You could see a total transformation on the woman’s face; and then the tears began streaming out of both of them. Everyone in the surrounding booths stopped talking, walking and taking pictures. All of us just watched. It was as if everything in the room had frozen except the two of them.
At the end of the song, there was a poignant pause followed by tumultuous applause and a standing ovation for the special moment that all had shared. John reached over and gave the woman a very tender hug. All of us felt the energy pass through them. The woman didn’t say much after that. Within a moment, she found her friend and was gone.
Jean Calvert
The Chain of Love
Just to be alive and to be of service to somebody is a reward.
Jo Ann Cayee
He was driving home one evening, on a two-lane country road. Work in this small Midwestern community was almost as slow as his beat-up Pontiac. But he never quit looking. Ever since the Levi’s factory closed, he’d been unemployed, and with winter raging on, the chill had finally hit home.
It was a lonely road. Not very many people had a reason to be on it, unless they were leaving. Most of his friends had already left. They had families to feed and dreams to fulfill. But he stayed on. After all, this was where he buried his mother and father. He was born here and knew the country. He could go down this road blind and tell you what was on either side, and with his headlights not working, that came in handy. It was starting to get dark, and light snow flurries were coming down. He’d better get a move on.
You know, he almost didn’t see the old lady, stranded on the side of the road. But even in the dim light of day, he could see she needed help. So he pulled up in front of her Mercedes and got out. His Pontiac was still sputtering when he approached her. Even with the smile on his face, she was worried. No one had stopped to help for the last hour or so. Was he going to hurt her? He didn’t look safe—he looked poor and hungry.
He could see that she was frightened, standing out there in the cold. He knew how she felt. It was that chill that only fear can put in you. He said, “I’m here to help you, ma’am. Why don’t you wait in the car, where it’s warm. . . . By the way, my name is Joe.”
Well, all she had was a flat tire, but for an old lady, that was bad enough. Joe crawled under the car looking for a place to put the jack, skinning his knuckles a time or two. Soon he was able to change the tire. But he had to get dirty, and his hands hurt. As he was tightening up the lug nuts, she rolled down her window and began to talk to him. She told him that she was from St. Louis and was only passing through. She couldn’t thank him enough for coming to her aid. Joe just smiled as he closed her trunk.
She asked him how much she owed him. Any amount would have been all right with her. She had already imagined all the awful things that could have happened, had he not stopped. Joe never thought twice about the money. This wasn’t a job to him. This was helping someone in need, and God knows there were plenty who had given him a hand in the past. He had lived his whole life that way, and it never occurred to him to act any other way. He told her that if she really wanted to pay him back, the next time she saw someone who needed help, she could give that person the assistance that they needed, and Joe added, “and think of me.”
He waited ’til she started her car and drove off. It had been a cold and depressing day, but he felt good as he headed for home, disappearing into the twilight.
A few miles down the road the lady saw a small café. She went in to grab a bite to eat and take the chill off before she made the last leg of her trip home. It was a dingy looking restaurant. Outside were two old gas pumps. The whole scene was unfamiliar to her.
The waitress came over and brought a clean towel for her to wipe her wet hair. She had a sweet smile, one that even being on her feet for the whole day couldn’t erase. The lady noticed that the waitress was nearly eight months pregnant, but she never let the strain and aches change her attitude. The old lady wondered how someone who had so little could be so giving to a stranger. Then she remembered Joe.
After the lady finished her meal and the waitress went to get her change from a hundred-dollar bill, the lady slipped right out the door. She was gone by the time the waitress came back. She wondered where the lady could be, when she noticed something written on a napkin. There were tears in her eyes, when she read what the lady wrote. It said, “You don’t owe me a thing. I’ve been there, too. Someone once helped me out, the way I’m helping you. If you really want to pay me back, here’s what you do. Don’t let the chain of love end with you.”
