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UNREQUITED KINDNESS by James Garrison
UNREQUITED KINDNESS by James Garrison
The summer when I was ten years old, a huge weight fell on my right foot and shattered my big toe, separating the flesh from the bone so that it looked like the meat on a drumstick flopping down from the chicken leg. That event led me first to surgery to restore my big toe and then to a remarkable show of kindness from strangers. I appreciated the surgeon’s skill, though he made me sufficiently whole to pass my army physical, but I never understood the reason for kindness from strangers or adequately thanked them—and I’ll never forget it.
My brother was seven years my senior and clearly negligent in causing my injury when we tried to move a swimming pool bench with the weight propped against it. Or perhaps I tried to move it alone, but he was there. He was preparing for a swim pageant or something like that, and I was helping him. It was the summer I first took swimming lessons from him in a regular class. The prior year his teaching had consisted of throwing me into water over my head and telling me to swim for it. Then, while I was screaming and going blub, blub, blub, he finally jumped in and pulled me out. Of course, my father was standing there and ordered him to pull me out. Years later my brother told me he regretted doing that. “What?” I asked. “Throwing me in or pulling me out?” I blame my brother for most of the physical injuries and other difficulties of my childhood. (How he became a rocket scientist and head of some NASA center for advanced space propulsion I’ll never understand.)
We lived in the house my father built. He began work on it around the time I was born, and it took him two or three years to finish it, before we moved in. It was a cinder block house covered with stucco on the outside and inside. The outside was white, and he “white-washed” it every year or so. The inside was painted whatever colors were available as cheap leftovers at the local hardware store. I recall one year when our kitchen was a shade of purple. Since the cold made the walls sweat in the winter, we had to paint them almost every year. After my father died, my mother paid someone to paint all the walls white, which is how they stayed until she moved fifteen years later to a house nothing like the one my father built.
Anyway, to finish this aside, my father designed and built this house all on his own, dug the cellar, framed it in, set the concrete blocks, installed the plumbing, wired the electricity, everything except the fireplace and chimney for which he had help from a friend. It all worked fairly well, except my mother refused to let us have a fire in the fireplace. Instead, my father built a bookcase in it where we kept a set of cheap, red-bound encyclopedias. I once tried to read them, but I don’t remember much beyond “aardvark.”
We were living in this house when my brother caused me to crush my toe and go about on crutches for weeks. I never realized that hobbling on crutches with a huge bandage on one’s foot could transform me from a ten-year-old, insignificant nuisance, most often told to get lost, into an object of attention and sympathy. Before, I doubt that any adults, other than my parents, or friends of my brother’s, ever considered me worthy of attention of any kind. My brother, I’m sure, had considered me an interloper from birth, someone who was best just ignored, unless to tell me he “wouldn’t give me air in a bottle” or to call me birdbrain or fart blossom, though I probably returned those in kind. But after my unfortunate injury, his girlfriend gave me a much-coveted Hardy Boys book that cost more than my meager allowance, and a woman I didn’t know, and my father and mother certainly didn’t know, took me under her wing.
My brother was a genial, good-looking high school senior, and in my recollection, something of a local heart throb, with his nineteen-fifties crewcut and lifeguard tan. He had good grades and lots of friends, and he even got his photograph in the local newspaper from time to time and in the high school yearbook, crowning some teenage girl for something or other. Me jealous? Never.
But I don’t think the woman who temporarily adopted the injured waif while his big toe healed had any reason to want to help me because of him. She may have had a connection to the swim pageant or perhaps her daughter went to school with my big brother. She had no children my age, and the daughter was dating some other guy, not my brother. I remember her, my benefactor, making the daughter’s date surrender his shoes so that she could shine them. Or maybe she just told him he needed to go shine his shoes himself before he went on a date with her daughter. To me the woman was royalty, or at least a duchess. Or maybe just an angel.
She would pick me up at my house close to the public pool where my brother worked and take me in her car to her house. I remember being enthralled with the beautiful sunroom and the furniture and real shag carpets and the television, but I can’t remember how she looked. Just the aura that surrounded her. Perhaps like one of the sitcom housewives in the old fifties television shows, but in color. And she never seemed the passive type. In fact, she always seemed in command. Like telling the teenage boy to shine his shoes, or insisting she shine them for him.
I was surprised my mother would surrender me into the woman’s custody, since she was not a relative or even a friend of my mother’s. Didn’t even go to the same church and may have been Catholic for all I know. My mother was so protective, I never went to a friend’s house overnight, or vice versa. In fact, my mother had few friends who came to the house in those days, mostly relatives, of which there were many. I do recall a couple of neighbors who came over to sit on the front lawn with my parents, watching us kids throw sock-covered tennis balls at bats or catch lightning bugs in old mayonnaise jars with holes in their lids. At the time of my injury, my mother was going through severe depression, and had been for the last year, even had electric shock treatments. I wonder if my benefactor/angel knew about that.
