From the Archive: The Corner By My Office

I drove past them for about a week before I stopped.

Same corner, most mornings, on the way to my office. A woman sitting with a small boy, waiting on the transportation that would take him to school.

What made me pull over was his clothes. He was in a school uniform, and it was the same uniform every morning, and it was getting raggedy. You can drive past a lot of things. Once you have noticed that, you cannot keep driving past it.

So one morning I stopped. I was curious, and that was the whole of it. We ended up having a good conversation.

What she told me

The boy was her grandson. Both of his parents were gone, and what was left was a grandmother who had taken him in without the means to absorb what that costs.

She was doing the absolute best she could. That phrase gets used loosely. It did not apply loosely here. She was not failing him. She was limited, and those are different things. The difference matters, because one of them invites judgment and the other one just asks for help.

What we did

Nothing complicated. We came back, and we kept coming back.

Regular visits. Food. Gifts for school when the year started and the supply list came home and there was no room in the budget for a supply list. Small things, on a schedule, over a long stretch of time.

That is most of what this work actually is. Not a rescue. A standing arrangement with somebody who is already carrying the weight, so that she is not carrying it alone.

Why this is here

She gave us permission to take this photograph and to share it.

This photograph was taken in April 2014, two years before the IRS paperwork came through. We were doing the work before we were an organization, and we did it for years afterward without a website, so almost none of it was ever written down. We are writing some of it down now.

This is one example.