What Difference Do It Make? (15 page)

“Hell, I don't know who she is!”

Then from across the room, I heard Mama yell, “I'm your wife, you ignorant bastard!”

Then, in my ear: “She says she's my wife, but that ain't right. I don't know
who
she is!”

It was just like home.

The fighting raged for days, rocking Life Care like a rickety rowboat in a thunderstorm. Then one morning about three weeks later, the director called me.

“Mr. Hall, I'm sorry to tell you this, but we've had to evict your father.” She then described a pattern of domestic quarrels, escape attempts, and all-around unruliness. “I'll need you to have him packed and off the premises by sundown.”

I was irritated because moving Dad was definitely going to be a pain in my butt. Strangely, though, a note of pity sounded in my heart. When applied to my daddy, it was still an odd, foreign sound. But it was not unlike the compassion I felt for so many of the homeless men and women I'd been trying to help over the last eleven years.

Sure, many of them had made their own beds in life and, as a result, had wound up sleeping in rags under a bridge. But Denver had taught me that to love a man enough to help him, you have to forfeit the warm, self-righteous glow that comes from judging.

I had developed quite a do-gooder reputation for myself by refusing to judge “bad sorts”—bag ladies and vagrants, drug addicts, drunks, and runaway teenagers who sold their bodies for money.

Strangers.

But I was just now learning to do it for my own flesh and blood.

I had no doubt that an ornery cuss like Daddy deserved to be tossed out on his can like a drunk—like when Mr. Ballantine's son pushed him out of his car, motor still running, on the curb in front of the Mission. I had all this compassion for Mr. Ballantine, but it had taken me all this time to muster up compassion for the man who gave me life. And more than that. Earl Hall had been an alcoholic absentee father, crappy husband, and all-around curmudgeon, no question. But he had provided for his family for sixty-five years, which wasn't true of many of the homeless I'd reached out to.

As a boy, I never missed a meal. I had a roof over my head, a cosigner for my first car. And Daddy had never asked me for money except in joking, and that was after I remodeled his house and he knew I was stacking it up.

Dad's drinking never caused him to miss a day of work. Now he was an old man, his body failing, mind not far behind, with a wife who loathed him and a son who for most of his life had held him at arm's length with nose pinched, as though holding a dirty diaper. A troublesome thought formed at the edge of my mind: was I so shallow, my do-gooding so superficial, that I could only set judging aside and help a person as long as his sins didn't affect me?

21

Denver

O
ne day, I asked Mr. Ron, “Mr. Ron, all these white folks be invitin us to their Bible studies. How come none of 'em's invitin us to their Bible doins?”

I ain't sayin it ain't all right to study the Bible. You got to study the Bible to know the rules of life. But I notice a lotta folks doin more lookin at the Bible that doin what it says. The book a' James says, don't just
listen
to what God has to say,
do
what He says. And Jesus said God is gon' separate us, the sheep from the goats, based on what we
did,
not on how much we
read.

I was havin a conversation ‘bout this with this smart fella I know named Mike Daniels. I says to him, “How anybody gon' know, Mr. Mike?”

“How anybody gon' know what, Mr. Moore?” he answered.

“How anybody gon' know God when all the time folks got their head stuck in a book? I can talk to you 'bout this stuff, Mr. Mike, and you won't get mad, but some folks thinks I'm a bad man or is blasphemin or somethin, but I ain't. It just seems like lots of folks is tryin to pull God outta somethin or someone, and that ain't never gon' happen. You know what I mean, Mr. Mike?”

“Yes sir,” Mr. Mike said. “I believe I do.'”

“How we gon' really know God if we trying to get Him out of a man or woman? How we gon' know God for real lookin for Him in some kinda religion, in some kinda system? I don't mean know
about
God, Mr. Mike. I mean really, honest
know
who God is?

“Mr. Mike, so many folks is tryin to get to God and know Him by
doin
somethin, like tryin to make a deal with Him. Thinks if they does somethin for God, He'll turn 'round and do some-thin for them. Thinks that we is all way down here, and God is way off yonder someplace far off outta reach. Most people thinks that we all got to get a education or study all the time,
then
we know, but that just ain't so. It ain't so at all.”

