Man’s [Woman’s] Response to Energy

WHEN I WAS A BOY, my mother told me a story that lately has been recycling into my consciousness, perhaps due to the coronavirus. I was around 10 years old. My dad worked with orphans and neglected kids, and I most likely had expressed some anguish worrying that my mom might die, like what happened to those orphaned kids, leaving my dad to fend for himself and us six young children.

My mom was a Depression-era survivor. She grew up in eastern Ohio, a coal mining area on the border of West Virginia. When I would go there as a kid, I remember every morning being able to write my name on the hood of my grandpa’s car in that night’s deposit of coal dust. It was not a rich area.

The story my mom told me goes like this. In that area, there was a man named Joe. His wife died, leaving him with four (or five—mom didn’t remember the exact number) very young girls. Joe did some coal mining and odd jobs and the family lived, very humbly, in a rundown shack along the railroad tracks.

Joe, despite little formal education, was an elegant writer. He started corresponding with a young woman from Boston about courtship and marriage. She succumbed to his eloquent description of his home and of his bright, beautiful children. (It seems that maybe the exact number of girls might have been left out of the letters.)

Joe told of the peaceful Ohio valley he lived in and described life there as anything but hard. He probably played on her emotions with the sadness he felt for his loss and the challenge of raising girls without a proper mother.

 Finally, she agreed to take the long train ride from Boston and get off at the stop near his home.

 She departed the train at the point instructed. Near a shack. As the train pulled away, a pack of girls started running towards the elegantly dressed young lady, yelling, “Mommy’s here” and “Mommy!”

 As she scanned the landscape, she quickly realized she had been misled. Through the dark clouds of coal dust that swirled around her, she could see the children’s dresses were thin and ragged. She could see the girls’ smiles and their eyes, full of joy and tears, showing bright on their faces.

I asked my mom, “What happened then?”

“Well,” my mom said, “as any rational woman would, she grabbed her umbrella and suitcase and started running down the tracks to try to catch up to the train.”

I felt sad that those poor kids would have no mother to help them wash their faces, tuck them into bed, hug them, tell them stories, dress them properly.

I sat in silence and thought about those children. My mom sat and watched my face.

•••

Today we have events in our lives that decide our destiny. Often they are small, like calling our neighbor and saying, “How can I help?” or writing out a check, sending funds to those who are in environments where there is little medicine, no reliable social cohesion, few doctors, and little food. Today, as we all know, there is an abundance of indifference on the part of those who could help work to end the misery.

If our sibling died and we needed to care for our nieces and nephews, we would feel a responsibility to set aside our comforts and help till it hurt. We might even think it was our destiny. Are people we don’t know, people who aren’t blood or who aren’t part of our tribe, any less important than those we call family? Might our destiny be to help people regardless of their place of birth? We have choices to make.

Norm was the leader of the educational/spiritual community I lived in when I was just out of school. He had me be his front man to set up lectures in churches and community centers. As I would tell church leaders what Norm would talk about, their eyes often lit up: Man’s response to energy.

 I was raised by a women’s-studies teaching feminist, so I would always add, “That includes women too, it’s not just for men,” as if that disclosure was needed.

“Man’s [Woman’s] Response to Energy” was one of Norm’s most powerful talks. People would clap and many in the audience would want to shake his hand or chat with him after the talk.

  On the ride home from one of his lectures I said, “You must feel good about how much change you are making in people’s lives. They are so inspired after your talks.” Norm slowed down as if to make sure I really understood the drama of what he was going to say. In the light of the car’s instrument panel, I watched as his face got a bit stoic. Then he said in almost a confessional tone, “Paul, most people go back to their lives of quiet desperation.”

•••

 “But Mom,” I said, “those poor children. How could she leave them?”

My mother pulled me close, looked in my eyes, and smiled as she said, “Well, that woman was from a very fine family in Boston. She had a nice, comfortable life to return to. Her parents thought she was crazy to get on that train in the first place. They would have welcomed her back. But that strong, remarkable woman, she did not get on that train. She stayed. She could not leave those little children.

She turned around.”

 Mom paused as if to reflect on the magnitude of that simple choice made by a very young woman. “Well,” mom continued, “she married that man and they had a bunch more kids. They got by. She washed them and they got fed. Joe was a good man and she had a good marriage.” Mom smiled and said, “All through school, my very, very best friend was one of those girls. I am so grateful that that woman married that story-telling rascal. I truly don’t know what would have happened to those girls if she had not married Joe.”

Some of the details of this story might not stand up to a fact-checker, but the woman from Boston did stay, she did marry that man, and they did have more kids. My mother retold this story to me a few years ago, when she got word that her friend who “was a child of that rascal” had died.