That night when she got home from work and climbed into bed, she was thinking about the money and what the lady had written. How could she have known how much she and her husband needed it? With the baby due next month, it was going to be hard. She knew how worried her husband was, and as he lay sleeping next to her, she gave him a soft kiss and whispered soft and low, “Everything’s gonna be alright. I love you, Joe.”
Jonnie Barnett and Rory Lee
[EDITORS’ NOTE: This is a true story derived from the song of the same name.]
A Special Gift
During the holidays, I sometimes think of Ol’ Art. That wasn’t his real name. It’s just what we fifth-graders called the scrawny, likable classmate with the goofy smile, threadbare pants and poorly mended shirts.
Not that Ol’ Art’s poverty meant much in our rural Georgia area. Few people had money, but most had gardens, a pig for yearly meat and a willingness to share. The problem was Ol’ Art’s mom. She saw such offers as charity and stoutly refused any aid.
Still, Ol’ Art never complained about carrying buttered biscuits for lunch, cheerfully washing them down with water from the hall fountain. The only time Ol’ Art thought about his poor state was after suffering a bout of Lila’s taunts. Lila, a local grocer’s daughter, jeered at us all, but she seemed to take special pleasure in tormenting Ol’ Art. She was in rare form when Ol’ Art drew my name for the fifth-grade gift exchange during the upcoming school Christmas party.
“You won’t even get a used head scarf this year!” Lila crowed, referring to a hand-me-down I received the previous year at the school’s annual gathering. “Ol’ Art here couldn’t afford a box of dirt.”
Ol’ Art blushed beet red to the tips of his hair. He blinked fast and crossed his arms tightly against his thin chest, using his bony hand to try to cover the new hole in his shirt sleeve. Feeling awkward and ashamed ourselves, we all looked the other way. I wanted to comfort Ol’ Art by reminding him it was Christmas, not presents, that mattered. However, I was a clumsy ten-year-old, too shy to say something so intimate to a boy.
Ol’ Art’s gift, wrapped in pieces of toilet tissue held together by a piece of twine, heightened Lila’s mean giggles. However, she stopped midlaugh, her eyes growing wider than my own, when I pulled from that wad of tissue a sparkling rhinestone bracelet with a gold-plated heart attached. Hanging in the middle of the heart, a miniature gold cross was embedded with a red stone. It was, at that point, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had never dared then to hope for such a possession, even in my dreams.
In fact, like the vagaries of a dream, something familiar tried to tug at my psyche as I stared at the bracelet, but the mental image would not come clear in my state of surprised pleasure. Slightly dazed, I glanced up to see that even the teacher was staring in open-mouthed wonderment at Ol’ Art. He was smiling so hard in return it seemed as if his face might soon split with the effort. His happy grin lasted that entire afternoon. When Ol’ Art’s mom came to walk him home later, her usually grim expression softened at the sight of Ol’ Art, and, going out side by side, a slight bounce in her step implied she shared her son’s ecstasy.
His mom died the following year, and Ol’ Art was taken in by relatives in another state. We never saw him again, but I never forgot him or that bracelet. It was eons later, after years of adulthood, that I ran across that bracelet again. The rhinestones had blackened with age, and the gold-plated
heart was scratched and worn; but when I polished the bracelet, the red stone embedded in the miniature gold cross still gleamed.
“How,” I finally asked after so many years, “did a fifth-grade boy who ate biscuits and water for lunch afford such a gift?”
It was then when an almost-forgotten sense of familiarity from the past became clear. About a month before that same Christmas party, I was in the school bathroom when I overheard a teacher outside the door ask the woman who had been hired to scrub floors for that day if she wouldn’t like to take off her bracelet before beginning.
“I don’t take it off until I absolutely have to,” the woman had replied, almost apologetically. “My husband gave it to me before he died. I found out later he had sold his father’s watch to get the money to buy it. I don’t usually take off this bracelet for any length of time without good reason.”
