“One-on-one neighboring would change the world,” I said to myself as I took Miss Susie to the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company this morning at 8:00. She was afraid to take the bus because she is eighty years old and arthritic and hasn’t left Pleasant Street for a long time. Her bill read $300.00, and she was afraid it wasn’t a mistake.
There was a parking spot right in front of the Gas and Electric Company, and I went into a little restaurant for breakfast while I waited for Susie. She was out, mistake corrected, by 8:25 and we were home by 8:35. An errand that would have taken her a whole morning of waiting for the right bus and riding the bus and not knowing where to get off was over. A load of anxiety for her old heart was prevented by a simple ride to and from the Gas and Electric Company.
If a middle-class family lived next to a poor family all over the world and people cared for only one neighbor, we would live in a different world, a better world. There would be little need for social services and welfare then, and there would be no waiting in line to see the social worker. The great anxiety of the poor is in the waiting, the fear that they will stand all day in a line that has no end, that at the other end there will be no help for them or a further delay. And they fear that the social worker will be tired and frustrated when their turn finally comes. That is why everyone needs one poor neighbor only. As soon as there are two, there is a waiting line.
I know this sounds utopian, but if everyone who reads these words would adopt one poor family, the result would be more astounding than hundreds of government programs. In a government of the people only the people can make anything better or worse. Most of my life I have lived in suburbia sheltered from the pain of people like Susie. Oh, I cared about the poor in a general way, but I didn’t know any Miss Susies. And now I understand that everyone needs a Miss Susie to love and cherish to keep life from being futile.
Miss Susie helps me far more than I help her. Every time she asks me even the smallest favor she worries that she is upsetting my plans for the day. And I think about my plans, my work, and I realize again how petty they are and how unimportant most of what we do really is. Susie’s very presence reminds me how important it is to be human.
Loving is not an abstract idea; loving is for and about individual people who make each other whole by caring. Nothing I will ever do in life will be more important than taking Miss Susie to the Gas and Electric Company. She makes Pleasant Street Friary a friary. Without her there would be no sunshine here, and we would think unimportant things are important.
