Good Deeds Are Better than Good Words

I want to share with you something that happened to me a couple of months ago and the memory of it has stayed with me so strongly it's as if it happened just this past weekend, because (between us) in some shape, size, or form it does happen on a regular and recurring basis and just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it's not real. 

With my apologies to my former neighbor, Reverend Cal Lord, and his inspiring insights every Friday, think of what follows as a blinding glimpse of the obvious by a sojourner further along on the road to Damascus. 

I was in New Haven as a follow-on to a clinical study I volunteered to be a part of by a world-famous healthcare provider exploring the possible links between diabetes (I have Type 2) and Alzheimer's. It's a drive from here, Norwich, where I live, to New Haven, where the research is conducted but I tell myself if the folks striving to learn something actually do learn something and that something can help someone else, it was worth the ride. 

Waiting at a red light in downtown New Haven to get to the clinicians' offices, I watched what I have to assume was a homeless man standing on the sidewalk during a lull in the traffic flow where he'd be holding up his cardboard begging sign to solicit change, or panhandling as so many of us call it (a story for another time is the origin of the term itself). 

In that moment as I watched he opened a bottle of water and emptied it over his head as a makeshift shower. Let me point out that the temperature was just south of fifty degrees Fahrenheit and there was a light but steady breeze which, in a city of concrete and steel buildings that turns streets into wind tunnels, was both cutting and intense especially for someone who was wet.

The truck driver behind me leaning on his horn brought me back into the now as our signal was already green and we all moved deeper into New Haven until all I could see of the man was a diminishing figure in my rear-view mirror, to be replaced at the next intersection by a woman of indeterminate age who was holding her own sign, and behind her on a different corner facing in the other direction another person and another sign. And so it went. 

Meanwhile, all around them on the sidewalk, people with purpose and destinations hurried past. Motorists like me stared at all of them out of the windows of our prisons on the road until all of it morphed into what Robert Hunter offered lyrically half a lifetime ago 'your typical city involved in a typical daydream.' 

It was a sobering moment that would have stayed with me even if it had only been happening in New Haven but we both know otherwise. There's not an intersection of state highways anywhere in Norwich that doesn't have someone seeking shelter from the storm in some manner. Even as the temperatures start to finally reflect the season we're in here in New England, there are people everywhere trying to get your attention because they're in need of help. 

We think of America as where 'God shed his grace on thee,' and there are all kinds of agencies with armies of volunteers, most especially now during the holiday season who are all doing God's work to try to make what little they have left after almost nine months of siege from the COVID pandemic and its economic and social impacts stretch just a little farther and help a little more. 

I was raised to believe we can do anything in this country if we put our minds to it. I cannot understand how so few of us can have so much when so many of us have so little but I have decided to no longer continue to accept what I have yet to understand. 

In eight days it will be Christmas Eve so we still have time to be the helpful, hopeful people we tell one another we are during the holidays. So stop saying Merry Christmas and start making it one for someone in need.
-bill kenny