Care Like No-One's Watching

Howard Center Keynote

June 3, 2009

They arrived in the middle of the night.  Arlene wasn’t asleep.  She might have been, but then again, maybe not.  Sleep’s been like Burlington’s weather these days – erratic and cold.  Inescapably cold. 

Anyway, cold and late as it was, she wasn’t asleep. She was knitting.

What with the price of heat shooting up like the dickens, Arlene has taken the art of layering to a whole new level.

She doesn’t mind the bulk, but the act of putting on undershirt after undershirt after shirt after shirt after sweater after sweater after fleece after a final wrap in Tyvek was just getting to be a little bit much.

So she’s spent most of the last few weeks going to Goodwill, picking ratty old sweaters out of the dollar bin, unraveling them, and re-knitting them into a garment of Biblical proportions.  Joseph’s coat of many colors transformed into a multi-hued, triple-thick union suit.  That much wool weighs a lot, so the whole thing is a little baggy.  The crotch tends to slide down around her knees.  But she just holds it up with Owen’s old tool belt.  The contractor kind with a buckle and suspenders, and multiple compartments dangling around the equator of her waist.  Makes her feel like freakin’ Batman.

She’s got compartments for snacks, pills, the phone (not too many folks calling these days, but at least she doesn’t have to go searching for it).  Even her dumb little yellow cat Twinkie rides around in the big nail pouch sometimes.  She’s got the hammer sling rigged for her knitting needles and a special pocket for yarn.  The day it dropped below zero, she knit herself fingerless mittens and attached them to the sleeves of the union suit without even taking it off.

She doesn’t wear this thing in public, mind you.  She’s got a little pride left.  And plus, Owen, even if he was watching her from the farthest reaches of Hell, would laugh himself silly.  But it’s just the thing for lounging around at home.  If you could call wondering what the heck she’s going to do with her worn-down, gimpy old self “lounging.”

The night they arrived, she was in the middle of making a new cap with extra-large earflaps when heard a commotion at the front door.  Peeking out the window, she saw a crowd of people – looks like even a few kids – scootching their way into the building.  Hard to tell, exactly, given the dark and the fact that they’re all bundled up like a family of Goodyear tire people.

Arlene’s pretty sure none of her neighbors would be having a party in the dead hollow of of a Tuesday night, so she limps out to the landing to see what’s what and who’s who.  “Hey there!” she calls out.  Seven or eight faces look up, and to her great surprise, a bunch of them are as dark as the night they came in from.  Darker than she’s ever seen in her life.

“Hello!” responds a…a…oh, how do you say it these days?  She’s a not-dark woman.  Ok, ok, she’s white.  “I’m Jill.  We’re here helping with this… This is a family from Somalia.  Some of the family, at least.  Do you know about Somalia?  It’s a country in…  Oh, well, we don’t have time for that right now.  But anyway, they just got off the plane, and now they’re going to be living here!  They’re your new neighbors!”

“Oh,”  says Arlene.  “Hey there.”

Seven or eight pairs of eyes stare back at her.  The lowest-lying eyes, giant, dark, and set deep in the head of a kid about 5 or so, get very, very wide.  The mouth below the eyes lets out a little, “Eeeep!”  An adult hand moves quickly over the kid’s mouth.  There is a long pause.

“Ok then,” says Arlene.  And she hobbles back into her apartment, a little confused by the family’s response.

That is, she’s confused until she turns around and catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror by the front door.  There she is, a bulbous, baggy, multicolored monster with dangling pouches, long needles, and wide red suspenders. 

Arlene grunts.  “Hm.  Welcome to freakin’ America!” 

Those are the beginning paragraphs of a short story called The Gifty Part of the Year, which I wrote for Vermont Stage Company’s annual production of Winter Tales, which is an ecumenically-oriented holiday show full of stories and songs celebrating the winter season and the various and sundry religious, spiritual, and community-oriented festivities contained therein. 

How’s that for a diplomatic and artfully non-partisan description?  While still being just ever-so-slightly self-promoting?

Actually, I wouldn’t have brought up the story, Winter Tales, or Vermont Stage Company at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was this very piece which prompted the folks at Howard Center to ask me to come speak at this event (an invitation for which I’m deeply grateful because these guys are amazing).  They felt the story reflected the spirit and purpose of Howard Center – helping people who can’t make it on their own – and that all the characters, from Arlene the knitter to the transplanted Somali family whom she surreptitiously adopts, to the refugee assistance volunteers, are people who could easily have real-life counterparts within the Howard Center community. 

