Like our Fathers

A dear friend of mine wrote this true story and shared it with me. I found it inspirational and hope you do to.

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It had been a relatively mild winter, but every now and again frost would be on the windshield of my car in the mornings before I went to work. Usually, it was not much ice to speak of, generally nothing that my credit card couldn’t handle in a few minutes. On one of these frosty mornings in November, my next-door neighbor, an African American man in his late 30s, saw me scraping away again (his wind shield of his truck was strangely unfrozen) and asked, “Do you want to borrow a scraper?” I said my credit card as doing me just fine, “thank you though.”

In the year and a half we lived beside each other, I believe those were the only words we ever exchanged. Beside the time he tried to feed his dead gold fish to one of the stray cats, of course. And the “stray” didn’t come, because I had already “rescued” it and moved it into my home. I did hold up her bowl, however, and let him drop the fish in it, which she promptly devoured.

He was a hard-working man, if nothing else. Usually gone before I left in the mornings; usually home after me at night. I found out later that he was supporting his mother, paying her bills before paying his own rent. One time the late notice accidentally came to my door. A few days before he moved out in May this year, his mother dropped by, cursing him out so loud the entire block heard it. “You’re gonna turn out just like your daddy,” she yelled, among some other things I won’t repeat. Eventually, she got into her car and drove off.

A few days later, I saw a yellow piece of plastic on my stairs. I thought it had come off one of his pieces of furniture when he moved out. I scoffed, annoyed that he didn’t clean up after himself. The next day it still lay on my railing. I picked it up and gave it a closer look. “He couldn’t have,” I exclaimed. “He wouldn’t have!”

It was a window scraper; small, but sturdy. It didn’t have a handle like most scrapers do – but then, that would have been luxury for me anyway. It was just about three times the size of a credit card. And it was rubber-ducky yellow. The man I thought hardly knew who I was and who, I thought, cared about me even less, remembered (6 months later) that the girl next door didn’t have a window scraper. And when that next harsh North Carolina winter hits, she’ll probably need one.

It’s a good thing that man turned out just like his daddy.