Making this mental connection at last, I realized Ol’ Art’s mom had eventually felt a compelling enough reason to not only remove her bracelet, but to give it up for good. That reason had been a mother’s love. That love was so strong she wanted her son, the poorest boy in the class, to have one shining moment of glory when he was able to give the best gift at the school Christmas party.
Marijoyce Porcelli
The Trophy
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.
Victor Hugo
My dad had eight children, and Mama was pregnant again. Her labor had started. The hospital, in Lubbock, Texas, was about thirty-five miles away, and on the way to the hospital, my mother passed away. The baby inside her didn’t make it either. I was four years old.
After that, my financially strapped dad put me and two of my brothers in the Methodist orphanage in Waco. That was to be our “home” for the next five years. As dad and my five older brothers and sisters drove away, a simple question took form in my young mind: What will happen to me ? I can’t begin to describe my panic and fear at not knowing the answer to that question. Placed in the care of total strangers, my brothers and I were devastated.
The three of us were housed in the infirmary for the first six weeks—separated from the rest of the children. Of course, nobody bothered to explain to me or my brothers what was going on or what we could expect next. The three of us were overwhelmed with feelings of loneliness and desolation, with no one to turn to for solace.
Later, my brother Jerry and I were placed in the same dormitory with about forty other kids. Delmar, my other brother who was about four years older than I, was sent to another dormitory. Each dormitory was under the supervision of an overworked matron with absolutely no time for nurturing her charges. At times, I’d sit alone in the dorm while billows of loneliness swept over me. It seemed as if nobody cared. It was like being in prison—or worse.
While we were in the orphanage, my brothers and I never really had anything we could call our own. If we got an apple or an orange at Christmas, we considered ourselves very lucky. But some say doing without is wonderful preparation for making someone glad for the “little things.” I’ll never forget Christmas at the orphanage when I was nine years old. A mystery friend gave me and my brothers a brand-new leather football. We were amazed to think that someone—anyone—had remembered us. That was one of the best Christmases of my entire life!
The following year, I moved back in with my dad. At the age of ten, I was old enough to “earn my keep.” And I did—in spades! I’ll never forget my thirteenth birthday, the day I picked 329 pounds of cotton on that West Texas farm. My dad gave me twenty-five cents. I’m still not sure whether the money was a birthday present or a reward for my labor!
Well, I took that twenty-five cents and went to see a movie, Public Cowboy #1, starring Gene Autry, “The Singing Cowboy.” Afterward, I remember thinking to myself, I could make a living doing that! All I needed to get started was money for a guitar. (I’ve still got the poster from that movie hanging on my office wall.)
The first chance I got to make real money—money I could keep and spend for myself—was plucking turkeys for three to eight cents a bird in Clovis, New Mexico, during summer vacations. I lived in Whiteface, Texas—about sixty miles from Clovis. Pretty soon, I racked up enough turkeys to buy myself a $6.25 guitar and a 25¢ instruction book. From then on, every spare minute, I practiced with my guitar and worked on songs. When I was fifteen, I won a contest sponsored by KICA, the Clovis radio station. As the winner, I was given a live fifteen-minute program that aired every Saturday afternoon. Just me and my guitar. ’Course, there wasn’t any money—the exposure and the experience were my pay. For the next three years, I hitchhiked back and forth between Whiteface and Clovis every Saturday just so I could do this free program. For some reason, I never had any trouble getting from Whiteface to Clovis, but on the way back I sometimes couldn’t get any closer to home than Morton—the nearest town on the main highway. From there, I’d have to walk the last ten miles. People tell me that’s called “paying your dues.” As I walked those long, lonely miles alongside the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle, I can tell you, I felt like I was paying enough dues to last a lifetime!
After high school, I got gigs in a lot of clubs and even played rhythm guitar at several recording sessions for Columbia Records in Nashville. My first real break came when I was nineteen. Country star Hank Thompson hired me to be his opening act. That led to my first recording contract on Capitol Records.
