By Ken Hamilton
I sat down to write a column on Black Friday and how there are too few African-Americans who will be out purchasing Christmas gifts on this day after Thanksgiving, despite the number of construction jobs that has, and is, taking place in their own community, in which they have little part.
This was on top of the column that I had also written talking about how I have to get my Christmas card for Kathy Farley-Harding in the mail early instead of handing it her personally on Christmas Eve, because I was running late. I suspect that, as usual, I will be getting hers today. She is so much more efficient than am I.
Then, from one of my many wonderful readers, I received an e-mail about a cab driver that picked up a 90-year-old woman from her home, drover her through the city to the places that held special memories for her, and finally took her to a hospice. He charged her nothing for the few hours that he spent driving her and in so doing, he came to realize the special significance in his own life. I will do proper research, find out who wrote the original short story and, with their permission, I will share it with you in its fullness.
Many of us have had such mild epiphanies. That e-mail made me take pause and reflect on my own life. After all, this is the season to do so. In all likelihood, I have already shared this story with the readers of this paper in the past. Like the woman in the story in the e-mail, some of those readers have passed on. Furthermore, the paper also has new readers who may appreciate reading what others have so enjoyed.
Yes, I did cry when I read the story. Though I was a cab driver, I don’t have a story that is similar to his; but I do have stories that made, and make, me feel the same way that I felt when I read his. We all do and we need to share those stories with those who mean the most to us. You mean a lot to me, and, in this season of thanksgiving, I share this one with you.
Many of you know that I tragically lost my mom when I was eight years old. You may also know that, as a shipboard sailor, the Navy trained us all in firefighting; which, in October of 1995, prepared me to crawl into a burning building at Orange Walk and rescue a woman. This heightened my awareness of fires, and stressed the importance of its early detection and summoning of help. In the spring of the following year, while, like the Orange Walk fire, I was returning home from work when I drove through my neighborhood and smelled smoke. The smell terrified me, thinking that someone may be trapped again. I made two passes around the block before I discovered the source of the fire. It was in a garage behind the home of an elderly woman, whom I did not know but as boys, we climbed into her cherry trees, broke branches, shared and devoured the sweet cherries that grew there. I immediately called the fire department, and then rushed upon her porch, banged on her door until she opened it, then warned her to evacuate the home pending the arrival of the firefighters. She and the child that was in the home with her, did so.
I left when the firefighters arrived.
A few days later, I returned to ask her what had happened and to see if she and the child were all right and not in need of anything. She was fine, and invited me to take a seat. In the course of our conversation, it dawned on me that I had never properly introduced myself. So, I did.
“I know who you are,” she said. “You are Kenny Hamilton. Nadine’s boy. When your mom died, I was the one who washed and ironed your clothes for you.”
That was back in the early ’60s, when most of the neighbors and friends living in our neighborhoods were of southern, farming stock and they took care of each other. My father would gather up our things and give them to one of the neighbor women. They would do what they could do to help.
I felt good that I was able to do for her what I did. Perhaps I prevented her house from catching on fire, and she and the child from being hurt, or worse. I don’t know. But, that didn’t matter as I sat in that chair with tears running down my cheeks. What she had done for me, years earlier, and unbeknownst to me, meant far more to me than anything that I could ever do for her. For the few weeks that she ironed my clothes back then, she was one of my surrogate mothers at a time when I truly needed one. And while I sat in her living room, looking at her from her chair, in those moments that I lingered between the years, I not only saw her, and so many other neighbor women like her but I also saw flashes of my own mom through the windows of that woman’s soul. I felt so alive, and so much like a child again. I was 8, and 43, all at the same time. In her words, she made so much of my life worthwhile and I am thankful to her for that.
There will be time for all of those other things that encumber our thinking on a daily or weekly, basis. I’ll do my column on Black Friday and I’ll make sure that Kathy, whose family did similar things for us during the loss of my mom and onwards, gets her Christmas card in a timely fashion.
But if I don’t do anything else this Thanksgiving, I want to thank those that remind me that it is the little things that we share, like the cherries of yesteryear, that are done anonymously, that creates the sweet taste that takes the brine out of our everlasting tears.
Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. His columns run Fridays in the Gazette. He welcomes feedback at Ken Hamilton930@aol.com.
