The Gift of Illusion

The Bible says good works alone don't guarantee admission into heaven and Mother knew that. Still, along with the ten percent of her earnings that she tithed to the church every week, she insisted on also setting aside time for the needy and less fortunate. Spreading the word, testifying to His greatness, and helping others was a natural antidepressant for my mother. During these acts of giving back, she was the picture of happiness, and the witnesses and recipients of her good deeds were none the wiser.

Shortly after we moved in with Hazel, Mother established a good-samaritan routine that lasted for seven years of Sundays. After the morning service at First Church of the Nazarene, we headed southeast to the small town of New Palestine. About the time I'd nod off and hit my head on the window, the Plymouth would turn left and wind down a long narrow gravel lane to a monster red brick building looming on the horizon. Three stories tall, with a hundred thousand rooms, it housed a million very old, sick, and crazy people who liked to grab little girls.

Hazel stayed in the car and napped or read the Bible while Mother, my sister and I made the rounds from room to room, bed to bed. It was impossible to stop at every bed, so each Sunday Mother picked a wing of the building and concentrated on twenty or thirty residents.

Mother blossomed in an environment that reeked of incontinence. Although her stage was dark, cold, and unwelcoming against a backdrop painted with despair and hopelessness, she was radiant. Moving from bed to bed, she revealed a personality that I rarely saw at home: happy, gregarious, nurturing, and a cultivator of hope. She believed these people needed her, and she was happy to accommodate. Even though I was too young to articulate my feelings or even understand their origins, I needed her too. I needed her to be all of those things for me--a daughter just beginning a life--not for an old senile stranger who had used up a life and now couldn't see or hear or comprehend the pretty lady who stopped by every week with promises for a better tomorrow.

Still, in a peculiar way, I understood why Mother had to go to the red brick building with a hundred thousand rooms. Young and attractive, with two well-behaved daughters dressed in their Sunday best, Mother brought with her an opportunity for the less fortunate to look outside their bleak reality and focus on this gift of illusion, and with the illusion came a silver of hope. I see now that the gift was as much for my mother as it was for them.


From the book Only Birds Can Fly (c) 2007 with revisions