The Hundred Story Home

by Kathy Izard

  We said nothing to the girls and headed out for our ride. I tried to forget about it the best I could, but my brain doesn’t work that way. My brain generates ideas and options.

  Throughout the trail ride I considered possibilities. We could get an apartment. We could commute. We wouldn’t sell our house. Nothing would change. I could do it all.

  We were in a huge pasture, looking back at the ranch. The girls were begging the wrangler for one more family race. The horses took off with just the slightest nudge. I think the animals loved running wild as much as we did. Nose-to-tail saddle rides must be as boring for horses as they were for guests. Charlie was in the lead with Lauren and Kailey right on his horse’s flank. Emma was in the middle with Maddie and me bringing up the rear. I gave my horse a kick with my boot to urge him ahead of Maddie’s horse. We were loping side by side less than two feet apart. Maddie was laughing her full-out belly laugh. Her horse turned his head slightly to see us gaining on him and midstride thrust out his powerful back right leg, landing the kick somewhere between my horse’s stomach and hindquarters.

  My horse pitched forward and then abruptly stopped galloping. I lurched over the saddle horn, trying to hold on. Successfully staying in the saddle, I thought I had saved the disastrous fall. Then my horse unexpectedly reared. Screaming as I fell off, I collided with the ground. There was a roar in my ears as I stared at the sky, trying to make sense of how I got there. I remember staring at the clouds thinking, That was out of control.

  By now the wrangler, Charlie, and the girls had all ridden back to help me. Charlie was leaning over me asking if I was hurt. I couldn’t answer because I wasn’t sure.

  My head hurt, my back hurt, my hand hurt. Were they broken? Why were ants crawling on me? Charlie and the wrangler moved me gently as they assessed for broken bones. In a field full of rocks, I apparently had landed on a red anthill. A soft red anthill. A ten-inch mound of dirt that, even though filled with angry ants, had saved my spine.

  After a trip to the emergency room by pickup truck, I came back to the ranch that night with a chipped bone in my right hand and a collar to support my sprained neck. It wasn’t the injuries that kept me up that night, but the thought I had as I lay on the ground.

  That was out of control.

  It felt like I had just received a giant sign from the universe: slow down.

  Live in New York and Charlotte? And lead Moore Place? And be a good mom to four daughters, one of whom had already tried to tell me to sit still and listen a little more?

  I was on my back again, this time staring up at the ceiling as Charlie snored. We had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to catch the plane back to Charlotte, but I couldn’t sleep.

  Three years had passed since Denver asked me, “Where are the beds?” Three years of waking up every day and trying to figure out how to house homeless people. Three years, and I had let everything else come second to that one Moore Place goal. We were almost there.

  Didn’t I want to still be in charge? Didn’t I need to still be in charge?

  I knew in my heart the answer. This past year had been incredibly difficult, but I had stayed because of my commitment to Dale Mullennix and my new family of Coleman, Raymond, and others. I had learned that about myself—I didn’t quit on people. But now it was time to put my people first. Charlie. Lauren. Kailey. Emma. Maddie. They had taken a back seat for the past three years. Denver, Dale, and Moore Place had all come first. I had lived the Do Good. It was time to live a little more of the Love Well.

  I kept hearing a whisper, and this time I didn’t think I was crazy.

  Tell Dale it’s time.

  twenty-three

  THE LAST, BEST YES

  The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

  —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross1

  My cell phone vibrated on my lap in the back seat of the taxi, and I looked down at the number I easily recognized: Caroline. We talked a lot by cell phone these days. I had told Dale it was time I stopped being a part-time employee, but I couldn’t really quit, so I went back to full-time volunteer status. It had been six months since Charlie and I had begun our new commuting lifestyle. He went to New York on Mondays and usually came back on Thursdays to spend the weekend in Charlotte. I joined him in Manhattan when I could. We were almost empty nesters with Maddie and Emma juniors in high school, Lauren a senior in college, and Kailey now a sophomore back on the East Coast. Since opening up to us and Jane about what was happening, Kailey was learning how to manage anxiety and depression. The office in the train depot was now all Caroline’s, and she had become the executive director of Moore Place even though we still technically didn’t have a Moore Place. For more than eleven months we had been ready to start construction but couldn’t break ground without approval from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

  While we waited on the government, Caroline had tried to be creative, working on everything from selecting paint colors to collecting résumés for future employees. I realized I had never thought about these details. Honestly, the actual construction process was overwhelming to me.

  Where would the trash chute go? Were there enough fire exits?

  Did the handicap-access rooms have wide-enough doorways?

  Caroline easily answered all the questions and made suggestions based on the New York buildings she had managed.

  When I gave up my job, I thought I would miss all the day-today details of the work, but it was the people I missed most. The program lunches with Raymond ordering two pieces of pie to go. The e-mails from Dale, excited about a new donor or progress on the capital campaign. In New York I could go all day without talking to anyone until Charlie came back to the apartment for dinner.