Now the tricky part was that when I sat down with Gail Rosenberg to talk about how this evening would go, she basically said to me, “So we’d love it if you’d read that Gifty story, and also talk about Howard Center and all our programs, and also of course subtly encourage people to donate lots of money, but not too much because you’re also welcome to talk about what you do at Vermont Stage Company and I know you guys need donations, too, and then oh, also, I know you haven’t actually written this talk – you probably haven’t even thought about it yet – but we’ve got an early deadline at the printer’s so can you also come up with a title for your speech and a quote we can include in the program and the invitation?  Oh, and also, you’re going last and it’s going to be a long evening, so can you keep your remarks to about 15 minutes max?”

“Sure!”  I said.  “No problem!”

By the way, Gail Rosenberg is a woman who absolutely LOVES her job, LOVES Howard Center (rightly so), and you should all spend time in her presence just to soak up the vibes from someone who emanates joy and satisfaction and hope and utterly open-hearted enthusiasm.  We should all be so lucky.

So, anyway, “Sure!”  I said.  “No problem!”  But I’m actually not going to do any of what she asked for.  At least not yet.

First, I want to tell you about something else.  I recently attended Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility’s annual conference.  Did any of you go?  It’s a great event to go to when you want to find yourself in the presence of smart, innovative, ethical, pragmatically idealistic business leaders who care about making the world a better place and actually know how to make it happen.

The challenge for me, though, was that the keynote speaker was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent years investigating and uncovering the horribly unjust ways in which the government spends the public’s money.  This, of course, is totally righteous work.  But he spent his entire speech talking about how this country is dominated by a fiscal oligarchy which has passed numerous laws designed to take from the poor to give to the rich in all manner of nefarious ways.  How when you get sick, your taxes get raised in order to fund tax cuts for the super-rich.  How we reward companies for moving their assets offshore.  How it’s impossible to get a meeting with one’s Congressional representative because they’re completely monopolized by lobbyists.  It was just 45 minutes of Unremitting Gloom.

When he was done, a woman stood up and said, “Ok, you’ve just completely depressed all of us.  So what do we do?”  And he replied, “Bug your Senators.”

Which was, I thought, a totally pathetic answer.

So, I went up to him afterwards and said, “What’s your goal in talking to a group like this?”  And he said, “To make people aware of what’s going on.”  And I said, “Well, you’re the expert here, do you have a comprehensive strategy for addressing the problem?”  Because I figured he’d just had a crowd of high-minded people right in his lap who’d totally be his Army of Righteousness if he’d presented them with a serious plan – or even just a couple good ideas.  His response?  “Read my book.”   He also made a point of letting me know that the reviews had been very, very good.

I bring this up because it’s exactly the kind of information we hear about in the news all the time.  And really, we hear about it in all the news – from FOX to Truthout, from NPR to The National Review, from Democracy Now to The Wall Street Journal – it all seems to be some version of the narrative about who’s being screwed or who’s doing the screwing or how to make sure you’re the screw-er and not the screw-ee.  And it can really want to make you take to your bed with a Teddy Bear and a big mug of Adult Ovaltine.  It can make you want to give up or check out or focus on what you can get for you and yours and not worry about the rest of the picture, because, Wake Up And Smell The Coffee Money Makes The World Go Round People In Power Will Do Anything To Stay In Power We’re All Going To Hell In A Handbasket and Things Just Don’t Ever Change.

And admittedly, that’s a true narrative.  Or at least a true-ish narrative.  But it’s not the whole truth.  It’s not the complete story of what’s going on in the world from day to day.  It’s charismatic and shocking and gigantic and important and definitely gets the most noise and ink and attention.  But it’s not the whole truth.  And we know that, in part, thanks to Howard Center.

Howard Center embodies different kind of truth.  In fact it’s an antidote to that Other Truth.  It’s the truth that yes, there is a world of fiscal currency – money and power and might and finance and all that stuff.  But there’s also a whole world of social currency, a world of power-under rather than power-over, which involves investing time and energy and resources in your community, investing in the homeless, the sick, the troubled, the lost, investing in the people who need the most help, and providing the tools and resources they need to make their lives functional and whole. 