In 1952, I started working on The Louisiana Hayride—a television show about equal in ratings with The Grand Ole Opry—where I stayed about three and a half years before moving on to The Ozark Jubilee for another three and a half years.
I had a memorable year in 1954 when “The Billy Walker Show” went on tour. One of our featured performers was a new face on the country music scene—Elvis Aron Presley. On Elvis’s birthday, January 8, 1955, I bought him a cupcake and put a candle in it.
In the years since then, I’ve been privileged to entertain millions of country music fans from the Hollywood Bowl to the Garden State Arts Center outside New York City and, as they say, around the world. In 1960, I was honored by induction as a member of The Grand Ole Opry.
Looking back—all things considered—I’ve had a wonderful life. In 1975, I came to understand that God has been looking after me all these years—even during those desperate times at the Methodist Home in Waco. Along the way, I’ve collected more than my fair share of trophies. But among all the certificates, banners, gold records, photographs and other prizes, there’s only one treasure that holds the place of honor on the mantel over my fireplace—that special football.
Billy Walker
Ole Charley
I can still see him meandering down the long hill from the adult psychiatric ward to our cottage backyard where we took the children with autism out to play. His name was Charley, or “Charwee,” as he pronounced it. I saw him every day for three years, and he always approached me with, “Hi, I’m Charwee. What’s your name?” He would laugh, shake my hand and pat me on the head. “Hello, Joe!” was his childlike response, always with a hearty laugh and a warm smile . . . not to mention a wad of “bakker,” or Skoal, in his mouth minus a tooth or two.
Charley rarely missed our afternoon recess. He loved playing with the autistic kids . . . running and laughing, eating dirt, leaves and various other nonedible items. Charley loved those kids and they loved him, too. So did I. He was a gentle ol’ soul. He had been institutionalized for many years and he was mentally challenged; but that hearty laugh and smile were contagious.
However, one crisp autumn morn Charley ’bout cost me my job. My teacher’s aide was out sick, and I had no backup that morning; so I was left to fend for myself with four young autistic children, two of whom were not even toilet-trained. That morning was destined to be the longest four hours of my life.
By 8:30 A.M., the kids sensed the kill. Yes, they were in a state psychiatric hospital, but they were smart enough to know I could not handle all four of them by m
yself.
Why not pay me back for all those times . . . I was about to explode when suddenly a loud knock came from our side door.
“Hi, I’m Charwee. What’s your name?” After our usual exchange, Ole Charley, who rarely talked, whispered in my ear, “Got an itchin’ you was in trouble and thoughtyou could use my help.” I stopped dead in my tracks, having never heard my friend utter much more than his name. Before I could question Charley, he was off, rubbing the kids’ heads and laughing that laugh.
Within minutes, the classroom went from “Let’s get him. . . .” to “Let’s show Charwee what we’re learning!” It was amazing! Charley had those kids eating out of the palm of his hand. So much so, that I decided to take a quick bathroom break, and . . .
I wasn’t gone forty-five seconds. I raced back into the classroom to find my boss, the CEO for children and youth services, and an institute administrator, “taking a tour of the outstanding program we have for autistic children.” My boss looked at me with eyes that cried out, “What in the world is going on here?”
“Yes, we met ‘Charwee,’” our CEO sternly replied as she looked at me with eyes that could kill.
It seems Charley and the crew couldn’t resist the combination of my absence and the old sink in our classroom, not to mention the four rolls of toilet paper and . . . It’s amazing what four autistic children and one jolly old man can do with a faucet, toilet paper and forty-five seconds.
“Is Charley one of ours or one of yours?” the institute administrator questioned.
“He’s a joint effort,” I quickly chimed in as Charley and the boys sheepishly sat down at the table.
“A what effort?” my boss muttered, perhaps wondering if I had been dipping into Charley’s Skoal can.
Chicken Soup for the Country Soul Page 4