LETTERS FROM HOME: MELODRAMATICALLY KEEPING HEARTLESSNESS AND CYNICISM AT BAY

Thanksgiving 1998

Dear Adams family,

When the Lakota Sioux pray, one of their elders explained, they always pray "mitakuye oyasin," for all their relations. "We pray for all of the black people, all of the yellow people, all the white people, and all the red people. We pray for all our relations."

This inclusiveness reminds me of your family -- white, black, gay, straight, male, female, successful and less so -- and how welcomed you made me feel when I was a stranger in your midst.

Cold weather is late arriving in Missouri this year. DC and I just got around to exchanging the tall screens on the front porch for storm windows. The task requires me on a ladder and her on the porch and a bit of intuition to know which window goes where. Our house was made by hand, the windows, too. Each one is different no matter how alike they appear.

Just as we were finishing the job one recent afternoon, a man of about 30 strode by on the sidewalk. He was almost in front of the next house when he turned and asked if we might be able to help him. He was wearing a new coat but apologized repeatedly for his dirty clothes. He explained that he'd been working on his car, a Saab. There was trouble with the starter and he desperately needed to fix it to get back to his family in Carbondale, an hour's drive east.

His wife and baby were waiting for him there, he said making a rocking motion and smiling broadly. He was a charming man.

Then he asked if we were Christians, though not in those words. He used another phrase, maybe "Are you living in the Spirit?" He said he'd been to all the churches in the neighborhood asking for help but had been turned down. He needed $12.75 to fix his starter.

Again he apologized for being dirty and wondered what we must think, him a black man with dirt on his clothes asking us for help. We were shocked by the question and assured him we thought nothing. And assured him and assured him.

DC went inside to call her church to see if they could help. She was gone awhile. Those minutes appeared to be a kind of exquisite agony for him. He again said he was sorry for his dirty clothes. Then he mentioned the pain his feet have been causing him, just before asking if we needed help with the storm windows.

When she returned with an envelop, he started fretting, almost wailing that he didn't want us to give him the money and finally promising to pay us back.

DC told him to leave the money in the mailbox someday. He hugged her and hugged me and walked on.

DC and I smiled at each other. We knew we'd probably been the objects of a not very subtle ruse playing upon our Christian compassion and white guilt. Call it intuition. But we'd enjoyed the melodrama. It didn't seem to matter if it was based on fact or not.

I pointed out that $12.75 won't buy much in the way of Saab starters but might buy a case of Stag beer (my brand). DC smiled bigger. She hadn't called the church.

In her poem "The World Loved by Moonlight," Jane Hirschfield writes: "You must try/the voice said, to become colder/I understood at once/It is like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze/braced in stone. Only something heartless/could bear the full weight."

The full weight pulls you this way and that, makes you wonder sometimes if you're being cynical enough. Daily we are given opportunities to ask ourselves what (insert name of holy person here) would do. Everybody eventually figures out his own answer.

Even if the story was a pack of lies I am not convinced the money still won't someday show up in our mailbox.

Mitakuye oyasin. Happy Thanksgiving.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.