Search Results for: I Saw An Angel Last Night

This is the fourth time that I’ve written that I’d purchased the last boot for my Amish Friends, and as in the previous four pronouncements, I was wrong once again.

Perhaps this time, it will come true. There is a  Christmas Elf in my story, as there should be.

Boots and Amish people are not a simple thing, and my search for boots for several Amish families from June to this week has taught me much, challenged me much, and once again highlighted the complexities of befriending people from a vastly different culture.

It does take patience and acceptance. And a strong will. I have the latter.

Barbara, one of the Amish girls and a friend of ours, got me drawn into the boot drama again. Barbara has done some work on our farm, and she is great, funny, friendly, and a hard worker.

But for some reason, Barbara’s was the toughest boot for me to find. And I will almost surely never know the reason.

It seemed something always went wrong when I ordered a boot for the Miller’s or their relatives  – the color, the size, the shipping, confusion between men and women’s boots, children and adult boots, boots with buttons, labels, colored heel strips.

The Amish do what their fathers and mothers did; that’s the rule. Change is a very big deal, never undertaken lightly. Boots, like everything else, are a sacred matter.

Everything I did seemed to be off. The world had changed since the first wave of Amish bought their first black boots, but the Amish did not change with them. Perhaps it was my Dyslexia. Maybe it was the Amish code of simplicity. I couldn’t give up.

Barbara’s boot had to be just right also.

I finally scored and got her a size six knee-high boot that was black and light and tough. I gave it to her two weeks ago, and she loved it, and it fit – a minor miracle.

I congratulated myself on dutifully and conscientiously completing the task of refitting two Amish families totaling more than 25 people with new boots, all of the different sizes, and just as winter approached. It would have been easier for me to walk up the 1,567 steps of the Empire State Building.

It may not sound like the most challenging task in the world, but my advice is that if any Amish person asks you to buy boots for them,  run from the room (politely and quietly) and stay away for a while, wonderful as these people are.

I have medieval notions of honor.

If I say I will do something, you can take it to the bank; I will get it done, no matter how much blood flows. I have many flaws, as we all know, but for better or worse, I accept responsibility for things I agree to do.

Barbara loved her boots, and I was pleased and thought we were done, finally. When Moise asked me a week ago to buy 10 boots for another family, I refused him for the very first time and without hesitation.  I have no regrets and no guilt.

I was surprised a week later to drive up to the farm to watch the new construction on the Miller home and see that Barbara’s new boots were not on Barbara but another young Amish child, a young man, a sibling. He was proud of his boots and made a point of shaking them at me and pointing at them.

I was rattled. It took me a couple of months to track these boots down for Barbara, and I couldn’t quite understand how they had gone from her feet to someone else’s. I had my suspicions, but I didn’t ask, and nobody explained it.

That is the Amish dance.

Barbara just said she didn’t have the boots any longer. I didn’t push it. Was this any of my business? Perhaps not. But when I was a reporter, that never stopped me. It was a point of honor.

My blood rising a bit, I asked her if she wanted another pair of boots, and at first, she was shy about answering – the Amish do not like to ask for things. But then one of her sisters chimed in and said yes, she would very much like another pair.

Barbara nodded. She didn’t object.

Every time I saw her after that, she asked me if the boots were coming and when. It was apparent she wanted a pair. Here we go again, I thought.  I got back online, ordered a pair in her size, or so I thought, took an Iphone photo of it, and showed it to her.

It wasn’t the right size, color, or boot. She knew it right away. By now, I had learned to show them a photo of every boot I was thinking of buying. Sometimes, even that didn’t work. At times, our living room looked like a Carharrt. Farm footwear display.

I was back in boot hell.

But there was no way I would quit until Barbara got a boot. Onward.

Nothing was going to stop me from getting her a boot that she wanted and that fit.

I rooted around online for another hour until I found one of those rural farm agricultural supplies and clothing sites that dot the midwest. These places exude courtesy and honesty, and when you call, somebody answers the phone who can help you and wants to help you: no phone chains or horrible music. They are the very opposite of shopping on Amazon.

It was jarring.

I’d run across many of those smaller sites, and while they often couldn’t help me find the boots I needed, they sure did try. This one was called Farm Boy, or farmboyag.com.

I knew right away this was the place I had been looking for all this time. I had found my Christmas Elf.

 

A salesman named Brian Marquette got on the phone right away, listened to my story, was appropriately sympathetic and very knowledgeable. “We’ll take care of you,” he said. I could tell that he had dealt with the Amish before; the store was near Lancaster, Pa.

He knew what I was going through.

He asked me a bunch of questions about Barbara’s age and height. He steered me away from the inevitable mistakes I was about to make.

I would purchase a knee boot knee-high size seven, and Brian told me a secret no one had told me – that the women’s boots ought to be two sizes lower than the men’s boots.

Nowhere did it say that on any store or site I’d been to.