“You're right, Mr. Moore. That ain't so. That's not the way it works, not even a little bit.”

“Mr. Mike, everbody's lookin for God everywhere on the outside. He ain't in no book, and He ain't in no preacher, and He ain't in nothin or no one on the outside. You got to go inside 'cause that's where God is—in the deepest place inside you. And ain't nobody gon' make God tell you nothin. Ain't nobody gon' have no wisdom 'bout nothin if they thinks they can read 'bout it or hear about it from some man or woman. That got to come from revelation. That got to come from the Holy Spirit inside us, Mr. Mike, and that ain't somethin that can be bargained for. You can't achieve revelation. You can't work for what's free.”

Since I been visitin a lotta churches, I hear people talkin 'bout how, after readin our story, they felt “led” to help the homeless, to come alongside the down-and-out. But when it comes to helpin people that ain't got much, God didn't leave no room for feelin led.

Jesus said God gon'
separate
us based on what we did for folks that is hungry and thirsty, fellas that is prisoners in jail and folks that ain't got no clothes and no place to live. What you gon' do when you get to heaven and you ain't done none a' that? Stand in front a' God and tell Him, “I didn't feel led”?

You know what He gon' say? He gon' say, “You didn't need to feel
led
'cause I had done wrote it down in the Instruction Book.”

Let's be real. A lotta folks on the list that Jesus calls “the least of these” ain't the ones you gon' find down at the country club. No, most a' them's the folks you gon' find in the jail or in the street. But we got to go to
all
the people—the rich, the poor, the lowdown, and the dirty—and show 'em all we got the same thing for ever one of 'em: the love a' the Lord.

I think part a' this problem is that too many folks ain't ready to face up to the fact that to love the unlovable, they got to face people that they fear. They is afraid to get out of their regular livin space 'cause they afraid it might be suicide, am I right? 'Cause you wouldn't be scared a' nobody if you didn't feel like they was gon' do you wrong.

Most people want to be circled by safety, not by the unexpected. The unexpected can take you out. But the unexpected can also take you over and change your life. Put a heart in your body where a stone used to be.

22

Ron

T
he Life Care director gave me the name of the only nursing home in that end of town that would take my dad, a lock-down facility for geriatric troublemakers. I checked him in that afternoon. Just after midnight, a nurse called to tell me Dad and his roommate had gotten into a food fight that devolved into a fistfight. I tried to picture two old farts pelting each other with strained peas and tapioca, then circling each other like a couple of WWF wrestlers with their skinny butts hanging out of their hospital gowns.

“We moved your father to solitary confinement,” the director said.

I went to visit him the next day and saw that he had a black eye.

I tried to talk to him, but he cursed me. A week later, I took Regan and my two-year-old granddaughter—Earl's
great-
granddaughter— to see him. They brought him homemade cookies. He slapped away their offerings and cursed them. Silently, I asked God to take him before I started hating him again.

A few weeks later, on Christmas Day, I took Mama to see Daddy. Last time they'd seen each other, they'd turned their nursing-home room into a war zone. As I guided Mama into Daddy's room, I braced for a hostile reception.

But I was shocked when Earl said, very sweetly, “Oh . . . Mama. Come give me a kiss.”

I helped her over to his bed, and she bent down and kissed him on the lips.

“I love you, Earl,” my mama said.

“I love you, too, Tommye.”

The moment was as rare as a da Vinci painting.

I sensed it was the last time they would ever see each other, and I was hoping to hear them reminisce about the good times, about what had sparked their love so many years before. But it seemed they couldn't remember, or they just wanted to forget everything but this moment. There was nothing left to say, so they simply stared into each other's eyes.

Driving Mama back to Life Care, she told me about how, in October 1942, she had ridden the bus home to Blooming Grove, Texas, from Denton, where she was a junior at the North Texas State Teacher's College. Her daddy—and my granddaddy,

Mr. Jack Brooks—ran a cotton farm in Blooming Grove, and he was the hardest-working man I ever knew.