  The phone buzzed again on my lap. “Are you sitting down?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes, actually in a yellow cab,” I said. The roar of traffic made it difficult to hear, so I pressed my hand over my other ear. “What’s up?”

  “It finally came!” she said. “Our approval from HUD! We finally got it!”

  I screamed out loud in the taxi, and the driver turned his head, alarmed.

  “Sorry!” I said pointing to the phone. “Can you believe it? Eleven months! Eleven months it took them!”

  The last, best yes.

  “I’ve checked calendars with the mayor and all the major donors, and the best date for the grand opening is Sunday, January 29, 2012,” Caroline said.

  I smiled at the huge God-instance. Should I tell her?

  “Kathy? Is that okay with you?” Caroline asked.

  “It works great for me,” I admitted. “January 29 is my forty-ninth birthday.”

  When I called Ron Hall to let him know the date, I found out news about Denver that was not so good.

  “We would love to come,” Ron said. “But I don’t think there is any way Denver can make the trip. He’s having trouble with blood clots in his legs, and winter travel is especially hard. Maybe we can send a video for you to play of our congratulations.”

  When I had asked Denver about naming the building after him, he said, “You better hurry because I’m old.” He might not be there to see it, but my promise would be kept, and Denver’s name would be on the doors—forever.

  “Kathy, it’s so nice!” Mom said as we drove into the parking lot of Moore Place. “I didn’t expect it to look so nice!”

  I smiled because I knew what she meant. The light yellow siding. The bright white trim. The red roof. The newly planted bushes. It didn’t look like a shelter for homeless people. It looked like a home. It was the day before the grand opening, and I was taking my mom on a private tour. She had flown in for the big event along with my sister Allyson.

  Louise would miss the grand
opening for a long-planned sabbatical in Costa Rica, but her faith had gotten me here. It had been four years since I confessed to her and Charlie that Denver called me to “build beds” and she directed me to Common Ground.

  As my mom, Allyson, and I entered Moore Place through the glass doors, it felt perfectly full circle that Mom would be the first to officially tour. If my mom had not mentioned Same Kind of Different As Me to me, I doubt I ever would have read it.

  In front of us was the donor wall—everyone who had even given $5 on the display. Across the top in gray script it read: “To those who brought us home: Thank you.”

  Listed underneath were the hundreds of people who had made this residence possible, most of whom I didn’t know five years ago. Now every name meant something.

  •168 individuals whose combined donations totaled $990,101

  •28 foundations who together contributed $6,423,000

  •60 houses of faith with a total contribution of $479,512

  •state, local, and federal funds totaling $2,700,000

  Although Steve Barton and David Furman had created an incredible building, the number of people who had made it financially possible was truly amazing. Eight teenagers had a bake sale to raise $550. Two Davidson College students cycled across the United States, raising over $8,000. And the Mailbox Angel continued to send her $5 and $10 gifts steadily and faithfully. Each name was a story. Each had given all they had in order to make this happen.

  As I walked the halls with my mother and sister, volunteers moved around us, getting ready for the celebration the next day. Homeless to Homes residents were going to be giving tours after the ceremony. Model apartments were being readied as volunteers made beds, hung shower curtains, and stocked kitchens. Every item in the eighty-five apartments had been donated by a family, book club, or church group in our Home for the Holidays donation drive.

  I gave Mom and Allyson the full tour of the apartments, each flooded with sunshine from large windows in every home. The library shelves were being filled with donated books for the residents to borrow.

  As we toured the art center, Mom wore a contemplative expression as she surveyed the easels and art supplies. I thought she was remembering the art studio in our home, but she surprised us by saying, “You know, I wanted to be an art therapist.”

  Allyson and I looked at each other. “What? You did?”

  “Yes!” she said, looking up. “You didn’t know? That’s why I went back to school to get my master’s after you girls went to college. I wanted to bring some kind of joy to those psych wards.”

  “Wait, what happened?” Allyson asked.

  “Well, your dad got diagnosed with cancer and that was the end of that,” she said, looking back into the art center wistfully.

  We rarely talked about it. Those Lost Years. We still acted like none of it ever happened. Mom seemed to think it was better that way.

  “What good does it do to rehash the past?” she would say.

  But there in the halls of Moore Place, filled with hope for so many, it seemed the right time to examine some of those wounds that had never truly healed.

  “I always wanted to be there for you girls, but then it would happen again,” Mom said with a huge emphasis on again. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked defeated, as if she could sense an imminent hospital stay.

  There it was: the shame, the secret, and the thing we could never talk about.

  Mom’s version of “again” was so different than how it all could have been. Any one of those agains could have been the end. Each spiral into mania could have been a suicide. With each round of new medicine, she could have stopped taking them. The pain of each lost year could have been amplified if she had coped using alcohol. None of that was her story. None of that became my story.

