Helpin' Ain't Easy

This blog is called Head and Heart. But sometimes I write about the head stuff and sometimes the heart stuff. Occasionally about both. Hopefully this piece will be about head and heart.

Years ago as in inner-city pastor I discovered helpin’ ain’t easy. In fact, sometimes trying to help is just about the most difficult work anyone can do. One of the people that taught me this lesson was Annie. She breezed into my life after church one Sunday demanding Church’s Fried Chicken since she was hungry. She wasn’t too happy with the sandwiches we were serving the homeless but she finally grudgingly took one. And that was the beginning of a friendship.

She stuttered terribly. Little tiny bird-like African-American woman who looked older than her years. Little by little she opened the door and let me into one or two of the rooms of her heart. She first saw me as all the other softie-pastors she had tried to rip off. She told me she needed new curtains, a table and chairs, panties, bras, silverware and the list went on and on. In frustration I told her, “Annie, I’m not Wal-Mart.” But I tried to help. We helped get her glasses. I signed her up at the Dental Clinic to get her teefies fixed. I took her to the grocery store to buy what she needed. It was there I learned she could not read nor write. And shopping with someone who cannot read the labels requires enormous patience.

On her birthday and sometime around Christmas we would go to a nearby restaurant. “Reverend,” she would say of the little diner, “this is the best restaurant in Birmingham, ain’t it?” And I would agree.At Christmas I always gave her a present which she would never open until Christmas morning.

I would drive her home because she lived ten miles from downtown. She never let me in her house—and I never really knew if she needed curtains and a table or silverware or dishes. She taught me that she was a person with hopes and dreams and responded to being taken seriously. When she learned she could not con me, or at least not much—we became friends. She taught me that I had to take her where she was and that her situation would not change.

One day she looked at me kind of sheepishly and asked, “Reverend, do you and yo wife have sex?” And I knew where that was going. “Oh, all the time Annie, all the time.” She was trying to say thank you the only way she knew how. I hoped she learned she did not have to do that.

She called me continually--sometimes too often. I learned that helping is complicated and never easy. More than once I found myself asking—why am I doing this? After I retired from the church and was working out of town I lost contact with her. I have often wondered how she is and if others are treating her as a real person.

When my wife and I went to see The Soloist this weekend all the memories of Annie came rushing back. The Soloist is one of the best films. I have seen in a long time. It could have been sappy and dripping with sentimentalism. Not this movie. It is the true story of Steve Lopez. a newspaper reporter for the LA Times and his encounter with a street person. He heard music one day in the park and discovered Nathaniel Anthony Ayers playing on an old beat-up violin with only two strings. The music was beautiful. Lopez was only looking for a column and discovered a friendship that changed his life. He learned that Ayers was once a student a Julliard and a classmate of Yo-Yo Ma. But schizophrenia overtook him. The columnist wrote a number of columns about Ayers and homelessness. More than 60,000 homeless folk live in LA in old paper boxes and in the streets. I won’t tell you what happens in the movie but Lopez learned that helping is not easy. Steve Lopez first wrote the book and out of that book came the movie. Robert Downey Jr. played an incredible part as Lopez and Jamie Foxx played Ayers, the homeless man.

Good movies, like great art touches us at many levels. This film brought back memories of Annie. It made me wonder about all the people in our town and all over that live on the streets with no address at all. It made me whisper a prayer for her and Lopez and Ayers and all of God’s hurting children everywhere.

In the last scene of Death of a Salesman Linda stands by the grave of her dead husband. Nobody came to the funeral but she and her two sons. And she says, “Attention must be paid." And that is what The Soloist taught me all over again.