Brian and I went back and forth, and we agreed to try a size 5, a lightweight outdoor boot. I rushed a photo up to Barbara, and she said yes, that was precisely the boot she wanted. I cautioned her it was a dark blue, not entirely black, but there were no jet black boots her size anywhere in the country that I could find.

Brian backed me up on that.

She said it was okay.

She wanted those boots; I could see it in her eyes.

Brian and I went back and forth a couple of times – he was incredibly patient and helpful and very determined to help me get it right and end this ordeal honorably.

(If anyone reading this should ever need a find boot for farm or winter or walk, call Brian or e-mail him at [email protected]. He is an angel, at the very least.)

“Let’s get these boots up there,” he said, “I can tell that you’ve had enough.”

Brian took my order and credit card and said he would get the boots by Friday (this was Wednesday afternoon.) I doubted he could do that, but the shoes were on the porch when I woke up this morning.

They had been delivered before 6:30 a.m, according to an e-mail I received.

I have no idea how he did this for the $14 shipping fee, but I did call him to thank him. Brian put Amazon to shame.

I ordered another size boot just in case this one was too small. I needed to end this.

Brian said I could quickly return one. Maria and I were going into town to get some food, and we first stopped at the Miller Farm.

Moise and his sons and cousins were there, sitting around the kitchen, drinking out of smoking mugs. Moise looked like King Arther, sitting in front of his council of Knights. It was a bit intimidating.

They were taking a break from working on the new house, drinking coffee, and warming up.

I walked in with the boots, and Moise asked to see them, I brought them over to him, and he pointed out that they seemed blue, not black. “Too bad,” I said, “it’s these boots or no boots.” Don’t even think about it, I thought, and I think he got the message. He made a point of thanking me, which was a boot journey first.

Barbara came over and tried them on, and they fit perfectly. “These are Barbara’s boots,” I thundered and declined payment for them, almost defiantly. “The boots are a Christmas present,” I said. I knew that would quiet them down.

Then we left.  Moise thanked me as I walked out the door, and Barbara came after me to say “thank you, Jon!” That was payment enough for me.

This felt great. I had kept my promise to myself and Barbara. I was sure she would keep her boots.

Now, I was done with the boot project. Every one in two families who wanted boots – this was pretty much everybody – got one. I think I learned more about the Amish, good and bad than all I had learned in the previous six months.

And I learned a great deal about acceptance.

I’m glad it’s done. Everyone got their boots—Merry Christmas to all. You, too Brian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Kellog, a dear friend, an angel, and a gifted poet died peacefully last night in her sleep, surrounded by her loving family, and in the warm comfort of hospice.

She was 91.

Mary was one of those excellent humans, a transformative figure in my life and in the life of Maria.  She knew how to be a moral, loving and exceptional human.

Together, she and Maria and I published four books of her wonderful poetry, the last one being “This Time Of Life.” Maria edited each one and helped put them together.

Every single one of her four books sold out.

I met Mary in 2006, not long after her husband Dick died.

She and four friends had gathered every year for 50 years for a “learning experience” and that year they chose Bedlam Farm.

Mary wrote me a neatly typed letter (I hadn’t seen a typewriter-like that in years)  asking permission to come to the farm.

The group (they were not quiet) spent a day at the farm, and Mary and I become close and fast friends, perhaps the best friend I ever had.

On a second visit, Mary mentioned the poems she had been writing all of her life but had never shown to anyone, including her husband.

She feared he and other people would think her strange if they found out she wrote poetry.

I told her she was strange, but so what?

A week later, Mary came over and showed them to me, Maria and I were blown away by them and we printed more than 2,000 copies over time and she sold every one.

She came to every one of our Open Houses and read from her poetry books there. By this time, I was in love with her.

She made many friends from an online creative group I had formed so creative people could gather and support one another.

Mary lived by herself on a 30-acre farm on the top of a remote hillside in Hebron, N.Y. It was a beautiful place, but forbidding. I don’t know anyone in their 80’s, male or female, that would have lived alone there.

Mary loved every inch of it.

I worried about her being there alone, the phone and power often went out.

One winter, during a nasty ice storm, I called her to make sure she was all right and cautioned her to stay inside – she was always driving older people to the grocery store and doctor.

It was a fierce storm, the roads were slick and still unplowed. She assured me she would be fine. An hour later, there was a knock on the back door.

It was Mary, holding a bowl of warm vegetable soup. ” I was worried about you down here in this big house all alone,” she said. “I brought you some dinner.”

That was a lesson I never forget, and I had no doubt that Mary delivered it deliberately. After that, I never told her what to do or fussed about her being alone on the farm, which she loved so much.

She stayed on that farm on the top of a hill well into her late 80’s until she fell about 18 months ago and broke her hip and agreed to go into an assisted care facility.

There, away from the farm, away from her beloved poetry, away from us and others, she began to wither and fade.

Her death was no surprise.