And the people of Howard Center know that those kind of investments pay unimaginable – and often unmeasurable – dividends: moral dividends, psychological dividends, cultural dividends.  They know that in the world of social currency, it’s almost impossible to set up a ponzi scheme or bundle risk or be stuck with a heap of toxic assets. 

Of course, they DO still need the regular kind of currency to do their work, which – let us not forget – is what this whole evening is about.  Hint hint.

You know, I was in Vergennes last week, and I met a guy named Kevin Dann who’s on a peace walk from Montreal to NYC as his way of commemorating the Lake Champlain Quadrecentennial.  He talked about the challenge of doing this whole big walk and meeting all these incredible peace-makers along the way, but not knowing if anyone was watching, not knowing if he’s having any kind of real impact.  The troubles of the world all seem so huge to him.  He said in particular he can’t stop thinking about how were torturing Native Americans back when Champlain came to the region, and we were torturing people in the Philippines 100 years ago and we’re still torturing people today, and nobody’s talking about it, he can’t even get his lefty peace-making friends to talk about it, and how will it ever stop.  He was walking because he was compelled to, because he HAD to, but deep down he wondered: Is anyone really paying attention?  Can I make any kind of difference at all?

I completely understood what he meant.  Not many people have the luxury of knowing that their work really and truly makes a difference.  And I felt particularly bad for him – partly because I’ve had those same thoughts about a zillion times, but also because there’d been this big article about him in 7 Days which I hadn’t seen at all.  But I wasn’t going to tell him that!  But I also didn’t want to leave him hanging.  So I repeated an old fable a friend once told me about a Sparrow who hears that the sky is going to fall.  And so he lies down on his back and holds his legs up in the air.  And the king’s soldier comes along and says, “What are you doing little sparrow?”  And the Sparrow says, “The sky is going to fall, and I’m holding it up.”  “With those skinny little legs?”  “Well,” says the Sparrow, “someone’s got to try.”

People like Kevin Dann – and the folks at Howard Center – do what they do – those sparrow-like acts of foolish courage, of quiet compassion, or fierce advocacy – not because it’s going to work, necessarily.  They do them because it’s right.  They take action because someone has to try and because taking action is what keeps their spirits and their hearts alive. 

The cool part is, though, all the stuff that the people at Howard Center do?  It DOES work!  All the programs they offer and the passionate, committed people who run them DO make a difference.  And even better, they know it!  They get to see the results of their work in action all the time.  And STILL they don’t care if anyone is watching – except for tonight when they’re asking for your help to pad their little feathered backs and bolster their skinny little legs and support their continued efforts.

The people of Howard Center keep the sky from falling in the lives of many, many individuals and families and they give hope where none existed before.  They care where nobody else does.  They care, in the words of that beautiful phrase from Matthew, for the least of these our brethren.  For the least among us.

Except Howard clients are hardly the least.  Especially not to themselves.  And the good folks at Howard Center know that, too.  They know the deep value of the fragile and the wounded and the lost people of the world, because they know that nobody really thinks of themselves as fragile and wounded and lost.  They might need a little bit of help – or a whole lot of help – but that’s in service of bringing themselves and their gifts and their skills and their love back out into the light.  Out into being a part of life.

And the people of Howard Center aren’t doing it just for their clients – who clearly need the help.  Nor are they doing it just for themselves – because service is their life’s purpose.  The people at Howard Center are also doing it for you.  Because every act of healing makes us all a little more whole.

You didn’t have to be here tonight.  You could have ignored the invitation or just sent in a check.  But you came.  And you don’t even have to give any more money.  Nobody’s really watching, and you already paid for your tickets.  If you don’t give, the people of Howard Center will still go on doing the good work they do.  

If you do give I’m sure you’ll get a lovely note of thanks, but it’s not like you’ll get your name in the paper or win an award.

But that’s not why you’re here.  That’s not why you’re going to give tonight, and give generously (unless you just got an annual appeal letter from Vermont Stage Company – in which case you’ll give mostly generously).  

You’re here and you’re giving for two reasons.  You’re giving because of your enormous gratitude for the great fortune of your life – for finding yourself in the remarkable position of being able to help out in the first place.

And you’re giving because you know that by giving, by raising your little limbs in the air, you are helping to hold up someone’s sky.

Thank you.