his aggressively anti-social behavior, the mess he’d obviously made of his life, and so-on? Where in the world were these surprisingly positive feelings coming from? There was no logical reason, no valid explanation for the way something way down deep in me reacted to meeting this colossally immature, irresponsible, abusive, and thoroughly disreputable character. But I knew what I sensed, and I knew how strongly I sensed it. I just had no understanding of why.

I didn’t hear much about Tom again for several years. Alice moved out to Seattle to put a continent between herself and her toxic family. We corresponded frequently for a while, and I finally gave in to her consistent claims that I had to come out there sometime… I’d love it there… the scenery is beautiful, salmon is cheap, shrimp (prawn) are the same, the climate is absolutely wonderful (asthma was just one incapacitating condition she had the pleasure of dealing with every summer), and so-on. But after some time she did tell me that Tom had wound up in a drug rehab facility somewhere around West Chester. He had met a girl there. When they had both completed their treatment, they rented a house together in the town itself and put the word out on the street that for any young person with no place to come in out of the cold, no idea where his or her next meal might be coming from, or just the need to talk to someone who could listen and really understand, their door was always open.

I was particularly glad to hear that. And not at all surprised.

More time passed. During the summer that I turned sixty, Alice came back East to visit her sons. She figured, she said, that this would be her last such trip. She was seventy-five at the time, and she told me that people with cerebral palsy rarely last much beyond fifty! But she called me on the phone and asked if we might get together for a while during her time here. She was staying with her son Tom, his wife, and their little boy, and she gave me directions for how to get there to pick her up.

Tom and his small family lived in a rather humble trailer park just off U.S. 30. Their house appeared to be made up of a couple of adjoining units set on a low foundation. It was obvious that their income was far from substantial. But Tom had a steady job as a sort of artisan in wrought iron, and the interior of the house was warm, neat, and clean. And their little boy, Jeremy, was a revelation. This was—and, to the best of my recollection, still is—the most well-mannered, best behaved, most obedient and respectful five-year-old I’ve ever been around. The boy was a regular gem whom anybodyshould have been proud to claim as a son.

And I wasn’t at all surprised. I knew perfectly well who bore at least half of the responsibility and deserved at least half of the credit.

Even those who seem like the most hopeless cases—the ones who fight most vigorously any attempt to help them, rehabilitate them, and integrate them into the prevailing culture—are sometimes, underneath all the accumulated anger, frustration, pain, and fear, the exact opposite of the person they’ve been presenting to the world. I would guess, in fact, that one of the main drivers, if not the main driver, that causes them to go so far off the rails is the recognition that so much of what they are seeing around them, experiencing in their daily lives, and finding themselves unable to escape or avoid is stoking an internal fury at the indescribable wrong-ness of the world in which they have to live. Their sense of right and wrong, fairness and justice, the right way to live, and the right way to relate to other people goes a little deeper, burns a little brighter, flows a little stronger than the same sense as it exists in most of us. And it is therefore offended more readily, more deeply, and more painfully than it is in most of us.

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, bafrnesandnoble.com, and most book stores.

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