As so often happens when the extreme elderly fall, it is difficult to recover. Mary tried bravely, but she never got to see her farm again. That was heartbreaking.

I’m not sure I have the words to explain what Mary meant to Maria and to me.

Both of us were very alone then, we had both been mostly shunned by the friends we had before we got divorced, and isolated in a very small and remote town on a big farm.

I was recovering from a savage breakdown and Maria was setting out to reconstruct her life and return to her life as an artist. Mary was central to both of those things.

Maria rarely thinks she is important, and it’s hard for her to believe how much people love and respect her. I loved Mary and she loved me, but the real story was Mary and Maria, two extraordinary women who loved and thought the world of each other.

People like Mary are rare. They can not be replaced, only appreciated. We are grateful for every minute we spent with her. So are people like Maria. Their friendship was a mutual gift.

It was pure joy to see Mary and Maria, both of them sitting together at Mary’s dining room table, going over Mary’s poems, talking, and laughing.

She trusted Maria so much, and Maria loved her poetry and her as much.

When Maria asked Mary to think about making changes, Mary almost always agreed, gratefully and with appreciation. When she didn’t agree, she said so.

She was tough as nails beneath her gracious manner.

Mary had moved to the center of our lives, our hearts, and our souls.

She has been ill for some time now, this may be God’s way of preparing us for the death of someone we love. But their friendship – Mary’s and Maria’s – was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw.

Mary became in some ways, the mother and family neither of us had.

She loved us and said so.

She supported and encouraged us, she admired us. She told me right off that she saw me changing and was glad of it, she liked the new Katz more than the old one.

And she appreciated us.

I never once saw Mary when she didn’t thank me for reading her poems and suggesting she come out of hiding as a poet and show them to the world.

Mary returned the favor.

She supported our creativity encouraged us as well. Mary was the very first person I told about my love for Maria, and the only one at that time. “Oh, that’s great,” she said, smiling. “She’ll be good for you, she’ll keep you in line.”

And so she has. After we got married, she referred to us as “the kids.”

Mary’s total trust in Maria, her interest in her life, her admiration for her loving spirit, and intense creativity — these were all gifts no one had ever given Maria at a time when she most needed them.

Our great friendship with her continued, until the time she no longer knew us or remembered us. But even then, she would sometimes talk of a poem in her head,  apologize that she just could no longer get it out. She wanted so much to remember my name, but couldn’t.

She was a true poet through and through, and she was so proud of that work, right to the end. It was who she was.

It got harder to visit her, she would look at me and struggle, mortified that she couldn’t remember my name. But she always asked me what I was doing how my life was, made sure I knew how glad we were there.

We visited her often on her farm before she fell. Whenever she saw us pull into the driveway, she came to the door and beamed.

Because you see, we gave Mary a beautiful gift also, without even knowing it. Into her 80’s, missing her husband, looking for meaning and purpose, the poetry gave Mary the focus and meaning she had been seeking as she neared the end of her life.

She loved writing about her beloved farm, she loved the crowd reading, the appreciation, the attention, the applause. I joked that once she stood up to read her poems, I’d need a crook to get her back into her seat.

Mary loved being teased, even when I repeatedly suggested that Napoleon was the first person to appreciate her poetry, she laughed and laughed.

She was so comfortable within herself, with who she was.

Mary was a killer on a book tour and at the open houses, soaking up questions, hustling her books – she sold 2,000 copies all by herself.

No one in her family had noticed Maria’s many amazing traits and gifts, no one ever asked her about her life, or what she was doing, no one made her feel whole and worthwhile. Nobody bought a smartphone to keep track of her work on her blog.

Mary did want to know, and all the time.

Mary was universally loved and admired. She was the first person  – and the only person – to encourage and support my relationship with Maria after my divorce.

Mary was at a turning point in her life after Dick died.

She resolved for him to never spend a day in the hospital, she took care of him for ten years. She was devastated by his loss and somewhat adrift, remembers her daughter Nancy,  and is depressed. The poetry, she said,  was a godsend for her.

It gave her an important reason to move forward and helped her recover.

Mary was a quiet and gracious person, but she loved doing readings and coming to the Open House. It turned out she was a ham. She loved the light that shone on her and her work.

Mary’s poems were gorgeous and iconic, inspired by her childhood on a family farm, her father, with whom she was close, and the stages of her life, including the last book, titled “This Time Of Life.”

She was unfailingly polite, gracious, and warm.

What a privilege for Maria and I to know her and support her very beautiful poetry (all of her books are sold out, there are none to buy at this time.

She loved taking care of other people. In her later years, she worked long and hard to have a hospice built near the town of Granville. She succeeded.

(Fate came rushing over to Maria when we learned of Mary’s death.)

Mary wrote several poems about Bedlam Farm and the dogs, she considered the farm a place of great harmony. When I met her Rose was still reigning at Bedlam Farm.

