It is better to light a candle

 It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. -- attributed to various people.

A long, long time ago – I know it was long ago because I was about 26, so that would have been around 1977 – I lived on the edge of a small town in a rural area. The town had no shelter for victims of domestic violence, or as we called it then, perhaps more directly, battered women. A friend of mine was trying to find people who would offer their homes as temporary “safe houses,”  where a woman and sometimes her children could stay for a night or two or three.  I told her that I’d be happy to do it, but all I had to offer was a sofa bed in a mobile home. Yeah, I lived in a mobile home in Minnesota, and some other time I’ll tell you about the winter day I spent crawling under it to unhook the frozen pipes, thaw them in the living room and re-wrap them with new heat tapes so I could hook them up again.  Anyway, my friend said, “That’s fine, it’s better than where they are.” I hosted three women in about a year, before the organization was able to establish its own dedicated safe house.

One woman I hosted had left and gone back to her husband more times than anyone could count.  Now, I wasn’t trained as a counselor, nor was I supposed to be one; I was just there to provide a space, but that bothered me. I hoped that at least I gave her a break. One woman who had an infant ended up going back, at least that time, and I felt bad about that. So did the third, and again I felt helpless. What good was I doing?

But a few years later, a woman I didn’t recognize said, “Hi, Pat. I’ll bet you don’t remember me, but I remember you. I stayed at your house once.” Then I realized she was the third woman, who had brought her baby with her and was worried about what the future held. I do remember that we talked a lot one night. But that years-later night, she said, “You showed me that I could do it.” She said something along the lines of it not being anything I had said, but the fact that I wasn’t afraid to have a job and pay my bills and live frugally if that’s what it took, and even the fact that I would take her and her baby in when, really, I didn't have a lot. I was stunned when she said that she saw strength in me and that she took strength from it. She got a job. She paid her bills. She stopped thinking she needed to put up with a bad situation so that she’d have someone to pay the bills. She said, “Thank you.” I said, “Thank you.”

I am pretty sure that she paid it forward.

I am not telling this story to be congratulated. Far from it. I am telling it so that you know that sometimes, well, sometimes you don’t know how much good you can do, or whether you even did any good. You just try. You may never find out, or you might find out just because of a fluke meeting. But not finding out doesn’t mean that it didn’t matter to someone. Light the candle anyway.

Lake Michigan

When I was a kid in Indiana, most of our vacations were about going to Michigan.  I always remember loving the big lake, Lake Michigan, which had actual waves, and playing in the waves the way people who go to an ocean play in the waves.

One year, we were going to Michigan and a guy my dad knew from work told him about this county park that was north of the state park on Lake Michigan and was “less crowded.” So we went there. Of course, we kids were really excited about going to the lake, and even about being on a less crowded beach.

There was a line of cars to get in and some guys checking IDs, and I was in the backseat thinking, Oh, they’re going to know that we don’t live in this county because we obviously have a license plate from Indiana. But when we got to the front of the line, they were waving us through to go in. My Dad made a U-turn and we left. We kids in the back seat were confused, and probably a bit clamorous. The lake! The beach! My Mom told us to be quiet and that she’d explain to us later. Dad was really quiet.

Turns out that the “private county beach” was discriminating. White people from Indiana would be allowed in, but black people from Chicago were being turned away – that’s what my Dad had seen and why he did the U-turn. We went over to the state park, which allowed everyone in, and of course I got one of the worst sunburns of my life. But also one of the great lessons of walking the talk. I don’t know if Dad actually said the words, but in my mind, the words were, “We may be good enough for your beach, but your beach isn’t good enough for us.”

Dad had been a B-17 navigator in WWII, and didn't talk about it much. But when people tried to ban books or movies or people, he had something to say, and it was, "That's what I fought against before, and I'll fight against it again."