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Belated Christmas Story to Warm the Heart
In the masterpiece novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch offers this sage advice to his daughter, Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. . . . Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
I have a dear friend whose skin no one would want to climb into, for she has battled an array of skin cancers for two decades. Her health issues have taken a toll, but in return they have given her an understanding of others who are facing their own hardships.
I knew my friend had a kind heart, but the depth of her empathy more fully revealed itself this past Christmas when she surprisingly turned down my invitation to join us for dinner. She is a single mom whose college-student son was out of state visiting his girlfriend’s family, and we didn’t want her to be alone.
It turns out she wasn’t. Instead of in my home, she spent Christmas evening outside in the cold with the homeless. I learned of this not from my friend, but from a shared intimate. In fact, my friend seemed embarrassed that I had found out about her charitable excursion because she is not one to seek recognition.
While honoring her privacy, here is her Christmas story that echoes the ideal expressed by Mother Teresa: “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”
My friend did not feed 100 people in need on Christmas night, but she did feed far more than just one.
She began by buying a dozen cheeseburger meals, asking the server to wrap each in an individual bag for dignity’s sake, and added bottles of water. She would later return to buy a dozen more burgers and would have gone back a third time if necessary.
“I hope it’s because the shelters, or family or friends, were taking care of the homeless since it was Christmas,” she explains, “but thankfully there were fewer homeless people out on Christmas than on a typical day.”
It turns out my friend has done this not only on Christmas evenings past, but on many “typical” days and nights in between as well.
Too, I learned, she has for years organized a food drive in her apartment complex, personally knocking door-to-door collecting canned goods, with the donations going to a different shelter each year.
Back to this Christmas. My friend admits that despite staying in well-lit areas, mostly store parking lots where she regularly sees the homeless, she was at times a little fearful for her safety.
“These were places I knew of in my area that I did feel pretty safe to go to, even at night,” she points out. “But honestly, I wouldn’t have gone to someplace like Compton, especially alone, and that makes me sad because the homeless in Compton most likely needed a hamburger and bottle of water more than anyone in Camarillo does.”
She had one hair-raising moment, however, when a man startled her by popping out of the shadows. He angrily confronted her asked what she was doing.
“When I explained I just wanted him to have something to eat, his face lit up,” my friend shares. “His face went from kind of scary to gratitude.”
As Atticus Finch knew, point of view means everything. What from the outside looked like a lonely Christmas evening for my friend, through her eyes had turned out to be a masterpiece.
“If anything,” she explains, “doing this was selfish on my part because I drove around for over an hour and a half and the response I got time and again from a simple cheeseburger meal and a bottle of water was, and in my Christmas memories always will be, priceless.”
When I again praised her for her act of goodwill, my friend humbly responded, “I wish I could do more. There are so many people out there who need help. It breaks my heart.”
Her Christmas story warms my heart.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
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Mr. E knew what his troupe was feeling. Before the curtain rose, he called the cast and crew together and told them this: “Theater is ephemeral and fleeting, like a dream. It doesn’t last forever. Each performance is unique and sacred. That is what makes it bittersweet – but that is also what makes it beautiful.”
Give the world another John Glenn, Prince, David Bowie, Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali – well, as near facsimiles as possible – to fill the voids they left behind this year.
This novel of historical fiction was originally, and enthusiastically, recommended to me when I was browsing the “New Releases” at Barnes & Noble back in 2003 – not by a staff worker, but by a perfect stranger.
More precisely, a gift copy of “Gloryland,” a novel by Shelton Johnson, came to me in the mail out of the blue and anonymously. I searched the Barnes & Noble box for a clue as to whom to thank, but there was no name on the receipt nor a gift note.
And so it continued for an hour, a history lesson becoming more painfully real because slavery could very possibly be in this beautiful family’s roots. I felt a rising anger and disappointment at Washington.