She often told me something I really needed to hear – that I had done right by coming to the country, despite all the pain it caused.

You’ll be okay, she used to tell me. I believed her.

It is difficult for me to mourn Mary too much. I’d rather celebrate her life and her poetry and our friendship with her.

She was a wonderful person, she had many dear and lifelong friends, an adoring mass of children,  grandchildren, great and great-great-grandchildren.

She lived a good and worthy life. Isn’t that all we can ask for?

We have missed her for a while.

Many family members were sitting by her side when she died.

She was grateful for her life and its bumps. I never heard Mary say a hard thing about it, or complain about the dark side of it.

If there is a heaven, Mary, you are already there, writing your poems, sipping your tea, become close friends with the angels. You are one yourself.

— People who wish to write Mary’s family or send flowers can do so: Robert M. King Funeral Home serving Granville, N.Y. Phone, 518 642-2322, 23 Church Street, Granville, N.Y., 12832.  Mary never liked anyone making a fuss. I think the family would appreciate letters rather than flowers.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin.

Scott Carrino’s loving puppy dog Louie continued to decline sharply last night, and Scott and Lisa decided to euthanize him shortly before midnight.

I’ve been around many dog deaths, but this was an especially heartbreaking one, these two sweet souls were a perfect match,  Scott loved him dearly.

It is hard to lose any pet, but losing a puppy is a special kind of pain, as Maria and I learned when Gus died. It seems the most unnatural thing.

Death is part of life, and Scott and I will not soon forget this experience of renewing our friendship and connection in the deepest kind of way. Pain does connect us to all of the people who are alive.

I hope I was able to help him get through this.

Scott called me last night – we’ve been talking several times a day – and told me Louie’s white blood count was dropping rapidly, he couldn’t keep any kind of food or liquid down, was dehydrating, and suffering some kidney failure. He was declining.

There was no good news to hang onto. It was time to end his suffering.

There were lots of tears all around. It is a good thing when men let themselves cry.

All puppies are cute, but Louie was especially sweet and endearing.

When I saw him for the last time on Saturday, he came over to me wagging his tail, the first time he had done that in days and the last time he would ever do it.

I was helping Scott train him, and Louie was a cheerful, bright, and accommodating student. He was the kind of dog who could crawl into your heart.

Scott and I were good friends; then we drifted apart; I hadn’t seen him or talked to him much lately, in the way of men, who put almost everything in their lives above friendship.

But this experience reminded both of us that we care about one another. No one can go through this alone.

Louie had a feeding tube in his nose, and the vets were suggesting blood transfusions today.

Money was not a factor in Scott’s decision, but I told him I thought it should be; the bill was rising into the stratosphere. If the treatment had gone on much longer, it would have reached $10,000 easily.

Sometimes mercy means letting go, not hanging on.

Scott did everything possible to help this dog and save him, and then some. I urged him to be on guard against guilt.

Scott was in agony. He asked me what I thought.  I said it was his decision, and I would respect whatever he decided and support it in any way I could.

I saw he needed and wanted some guidance and reassurance. I think he knew what he wanted to do. If it were me, I said, I would stop. I would euthanize the dog, to end his suffering and also mine.

I said we are advocates for these animals, they can’t speak for themselves, and part of our role as stewards was to prevent suffering.

I said I wouldn’t want this prolonged, painful, and unnatural treatment for me, or Maria, or for him, and I can’t justify spending that kind of money on a sick dog when so many children in America don’t even have health care.

I often think of the refugee families, so poor they can’t eat three meals a day or heat their apartments in the winter.

I told Scott I understand the pain he was in – he loved that dog “terribly,” as he put it, he delighted in having him around – but I promised him in time he would have another dog again if that is what he wished.

The lesson here, I said, is that he really loves and needs having a dog, not that he doesn’t or shouldn’t because this turned out so badly.

Scott has been through enough; he and Lisa lost their beloved cafe when the pandemic struck, and they are working day and night to build a wholesale food business.

They work hard, and Louis was a cherished bright spot and comfort for them.

When I get out of the hospital, I suggested that I come to Scott and Lisa’s farm, and we have a quiet memorial service and remembrance for Louis. Some closure, perhaps.

Scott is not seeking financial help, but I’d love to help him get another dog when some time passes. People who love dogs that much should have dogs.

This was a rough experience, but Scott learned a lot above love and compassion, and so did I, and our friendship was renewed.

I was so grateful to be in a position to help Scott navigate this nightmare. Light follows dark; everything is a lesson.

I am grateful to be a human being and experience the crisis, mystery, and richness of life. I told Scott there was no point in trying to make sense of this, a loving dog is a precious gift, but like everything good in life, there is no sense trying to understand the suffering and death of an angelic puppy.

One has to accept it and move forward. Dog love and pet love is intense. In its own way, it asks a lot of us, it it calls for courage and perspective. Death is the toll we pay for it.

We can’t make these awful decisions for the people we love; we can look for our animals.