When she got home that October, she told her daddy she was fixing to marry a soldier who had just shipped off to Phoenix—Earl Hall. Never one to pass up a chance to teach a lesson about hard work, he told her that if she'd help him pick a bale of cotton, he'd buy her a train ticket to Arizona. Five days later, she'd picked her bale, and her daddy drove her to the train station.

Listening to Mama tell this tale as we drove through Haltom City, I still couldn't trace the roots of her love for Earl Hall. “So why'd you marry him?” I said.

She laughed. “Because it beat pickin cotton!”

So there I had it. I owed my very existence to my mother's aversion to the cotton patch.

CAROLYNE

Not Just a Pretty Garden

Thirteen years ago, Carolyne Snow set aside a career working for entertainment mogul Barry Diller to become a full-time mom. Still, she and her husband, Robbie, a music marketing executive, kept in touch with entertainment industry friends. One of them was Mark Clayman, producer of
The Pursuit of Happyness,
the 2006 movie starring Will Smith.

In May 2008, during a visit to the Clayman home, Mark gave Carolyne a copy of
Same Kind of Different as Me.
By then, Mark had already optioned the book for film. Still, he regularly passed along the book to friends.

“Read it,” he told Carolyne. “I want to know what you think about it.”

Not only did she read the book; it set her to work on a project that is still underway.

The plight of the homeless had torn at Carolyne's heart when she traveled to downtown LA in the predawn hours to visit the commercial flower market there. “I exit at Sixth Street and head down to Maple,” she says. “You notice the people with cardboard boxes wrapped around them and see tents set up all along the street.”

The police allow the homeless to pitch these makeshift bedrooms by night but require that they clear out by six in the morning. “So many people say, ‘Oh, well, these people are just drunks and addicts,” Carolyne says. “But I remember one morning when I saw a mom and her small children packing up their stuff. As a mom, I can't imagine what that would be like. I wondered what this woman must have suffered in her life to arrive in that position. It was heartbreaking.”

The Snows live in Santa Clarita, a small town just north of Los Angeles. While there is very little homelessness there, there is a large Hispanic community pocked with poverty. After reading
Same Kind of Different as Me,
an idea began taking shape in Carolyne's mind: a community garden with beds set aside to grow produce for food pantries serving the homeless and the working poor. She envisioned a garden that could not only provide nutritious food to people who needed it, but that could also attract children to a service project and teach them the value of sowing and reaping, literally, in their own community.

“I felt this was something I could do that would bring people in and involve them without being churchy,” Carolyne said. “I'm not really a ‘religious' person. Spiritual, yes. Organized religion, no.”

But starting a community garden turned out not to be as easy as finding a vacant plot of land and diving in with roto-tillers. The logistics of involving children in the project required that the garden be centrally located. As the idea developed, it made the most sense to launch the garden at a public school.

Carolyne's research led her to a Los Angeles–based group called the Garden School Foundation, a group that in 2003 started a prototype garden at central LA's Twenty-Fourth Street Elementary School, an institution where 100 percent of the students come from homes with incomes low enough to qualify for free school lunches. The Garden School Foundation's philosophy is that “schools should be like parks, not prisons; the best way to learn about good food is to grow it; and children have to know nature to love it.”

Carolyne went to visit the prototype garden, which included neatly cultivated rows of vegetables, a garden shed, and straw paths meandering through the plot. “The kids working in the garden were so polite and so respectful,” she remembers.

When Carolyne commented on the children's behavior, the man in charge told her that the students were what is known in “educationese” as “at-risk” kids—that is, students from extreme poverty, whose neighborhoods were riddled with gang activity, crime, and drugs.

Carolyne, from the upscale suburbs, observed the kids' model behavior and tried to imagine the kinds of homes they went home to at night. “You could see the value of this project to them,” she said. “You could see that the garden was providing something for these kids that went beyond health and nutrition and what's taught in a science class. It gave them someplace to go, a sense of community, a purpose.”