My parents were born more than 100 years ago and grew up in an era when survival depended on hard work.
Both had only a high school education. My dad never earned more than $8 per hour, which was more than my mom, who worked in a garment factory, ever made. That meant dad worked two jobs for most of his adult life – three if you count the enormous vegetable garden he planted each year, which kept food on a table for a family that included six kids.
We never had much, just enough to share.
From February through September, my dad would come home from his grave-yard shift job and head straight for the garden, which produced great quantities of peas, peppers, beans, squash, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, watermelon, okra and, if the weather cooperated, corn.
Mom would come home bone-tired from the factory and head for the kitchen and the pressure cooker, staying up late hours canning vegetables that sustained us through the winter.
As a kid, I spent long summer hours in the garden and helped mom with the canning, too. (there were mountains of tomatoes to peel and those Ball jars, lids and rings didn’t sterilize themselves).
Yet we always gave away as much as we kept for ourselves, maybe even more.
As I sweated away in the garden, I bitterly noted that it was odd that our neighbors were happy to receive the fruits out of labor yet never offered to help weed the garden or pick the vegetables. They never offered to help mom with the canning, either.
Yet this thought never seemed to occur to mom and dad. They gave joyously and without reservation. If you were looking for a cash donation, my parents couldn’t help much. But if you needed some food, well, you had come to the right place.
I share this not to heap praise on my parents. They were not alone in their generosity. Old lady Smith (no relation) hoarded scraps of fabric which, despite her arthritic fingers, she turned into beautiful quilts she simply gave away. Mrs. Dickerson would feed anybody who strayed anywhere near her little house at the end of the street. Mr. Harbin, a fireman by occupation, would fix your leaking sink or get your car running again without thinking about getting paid. Mr. Shields was a hunter and trapper, which meant there was meat on the table all down the street. Ms. Haas sewed dresses. All she asked for was the material, size and a pattern.
In our poor neighborhood, everybody could do something. And everybody did, it seemed.
It was the spirit of their day and their generation.
I’m thinking of them more and more these days.
No one can accurately predict what hardships the COVID-19 virus will produce, but they are likely to be substantial and lingering. Some people will be financially secure enough to weather this crisis and consider it more of an annoyance than a hardship.
But for working people, it may become an existential threat. Welcome to my parents’ generation.
We’re going to need each other like never before. And that means we’re going to have to suffer our own hardships even as we attend to the needs of others.
That’s why I am thinking now of my parents and of their hard-working and generous generation.
Based on income, there were times when my folks would have qualified as beneficiaries, not benefactors. Yet relative to their resources, they gave as much, if not more, than the rich factory owner my mom worked for. That was true up and down our little street.
The people of that generation understood that personal hardships need not exempt anyone for doing his or her part to help others.
That still true today.
Individually, we may have much or we may have little, but we all have just enough to share, whether it’s in the form of money or talent or time or, like my folks, the sweat of our brows.
There is always something each of us can do and in the dark days that cloud the horizon, there are no small acts of kindness.
Give what you can. Give it generously. Give it joyously.
Our hour has arrived.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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