Scott asked me if I would text him when my surgery is over. I will.

(This morning, I stumbled into an extraordinary opportunity to understand better and perhaps explain more clearly the grip Donald Trump has on rural America.  I got to talk to real people. As a reporter, I loved talking to different kinds of people, and I find that I love it still. In journalism I fear this is a lost art, another casualty of left-right thinking.)

Jerry was a big man in jeans and work boots; he was about 6 feet 4 inches and a hard and muscled 230 lbs. As I left Jean’s Place this morning after picking up my lunch and paying them for the latest Mansion catering, I ran into him and his wife and friends outside the restaurant.

Jerry worked in construction, or at least he did before the coronavirus. He has no job now.

He and two other men were sitting on lawn chairs out in the parking lot with their wives.

They knew who I was and that I was involved with helping Jean’s Place, and they asked me if I cared to join them, they had an extra chair in the car. It was a gracious thing to do; I’m not exactly a local.

I didn’t expect three or four of us to be crying in about ten minutes.

I said sure; I’d like to sit down, we sat in a fairly wide, properly distanced circle. All of them were holding masks; none of them were wearing one. This seemed fated to happen. When you open up to things, things happen.

We chatted about Jean’s Place, and then the conversation spontaneously – perhaps inevitably –  moved back to Governor Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know you love our governor. Sometimes, I’d like to run him over.”

Gerry has been reading my blog, I thought, as several Jean’s Place customers now do from time to time. In a sense, I think he was waiting for me.

I was about to get a powerful lesson in understanding Donald Trump’s appeal to rural America, the source of his greatest power and strength.

I knew some of this intellectually, but I was about to feel it on another and much deeper level.

It reminded me that understanding Trump is so much more important than hating him. I’ve written very favorably about Andrew Cuomo and more than once, and I was about to see a completely different view of him, so far from mine or many people like me.

I call it Grunt and Grumble, country people love to sit around and talk with one another, something city people in my experience are always too busy or nervous about doing.

“I hate that bastard,” Gerry said of Governor Cuomo,” he doesn’t give a shit about my family or me.”

“If you watch the cable news, you’d think that all of the people protesting about the shutdowns are Nazi’s with machine guns. I’m not a Nazi,” said.  Most nights of late, he said, “I go to bed crying, once my kids are asleep and can’t see me. Jenny and I never once thought we would have to go to a food pantry to feed our kids.”

I always think the same thing at night; he said, “what is going to become of us and all of our dreams and plans, from a vacation to a new truck to college for our son. Forget all of them,” he said. “What gets me crying,” he said, “is when I ask myself, “what am I going to do? Because I have no idea.”

“And I don’t have a machine gun, either,” he said.”Don’t get me wrong, I’m a gun lover, but those guys are jerks. They give working men a bad name.”

For the next half hour, Jerry and his friends talked about how they feel living under the thumb of city people. The whole Pandemic, he said, was mostly a city thing.

They all lost their jobs, and because their kids are home, none of the women can even think of working. It didn’t seem an option for the men to take over the domestic chores.

“He (Governor Cuomo) says we can all open up when he hires thousand of ‘contract trackers,” said one of the women. “How are we supposed to work when the schools are closed? He says the future might be in ‘virtual schools.’ “Really, who does he think are going to stay home with those kids?”

They didn’t have to wreck our lives like that, ” said one of the men, “make us beg for food for our kids, wreck our credit and mortgage payments, wipe out our savings. “You want to see big tough grown men cry; you should have been in our houses these past few months.”

I was struck by how open these men and women were, how frightened. They seemed to be in shock.

The Pandemic was severe, people suffered, but so did we, said Jerry. “We aren’t used to begging for help; I spent two hours a day on the phone trying to find out where my unemployment check is. I want to hang myself,” he said.”We even thought about food stamps, but people can’t get those either.”

Peggie, one of the wives, said, “We suffered a lot more than anybody seemed to know or care about. Cuomo, she said, was just another Democrat, a city guy who only cares about the city. Then he went and took all those sick old people from New York and brought them up here and stuck them in our nursing homes, and killed a lot of mothers and grandmothers.”

And, she added, “we are still suffering. Nobody has any money in the bank; I expect we might lose our house by the end of the year. There won’t be enough time to pay back all the money we owe. And not enough work. My mother gave me $20 this morning and said go visit Jean’s Place and have some pie…”

She smiled. “And you know what? Jean wouldn’t take our money. I was grateful and ashamed at the same time. Maybe relieved. That’s dinner money.”

Jerry got laid off when the Pandemic hit New York City. So did his wife, who worked as a receptionist for a construction company. Neither one has heard from their bosses about whether they still have work.

“This isn’t about Nazis and Democrats,” he said, “we are fighting for our lives.”

I saw Jerry’s eyes well up again, and so did Nate’s, also a carpenter and landscaper (in rural America, people have two or three jobs, many seasonal, to survive. There are no other jobs around anymore.  There are none in sight either.