No TV, car, telephone—that was how my family lived in 1956—until my mother used her weekly allowance from my father (yep, that’s right) to have a telephone installed so that my brother, the high school heartthrob, could talk to his girlfriend. So, I reveled in watching television at the kind woman’s house for a few hours and, I’m sure, drinking a Co-cola and eating snacks. And she gave me books: The Adventures of Robin Hood, a book of stories about dogs, and maybe a novel by Dickens—I can’t remember; but I still have the old, worn Robin Hood book. I can see its faded red cover on my bookshelf.
Then my toe healed completely, though a bit stubby on the end, and my idyll ended. I never saw the woman again, and I cannot remember her name. She never asked for the return of her books—or for thanks. And as an unrefined and self-centered ten-year-old, I never thought to thank her for her kindness.
In my long life, many people have showered me with kindness, and either I’ve not recognized it or adequately thanked them. In one instance, the benefit provided had consequences that reverberated through my life.
When I was in college, my then girlfriend, a high school senior, ran away from home and rode a bus to Chapel Hill, NC, seeking my help to escape from what she said was an abusive situation. I recalled her father watching television, an old Roy Rogers movie, cleaning his arsenal, the gun parts spread out on the floor and couch beside him, and instantly realized that this could get complicated. I never found out what exactly had happened with the father; my girlfriend made only subtle references to sexual abuse, although a couple were specific, and verbal. Before long, after the girlfriend arrived in Chapel Hill, I heard from home that the father had been storming about in his front yard, waving a .45 and expounding on what he’d do to me. This presented a quandary. Marriage was certainly not in the cards, nor was the girlfriend returning home to whatever the situation there was, at least as far as she, or I, was concerned.
Answering an ad in the local paper, the girlfriend and I visited an old Victorian house, as I remember it, where a room was advertised for rent by a family with two small children. That’s how we met Carolista, a friendly and attractive young woman with a poetic name that immediately appealed to me. She started asking questions about the girl’s situation, and ended up taking in my girlfriend, without any rent, asking only that she help look after the two young children. The girlfriend confided in Carolista about her abuse at home, and eventually Carolista managed to enroll the girl in high school to complete her senior year—and keep the father at bay. The girlfriend jilted me before graduating from high school, then left Carolista’s care to live … I don’t know where. I visited Carolista again in the fall that year, and she did not know either. It was the sixties and communes were becoming popular.
Carolista owned a small jewelry store in Chapel Hill and another on the North Carolina Outer Banks, in Nags Head. When my future wife and I were planning our small and inexpensive wedding (in exchange for two tickets to Sao Paulo, objective Rio de Janeiro), we visited Carolista’s jewelry store in Chapel Hill to buy wedding rings. She happened to have two gold rings she had crafted before the price of gold went through the roof—it was less than $40 an ounce then. Each of the rings has a lovely design that doesn’t quite match the other but complement each other. Sort of like my wife and me. For several reasons, the rings are the most precious things we own.
I searched for Carolista on the web a few years ago and discovered that she had died young, yet she was something of a hero on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There’s even a street named after her and a plaque nearby. She and her children were on the dunes near Nags Head one day in 1973 when she spotted a bulldozer preparing to flatten one of the highest dunes. As she had when she encountered my then-girlfriend and me, she sprang into action. “North Carolina Woman Who Saved Jockey's Ridge To Be Featured on Highway Historical Marker.” NC Division of Parks and Recreation post on June 26, 2023. The article recounts that:
On August 15, 1973, [Carolista] Baum courageously positioned herself in the path of a bulldozer sent to remove sand from Jockey's Ridge. Defying the machine's progress and finally engaging in a heartfelt conversation with the bulldozer's operator, the driver departed the dune. …
While local organizations had previously discussed protecting the expansive dune from encroaching development, it was Baum's unwavering determination that transformed the idea into reality. Inspired by her dramatic protest, Baum co-founded the group People to Preserve Jockey's Ridge, rallying support through fundraising initiatives and petition drives to capture the attention of state lawmakers and local officials.
Not long after seeing this article, my wife and I visited the Outer Banks—and there was Carolista’s name on a street sign and a marker commemorating her victory. There’s a Jockey Ridge State Park now, thanks to Carolista, and she has received well-deserved recognition for her decisive action.
But I never thanked her—or maybe I did and just don’t remember it. My wife and I paid for our rings, and we certainly thanked her for those. But as far as the wayward girlfriend? All I can say is that for Carolista’s perceptiveness, kindness, and generosity, I am forever thankful. Carolista certainly is my hero.

James Garrison practiced law before writing three award-winning novels: QL 4, set in the Mekong Delta in 1970, The Safecracker, a legal thriller, and What Seems True, inspired by an unresolved 1979 murder in Texas. His latest work, Ruminations: stories, essays, and poems, was released in 2024. His prose and poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. www.jamesgarrison-author.com