  Mom always got up. She always fought her way back. Hers was the ultimate story of survival. Seven times down, eight times up. Yet she still didn’t understand the power of her own story. Truthfully I never had either.

  I had spent nearly my whole life carrying a quiet grudge. I had never been able to truly forgive my mom. For going away. For leaving my idyllic childhood. For getting lost in the desert. But especially for not talking about it. For pretending it never happened. If we could talk about it, maybe I could finally let it go.

  I looked at my mom and saw her as if for the first time in over forty years. The mom whose brain was brilliant and broken. My truth was not that I didn’t have a mother growing up. My truth was I had lost her. I had lost that mom who was poised to give me the perfect childhood and then couldn’t. I still missed that mom every day.

  But who knows how that little girl with the perfect mother would have grown up? Who knows what she would have done with her life? That little girl never would have learned how strong she could be. That little girl never would have had to become resilient. That little girl never would have believed she could do anything—really anything.

  I tried to tell her the truth. “All those years I was never thinking, Some day this is going to make me incredibly resilient.”

  Mom smiled.

  “But it did, and I am. And without all that I would not have moved to Charlotte or met Charlie or had my four girls or ever attempted to help a single homeless person. Your story is my story, Mom, and your story gave me all that.”

  We stood together in the moment, and the past forty years, including those sixteen Lost Years, were with us. Seconds earlier those years had been wedged between us, but it felt like they had just begun to compress in a time warp pulling together in an accordion of forgiveness.

  We did not speak; we just felt. For the first time I could remember, we all just felt together. Not in secret. Not in shame. Not isolated in silence behind closed doors. Together. Taking in a sadness. Feeling a regret. Not fixing, just feeling.

  That day I took a photo of my mom standing in front of Moore Place on the lot that had once been a junkyard. The sun was shining, and the sky was incredibly blue for a January day. She was smiling broadly in the foreground, Moore Place a backdrop to her happiness.

  At the grand opening the next day, I was in the lobby greeting more than two hundred friends and donors as they arrived to fill the Moore Place dining room. Even though it wasn’t my personal birthday party, it felt like one. Charlie and the girls arrived with his parents, Bob and Jean Izard, from New York. Before we had a single private donor to Moore Place, Bob and Jean had gone in with Charlie to be the very first donors to the capital campaign. They mailed their surprise pledge to Dale Mullennix and asked that the lobby be named in my honor. Showing them the plaque, I felt like I had received the best birthday present ever.

  Dale began the program, recognizing John and Pat Moore with a piece of original art by an artist in the UMC Artworks program. Then Dale called me forward and gave me another piece of art. It was a fifteen-by-fifteen-inch oil painting of a set of keys painted by a formerly homeless artist who would be moving into his own apartment later that week. I remember accepting the piece and turning around to see the audience standing and clapping.

  Everyone there, from the Five Guys to Joann to Coleman to Liz, was part of this story. All these people whom I hadn’t known four years ago played a role in this journey. Even before we all met, they already knew they were coming, Denver had assured me. Every person had a story, and now those hundreds of stories had built this home.

  I should have thanked each one of them and said every name aloud, but I couldn’t speak. There was too much to say, and no words matched what I was feeling. Charlie was standing, clapping with the crowd, tears in his eyes. This had been a long road for both of us. He had been the First Believer when I told him I wanted to start this crazy project. As obsessed and distracted as I had become, he never asked me to quit. I stepped off the stage and gave Charlie a long hug and then sat down with my family—all of them.

  As I pulled myself together, Caroline spoke. She was poised and confident, describing how residents would move from a life of chaos to
a life of normalcy. The new staff at Moore Place would help “create the ordinary.” How extraordinary that would be for eighty-five men and women.

  As Caroline spoke, I felt my incessant need to get this done fall away. It was finally finished. I had completed my promise to Denver and imagined the unimaginable for my father. Together, with all those in the room, we had done something about it. I would be stepping away after the grand opening. Caroline would run Moore Place, and I had worked my way out of a job. It felt like a natural transition, one for which I was grateful.

  I might have been the birth mother to Moore Place, but Caroline would raise the child. Our baby couldn’t be in better hands.

  After the ceremony there were hugs, high fives, and home tours. In one final full-circle moment, the last person to ask me for a tour that day was Rufus Dalton, the same man who had been honored four years ago for his forty-year service to Outward Bound. That was the dinner after which Charlie and I wondered what would be our “forty-year thing.”

  When I saw him in the lobby waiting, I was stunned.

  Was this God showing off again?

  I wanted to tell Mr. Dalton that this whole project started years ago with his recognition dinner and the discussion Charlie and I had on the way home. I tried to find the words to tell Rufus how unreal it was to see him standing there in the Moore Place lobby on Opening Day. But I had no idea how to make him understand all that had happened since that night.

  twenty-four

  I FEEL LIKE PEOPLE NOW

  And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.

  —Haruki Murakami1

  After almost five years of wishing and waiting, one of the first tenants to move in was Chilly Willy.