“I know Trump can be an asshole, ” Nate said, “we’re not blind and deaf. And we’re not stupid. Those tweets are stupid! I hate to see a President tweeting like some high school idiot.”

But, he added, he does care about people like us. “He fought for us to get our jobs back, to get our lives back to normal. He saw there was no reason to wreck our lives. This place is not like New York City or San Francisco. Hardly anybody got sick up here; we don’t know anybody who died except in a nursing home. It was crazy to treat us like we was in New York City.”

Trump, he said, spotted that and speeded the opening up. He saw his opportunity, one said, and he took it. “If not for him,” said one of the men,”we’d still be shut down instead of opening up.”

The conversation shifted as the people there got into it.

“Have you ever not had enough money in the bank to feed your family?” asked one of the wives, she didn’t give her name. “Have you ever looked  your kid in the eye,” and said, “honey, we’re  having noodles again tonight because that’s all grandma had to give us.”

I laughed. I’ve said something like that to Maria once or twice, but never to my daughter. I guess I wanted them to know I wasn’t born to money either, and don’t have much.

The food pantry was swamped, she said, they ran out of food every few days. It was the first time they had ever gone to one.

Her sister, she said, married a drunken bum – her words.

“She came over to cry with me and tell me he was home drinking all day, pissed off because he couldn’t work and taking it out on her. There was nothing she could do. She called one of those hotlines, but they were swamped.”

Her sister was “all black and blue,” she said, “does that count as suffering too?”

When somebody asked Cuomo about domestic at one of his press conferences, do you know what he said, she wondered? “Well, at least they’re not dead. Screw him.” I heard him say that, I know it was true.

Jerry nodded. “It’s like if you didn’t get sick in New York City, it just didn’t matter what was happening.”

Trump got us out of that hole; they all agreed. They all felt that sickness and viruses would come and go. People would die. But that didn’t mean everything had to die.

Trump knew we didn’t need to be shut down, he was the first one to see it, said Jerry, and everybody nodded.

And because of him, everybody is opening up. That’s why we like him, said one of the wives, her name was Carol. Some of us might get back to work.

I was struck by how much their views about Governor Cuomo mirrored “progressive” views about Trump. They saw him as cruel, uncaring, even dangerous – as if he knowingly killed those elderly people in their nursing homes. He didn’t care about them, think of them, wasn’t their leader.

If you substitute Trump for Cuomo, you’d get an almost word-for-word match, we no longer see politicians on the other side as human, we are manipulated and encouraged to think of them as inhuman monsters who, given the chance, will destroy our democracy and way of life.

What I see often are empathetic people who lose any sense of empathy for the “opposition” candidate. For the Republic to prosper, it seems to me people have to start thinking of politicians in a different way. It would almost take a Nelson Mandela to do that.

Trump has shown no interest in healing wounds, Cuomo is not a position to try to do that, he doesn’t seem to have made dividing people a central strategy of his governance. Biden says he wants to do it, but he hasn’t said how he might do it.

I was comfortable with these people. They didn’t seem very different from me, and we had no conflict with one another. We had no trouble talking to each other. We didn’t expect to be best pals, but it was easy to talk to them and listen to them. Listening mattered –  they weren’t used to it.

It was our politics that separated us. Or maybe it was the politicians who labeled us and separated us, the creators of the “left” and the “right.”

I was affected by what they were saying and feeling. Looking into their eyes was very different than writing about them.

Sitting there, in Jean’s parking lot, I saw how we live in two completely different worlds on one level,  even though on a human level, we are very much the same.

That is a hopeful thing, that is the way back.

Donald Trump gets this, like him or not. One reason he makes so many people uncomfortable is that he exposes all of the people who don’t get it. Rather than changing, they just focus on him as the root of all evil.

He is in sync with these people, and he alone sensed their isolation and anger and intense hurt. “Hell,” said Jerry, “my family has been poor for 50 years. But we could always get to buy, pay our bills, feed our families. This thing knocked us into outer space. We will spend years getting back on our feet if we ever do.

Trump is agile, unlike people who are “left” or “right.”

He pivots on a dime, instantly, and often shamelessly. He senses the flow, he does not create it, and exploits it, like an owl up a tree waiting for some mice to come out.

One of the women said she was a nurse at a local hospital. She got laid off three weeks ago, there was one coronavirus patient in the whole hospital, and the rest of the hospital was empty.

“We lost so much money because the hospital was empty, and then they brought in a half-dozen sick, elderly people into our hospital from downstate, and nobody would come near us for any reason. Then they took our ventilators and brought then downstate and traded us the sick people they didn’t have room for. I don’t know I’m ever getting my job back. And I couldn’t take a job; I have two kids driving me nuts at home.”

Some of the resentment to Governor Cuomo, I said out loud, seemed to verge on conspiracy theories, the new American way of demonizing people.  He seemed to me to be doing the best with a true nightmare no one had imagined.

