06/01/2010
Bad Daddy, Good Daddy
I did something wrong recently.
No, it wasn’t really, really wrong or of course I wouldn’t be confessing it to you. I have neither performed terrorist acts, robbed convenience stores, or cheated on my income tax.
What I did was a bit morally wrong, maybe, or simply something lacking in the realm of social obligations, good neighbor stuff – like that.
Of course I’m going to tell you about it.
Sometimes on my daily walks I find things, what I like to think of as the flotsam of loss. Tools, phone cards, clothing, toys, shoes (!), underwear, condoms, things expected and things unexpected like the plastic bag full of porn magazines that I deposited on the steps of a Baptist church. That was snarky, but I was in a snarky mood that day.
I’ve also found three wallets, variously complete with driver’s licenses, insurance cards, credit cards, funky notes, and money. On those three occasions I ended my walk at the police station. The officer on duty filled out a report and thanked me. The first time, though, she asked for my name, address and phone number.
“What for?” I asked.
“Sometimes people might contact you to thank you,” she said.
They never did.
Another time I found an old man. It was a quiet Sunday morning in the fall, quite chilly, and he was just standing in the street looking cold, the light jacket he wore not nearly warm enough. We talked for a few minutes and after he told me he was being held prisoner by his wife’s mother I called 911 on my cellphone. In only a minute a police car came down the street and resolved the problem.
The other day, though, I found a purse on the street not far from a local tavern. My walks are always early and this was at around six-thirty in the morning. I conjured up an image of some tipsy young thing (it was a “young” purse), a little goofy, certainly irresponsible. Perhaps she’d set the purse on the street to adjust a shoe, or maybe in a playful or an angry mood she’d thrown it at someone and in the ditherality of the moment or the playfulness or the heartbreak she simply forgot about it.
Sometimes people might contact you to thank you, she said. They never did.
I looked inside: gum, lipstick, digital camera, cellphone, credit card, tissue, car keys, no money.
All of it, of course, was replaceable with the mandatory hassle and headache and expense. I began to think, though – and this is where the confession becomes a bit difficult – of all the times over many years that I’d done something nice for someone, often something the person wouldn’t even have known was done for them. Secret acts of kindness with the secrecy often easy enough to unravel into a moment of gratitude if the person had been so moved.
I began to resent, too, the feeling that someone else’s irresponsible act was somehow my responsibility to undo. You were drunk but I was sober so, here, let me put your life back together.
A lot of times, I think, when we do nice things for people we do them without expecting anything in return. A reward is always nice if that’s appropriate, or even a thank you, but one of the things that keeps us elevated above the creepy-crawly things of the earth is our ability to recognize that one among us is having a problem and we can help. We help, then, because it’s the right thing to do – period.
I think I’ve had that attitude all my life and I don’t mean to be self-serving when I say it. Rather, I might credit a good upbringing or good teachers or the reading of decent and influential books or, hell, just being a good person.
Until the other day.
I guess I was just having a fed-up moment or a fed-up day or simply feeling that, hey, it’s not my job to follow you around and correct your mistakes. If you’re so damn stupid or so damn drunk you can’t even hang on to your gear then maybe you need the headache and the hassle of replacing that stuff.
Or maybe it was just that my kindness tank was empty, my compassion gauge reading zero.
I was downtown by then. I approached one of the municipal waste containers and tossed the purse in.
Bad daddy. Bad man. Bad person.
Sometimes people might contact you to thank you, she said. They never did.
Life, however, isn’t always like literature. In a good novel I might find myself wracked with guilt over my insensitivity, my unkindness. With nothing to do by way of atonement to this person I’d wronged, I decide to devote my life to teaching Nigerian children how to read and to stop stealing gasoline from the dangerous refinery pipelines.
In life, though, the garbage isn’t necessarily picked up right away, and sometimes our misdeeds do offer us second chances at atonement.
Monday morning I walked by that same trash can downtown. Looking around and wondering how many people might see this homeless man picking through the trash – and seeing none – I retrieved the purse and took it to the police station.
Good daddy. Good man. Good person.
Yes, the officer took my name and phone number. I’m not holding my breath waiting for a call.
G. K. Wuori © 2010
Photoillustration by the author
