Writing from here in Hoosierville, where farmlands are down to the nub now, shaved and set aside for the winter, where passersby on the sidewalk look up, look in your eyes, and offer not one but two complete sentences: “G’morning. How’s your day going?” (and that from someone just passing me by—swiftly—on a downtown sidewalk), I’ve come to the certain and edifying conclusion: Small towns run on kindness. Plentiful kindness. Kindness of the kind that makes you feel you belong. And embraced in ways you might forget elsewhere.
In small towns, tradesfolk pass out business cards touting all you need to know: “Trustworthy.” “Honest.” “Reliable.”
Who says America is broken?
I’ve been down here all week (overseeing the addition of a bannister to the steep centenarian cellar stairs, getting the gunk out of the air ducts, ditching the very last of the asbestos, making friends at the County Recorder of Deeds and the antique hardware emporium, and with the sweet, sweet gentleman who called this old house home for 40-some years), and I tell you: the kindness I’ve found here is a sure cure for the acedia that ails us all.
Acedia, a state of apathy, listlessness, spiritual torpor, and indifference, oft described as existential weariness or a rejection of spiritual and moral engagement, is a good chunk of what ails us as we all but drag ourselves to the polls, do our wicked best to purge this nation of the moral afflictions—name 'em: avarice, greed, lust, heresy, cruelty—that have besieged us, made us unrecognizable to ourselves, let alone to our allies hither and yon. (Dear Canada, we are so very sorry.)
The rest of what’s ailing us is more along the lines of revulsion. Or fury. Or maybe it’s mortification, the word that best describes whatever it is that keeps you wide-eyed in the dark of the night, staring out into the murk, wondering if light will ever come again.
I know America’s superhighways and supersized ambitions have bulldozed the heart and soul of plenty of by-the-wayside places, sucked the daylights out of burgs where folks made a plain and honest living. I know a bit about Fentanyl and the opioids and the hell shot through veins, inhaled up nostrils, melted under tongues. And I know it’s worse than desperate in plenty of places.
But there is something sacred still stirring here in the heart and soul of good people schooled in plain old quotidian kindness. Nothing fancy or frilly about it. Just the sort of daily disposition where when someone calls on the phone in distress, they make sure to take down your number, get right back to you, send someone over. The sort of work ethic where if it takes an extra hour to get the job done right, no one seems to be watching the clock. The sort of dedication to the job that when the phone rings at 7:30 a.m. Chicago time, it’s the St. Joe County recorder of deeds worker named Ray, who just couldn’t stop thinking about the question you’d asked the day before, so first thing that morning he’d dug back into the archives and pulled out the deed on the lot where your little house sits and he reads you the name, date, and dollar amount.
Ray, who I met the other day when I dropped off the chocolate chip cookies I’d promised, told me he’d gone to Purdue, owned a gas station for years with his brother, but then a big oil company bought it, and he thought the deeds recorder might be a fine place to spend a few years before he stops punching the clock. And, besides, he likes scrolling through microfiche.
Patrick, who lives down the block and seems to be something of the mayor of this little street, was another someone I got to talking to. By day, Patrick told me, he delivers furnaces and water heaters to trailer homes, mostly. But on weekends he and his wife hunt for antiques they sell in their stall at the heritage mall; “it’s a passion,” he wanted me to know. As Patrick and I were talking on the sidewalk the other evening, where I’d stepped off the porch just to gawk at how the sky had melted into the softest purest pink I’d seen in a while, he made sure to mention he’d happily lug any big heavy book boxes (the ones stuffed to the brim with law tomes) to anywhere I needed ‘em moved. “It’d be the lightest thing I carried all day,” he told me, as we stepped inside to test the hypothesis.
Or there was Rodney, who spent the day putting up a bannister and umpteen other odd jobs I realized were wanting, and who followed up the next day with a text letting me know he’d added me to his prayer list, and asked that I add him to mine—if I happened to be a praying person. I assured him I was.
So now, every night when I close my eyes and stare into the darkness, I pray for Rodney and Patrick and Ray, and I pray especially hard for Larry the painter whom I got to know a week or so ago, and who is headed in for open-heart surgery on Tuesday, election day, and as scared as he could possibly be, he told me.
There’s a whole gaggle of goodness out there, people. It comes in tablespoon doses sometimes, and sometimes by the kettle full. It’s tucked away in places where you wouldn’t think to look for it—the checkout line at the big-box store, where you thought anonymity and inattention were the corporate mandates, or the county assessor’s office, for crying out loud, where they’ll print off sheafs of documents for you for the price of a smile, and toss in a free paperclip besides (if you happen to ask).
I’m not giving up on this ragtag of a country. I’m not looking to Silicone Valley to tell me who we as a people are, and I’m sure not looking at the cesspool along the Potomac. I’m looking to the good folk of Hoosierville who remind me at every turn: wholehearted kindness has not withered and died, has not gone the way of all flesh.
Small towns run on kindness. And the rest of us too.
Dear God, may we be kind. And kinder than kind. So help us…
Martin Luther King called it “beloved community,” and preached that we could become that very thing, as he fought against the “triple evils”: poverty, racism, and militarism. We here, in these rickety old chairs, we are a beloved community, latched and thatched across years and stories and heartache and hope.
Tell me a kindness you bumped into this week:
Seems more than fitting that I stumbled across this curious bit of wonder this week: According to Jewish mysticism, there are 36 people quietly holding up the world. Lamed Vav Tzadikim, “36 Righteous Ones,” is the name put to those hidden saints of every generation, and to the sacred teaching behind it.
Judaism is filled with numerologies; letters hold meaning, and are combined in equations that point to deeper meaning. Seems every tribe of humanity here on planet Earth, since the beginning of time, has been searching for meaning, trying to decipher our way. The ancient Hebrew sages and scholars found it probing open the scrawl on the sacred scrolls of Torah. And here, they zeroed in on a tiny word found at the end of a line in the Book of Isaiah, “Happy are all they that wait for Him [lo]” (Isaiah 30:18). That little word, lo, spelled lamed-vav (ל״ו), combines the Hebrew letters lamed (30) and vav (6), which together equal 36. According to the sages, it’s the numerological value of lo that points to its deeper meaning, and thus they deduced and taught that the word alluded to the fact that there are at least thirty-six full-fledged righteous individuals (Tzaddikim) in each generation. (A sage I never will be, for I might never have connected those particular dots, though I’m mighty glad someone did.)
The concept traces back to the Babylonian Talmud, and a sage named Abbaye, who derived the equation, did the math, and spread the word that there are at least 36 righteous people in every generation who receive or greet the Divine Presence every day. The Tzadikim Nistarim (hidden righteous ones), he taught, are completely unknown to society and usually unaware of their own special status. They often work ordinary, humble jobs and blend in with the rest of humanity. (I think here of the roster of hidden saints I stumbled into this week, and I rather love the notion that we live in a Where’s Waldo World of Hidden Saints; can you find the one among the throng?)
According to Hasidic and mystical legends expanded in later centuries, if even one of the 36 were missing, the cumulative weight of human suffering and sin would cause the world to come to an end. Thus, there must always be thirty-six. Do you know one?
Nominations being taken….
Here’s a little morsel that stirred me: Alberto Rios, in the poem “We Are of a Tribe,” writes: “This place requires no passports. / The sky will not be fenced.”
And for no reason other than this might take your breath away. (Buckle your seatbelts):
Gate C22
Ellen Bass
At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
From The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Bass.
Holy, holy God, thank you for the poets……
on our knees: amen!
Amen, Sister. Amen.