One of the women nodded, nobody else responded. I wanted to listen, but I didn’t want to be another nodding head.

Sooner or later, she said, the bank was going to come calling. They hadn’t paid their mortgage in the past two months. She can’t pay it this month either. “But the devil will  have their due,” she said, “I can promise you that.”

Their stimulus check lasted about a week and a half. They used it to repair Jerry’s truck, buy some groceries, and pay a couple of bills.

I found these men and women to be realistic about Trump; he wasn’t their cup of tea. None of them would want to have a drink with him, or even invite him to sit down them. I asked them if any of them wanted their kids to be like  Trump. They all shook their heads. No way.

But he listens to them, they said, and he understands their frustration and anger. He fights for them. “Who else fights for us?” Gerry asked. I saw the other men were shy about talking to me.

I see that Trump, a master at responding to his chosen audience, has once again read the mood of these people, and responded to it. Once again, he is ahead of the curve and is making the curve possible.

And once again, his opponents have stumbled into the same trap as before.

It seems most of them really can’t see beyond the end of their noses. If you only represent half the country, then the country will always be divided. And you may not get enough votes to win elections, it will always be close.

And Trump has a free ride right now; now there is no one standing up to challenge him on anything like a national level. Nancy Pelosi is tough and strong, but she is never going to turn rural people around or make them reconsider their loyalties.

None of this made me love Trump or even respect him more.

But he is not crazy, and he is not dumb. If he is crazy, then foxes are mad. In political terms, he always stays ahead of the curve. In one month, his position has gone from hopeless to close. He is now the King not only of the opening up, and of saving the economy, but of the search for a vaccine.

I’m not sure where Joe Biden is in all this, he rarely pops up on any of my screens.

I was shaken by what I saw and heard, even though I have thought about it and written about it before. I couldn’t help but be emotional, the stories I was hearing were gut-wrenching, just like the stories of the coronavirus families.

I was looking into the eyes of real people; in many ways, just like Maria and me, they were not labels like the left or the right.

Strangely, Trump is not representative of them at all. I believe he is very vulnerable in that way. Honestly, it would not take much for someone to touch these people and pull them back into the mainstream of political life.

But for that to happen, they would have to be part of mainstream American life.

Trump’s strength mostly seems to lie in the fact that he is doing what no other national politician does nearly as well, or even at all.

He is bold, he gets his message out, every day in every possible way.

He knows who he is speaking to.

His use of social media is, in fact, quite brilliant.

One day, some politicians with brains will put up a  twitter page devoted to helping one troubled American a day – a farmer, a kid struggling with opioids, a family whose house burned down, a woman who lost her job and can’t feed her family.

Imagine a Twitter account devoted to doing good, one family at a time, every day.

Could that be as or more effective as the barrage of fund-raising messages I get every single day? Maybe so. And how would that make Trump look if a Democratic opponent did it? You could reach disconnected audiences like rural people in a flash.

Franklin Roosevelt and the other great politicians understood that to get something, you have to give something. Most politicians I hear from have their hands out, every time.

Sitting in that parking lot, I saw and felt how Trump is talking to rural America, cementing his ties with them,  plugging into them, mirroring them. He’s either much more empathic than we think or gets some great advice.

That is the bond he has with this part of our population that seems unbreakable.

One of the great laws of politics is that nothing can ever be taken for granted, everything changes.  Nothing is beyond hope.

Rural people loved Franklin Roosevelt; he fought for them.  Up here, the farmers still talk about how he brought the water, how their mothers didn’t have to walk a mile to haul water home.

He brought them jobs, electricity, water, farm aid, and hope. No one else has fought for them since. Roosevelt brought them more than promises; he brought them jobs and things that materially altered their lives.

Who, I wonder, in either party is doing the same thing for these people that Roosevelt did?  This would be a good time; they are in deep trouble. Their hearts belong to just about anybody who knows that.

If you look at the data, rural are suffering more than any other segment of our population, aside from Native-Americans. Nobody is doing anything for them either.

President Obama was mentioned only once, but there was a lot of shugging. “He was a classy type of guy, but I don’t think he knew we even existed,” said one.

Gerry had to get up and go pick up his kids; they were at his grandmother’s. Their morning outing at Jean’s Place was over.

I thanked them for inviting me to sit down and for talking to me. I said I felt very comfortable with them, even as I knew were different in many ways. I wished them luck.

I felt pretty humbled.

As I got up to leave, Gerry got up to shake my head and thank me for understanding how vital Jean’s Place was to the community.

“You probably don’t see it,” he said, “but Jean in there cries all the time. She’s done so much for people; it’s been so hard on her.  I appreciate what you do, and thanks for listening to me.”

Our country is divided, I thought, but it’s people like Trump and many other politicians who do most of the dividing.

We were not divided out there this morning. We had no trouble sitting down and talking to each other, and I almost fell over when Gerry and his wife got up, and both of them gave me a big hug.

Neither of us even thought about social distancing. It was a manly king of hug, shoulder to shoulder.

It really can be done if only somebody will do it.

 

Today was Laura’s first day at the Mansion, she was bewildered, crying and afraid, as most people are when they first arrive and their families are gone.

(photo, from left: Nancy, Laura, Georgianna).

But today was different.

Today, I witnessed one of the most beautiful things I’ve yet seen at the Mansion, Georgianna and Nancy knew how Laura felt, they stepped out of themselves and took her under their wing.

Talk about angels.

They sat with her in the dining room, talked to her about the Mansion’s secrets, insisted she come out and sit with them in the Secret Garden (Bert is back at the Mansion, but recovering from her hospital stay), smoke if she wished, have some soda if she liked.

They even shared their precious chocolate bars with her.

I came to the Secret Garden mid-morning to drop off materials for the Break Room.

I met Laura, introduced my self. “Oh,” she said, “Georgianna has told me about you. You’re the nice man…” I blushed. ‘Isn’t he cute?” Georgianna said with her wicked smile.

Laura was with these two all day, every minute.

They included her in everything they were doing, gave her a tour of the Mansion and one of the muffins I brought, talked about how much fun it would be once she settled down. Life can be hard here, I heard Georgianna say, but it can also be fun and safe.

They didn’t sugar coat life, they are not Pollyannas. They’ve both known some very hard times.

They told her they knew how frightening and lonely the First Day was, they would be her friends, they would stay with her and get her over the hump.  They didn’t try to cheer her up, they just tried to let her know she wasn’t alone.

She had a new community, even when she thought community was lost to her.

Through the day, Laura visibly brightened. I saw her tears try and I saw the first flashes of her shy smile. We all got her to laugh. She loved Fate.

I figured out some things she needed and wanted – new people are always wary of asking for things. I invited her to Bingo. She said she had never played Bingo, probably wouldn’t go tonight.

“You will go tonight, sweetie,” Georgianna assured her. Nancy agreed. Laura knew she was beaten.

All during the game, Georgianna sat next to Laura, showing her how to play the game, how to slide the red number covers, how to pay attention to the caller.

She egged her on, assured her she would win a game. And she did.

Laura won one game early one, and I gave her an angel bracelet and some carved stone animals as a prize, which she loved. When she won, Georgianna and Nancy each cheered and hugged her.

When I left, the three of them were sitting in the Great Room watching a Godfather Movie DVD I had given them last week on the big TV bought by the Army Of Good.

And eating the Nestle chocolate bars I’d brought as a snack.

Laura was wearing her angel bracelet. She was holding the little dog.

She looked at peace at that moment sitting on the sofa close to her new friends, her new family.

I know she has some hard days ahead of her, I also know she will be in good hands. Those two are truly generous, they have big hearts. it is a pleasure to help them get what they need.

They will take good care of her.

Compassion can blossom anywhere, I think. Life is a garden, in a way.

Georgianna, Bert, and Nancy are good friends, they care about each other, defend each other, protect each other and watch over each other. Laura is in the club. The Secret Garden has a new member now.

She is our friend, Nancy told me. Get her some warm socks, please.

(I ordered a winter coat for Nancy tonight, and a wool hat. I’m weary of seeing her shiver out there. These things will arrive on Monday.)

This was one of the most generous and compassion things I had yet seen there, I love those two women and their selflessness. No matter how hard their lives can be, they always think of the other.

Almost everyone at the Mansion, residents, and staff, remembers the first day there. The residents all say it was one of the most frightening, disorienting and painful days of their lives.

It brings me low just to think about it, and there is not much anyone can really do to ease the brutal transition from one part of life to another.

Or so I thought until today.

Georgiann and Nancy did ease Laura’s first day, she trusts her new friends and told me she feels safe just knowing them. She looked right at home in the Secret Garden.

“They have been so nice to me,” she said, filled with gratitude.

I heard them talking earnestly and honestly to one another out there in the cold. How nice, I thought. Just one day, Laura already has someone to talk to, eat with, sit outside with, watch movies with.

Georgianna told me she is taking all of her friends out to lunch at the Round House Cafe with the $75 gift certificate I gave her for her birthday. “I want them all to get a special meal,” she said.

People want their older friends and parents to be happy, but it is not a happy thing to leave everything you love behind and to know your next move in life will be to a nursing home, and soon thereafter, death.

Lots of people come to love the Mansion, it becomes their home. But it is wrenching to see people just after they leave their homes, pets, lives, friends, and way of life behind them, and for good.

But usually, there is not much that can be done. People just have to get used to it, they have to get through the homesickness and the loss.

Most do.

Today spoke to me of the wonder of true humanity, it blossoms anywhere, all it takes is a big heart and generous soul. We all have to keep the flame burning, it is our sacred task.