Understanding the Other

It is scary to be the outside, looking in, trying to hold things together

And yes, expect this to become a Simpsons episode next season

I grew up in a small Wisconsin town (Boscobel, pop. 2100 then) of quite limited means. We had a handful of people who could be considered well-off (including my forbidding, rather distant grandfather), but just about everyone I knew (including my siblings and myself) lived with hand-me-down clothes (either actually handed down from older siblings or bought at St. Vincent Depaul’s in Madison). It wasn’t a big deal, as everybody seemed very much in the same realm. Indeed, the big slur you could level against someone was to claim that they thought they were “better” than you (meaning, rich). Kids would brag about how un-rich their families were, something my parents managed by having nine babies (I was 8th).

My dad was the city attorney and my mom ran volunteer services for the county (dealing with the truly indigent), so they knew things about just about everyone. Thus, whenever the subject of somebody doing this or that bad thing was raised at our dinner table by us kids, we’d get admonished by our parents for making assumptions about why something like that could happen (our theory always being the person was pure evil). They would tell us, by inference, because they were discrete and professional, that, if we knew what that family’s circumstances actually were, we’d probably cut them a break out of empathy. Why? Because these things befall families all the time, and when they do, even worse things ensue.

That was my mom’s mantra: never assume because you just don’t know. Instead of leveling blame, just try to do something to make life maybe easier for the person in question, the dreaded Mom challenge being, Have you tried being friendly with them?

God, I hated that question.

Now, understand: my parents were strict and had very high standards that came with somewhat severe judgments — at least when it came to our behavior. But they had that empathy for others, which is why, when the parish priest would receive some impoverished family moving through town, they’d end getting sent to our house for dinner, which always struck me as strange as hell.

Still, it left an impression.

[My spouse Vonne, the small-town minister’s daughter, had it much worse than I ever did.]

Years later in my mid-20s, I’m at Harvard working my PhD and getting by with my spouse (then working in elder services as a caseworker in South Boston). Besides being a research assistant, teaching assistant, grader, and Eliot House tutor, I held down a job as superintendent to two apartment towers in Brookline, just on the Boston border near Cleveland Circle/Boston College. Very Jewish neighborhood with lots of orthodox and still more of the reformed. Owner of the buildings was Jewish and so were a high share of the renters. This was new territory for Boscobel Tom, to say the least.

As “super,” renters came to me all the time for fixes and favors, and, if it didn’t fall under certain categories, they were expected to pay me for my time, which they did. So I got to know people from all sorts of angles, like unplugging their toilet, or helping them into their apartment when they were drunk and couldn’t find their keys at 3am, or feeding their cats during holidays when they were away. It was a weird job filled with TMI, but I got to really know people.

One in-house legend was Mr. Shlevin, an elderly Jew with a tragic backstory who had lived in his apartment with his spouse for a couple of decades and was a fixture at the place. Shlevin was always genially working me on this and that to be fixed, which I did — no problem. Dude was my eyes and ears, and that was helpful.

Shlevin also needed me to do all sorts of things because he was so frail, as was his wife. So, I became a caretaker of sorts, and over time, I filled a big hole in their lives even as I saw it mostly as a pain in the neck that was constantly interrupting my PhD work. What I didn’t realize at the time (even as my more knowledgeable wife tried to school me), was that I was this big piece that fit into their rather vulnerable existence and kept it going on a mundane, day-to-day basis.

By the time we got there, Mr. Shlevin and his spouse probably should have been in assisted living, given their needs, growing vulnerabilities, and lack of help from their distant kids. By so aggressively befriending me (always in my face, half hectoring and half cajoling and always, almost comically bribing me), Shlevin and his wife were keeping things together, making this situation work, and staying out of the dreaded nursing home (assisted living really wasn’t a thing back then [mid-80s]).

Honestly, most of the time Shelvin and the Mrs. were pretty funny, like the elderly wizard couple from The Princess Bride.

And so this was our relationship: I was the substitute son who backstopped their lives, which, by that point, were quite narrow and constricted (no one goes very far in a crowded urban environment with a walker, let’s say). You need eye drops every day for a month? I come do that. You need some medical thing set up in your apartment, I come do that.

The last time I saw Mr. Shlevin was on a stretcher being removed from his apartment. He had had a pretty bad stroke, prompting his wife to rouse me to call the ambulance. As they wheeled him out, with tears in his eyes because he knew this was the big hit he had long feared, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it with a desperation that really left an impression I still regularly revisit in my mind (like, any biopic of me would HAVE to include this moment).

Shlevin knew his life, with his wife, at that apartment they had called home for decades, was done — just like that. In grabbing my hand, he was simultaneously thanking me for what had been, and screaming out silently over what had just happened. He just wanted it all recognized and remembered by somebody, and that somebody — beyond his wife in that moment — was me.

It was a life lesson of the greatest sort: a deep glimpse into the vulnerability of others and the fragility of life and our circumstances in general. But, most of all, it reminded me yet again of the need to understand the circumstances, the trajectory, where things begin and where they inevitably end up for all of us.

That is a big part of what I mean when I speak of broad framing something. It is as much feeling as seeing.

My wife, now a hospice social worker, goes into homes every day to help families deal with a looming death. It is very tense and difficult work that demands enormous empathy on her part. She goes through experiences — on a daily basis — that would be a legendary story if they happened to me. Vonne simply processes them and keeps working, stunning me daily with the strength and goodwill she brings to these unbelievably unpleasant situations.

Vonne’s primary work area encompasses Springfield OH, today so much in the news over the Haitian immigrant “crisis.” As such, her take on the tumult naturally reflects her ability to see things from the other’s perspective. Springfield is the next town over from the truly small town of Yellow Springs, where we live. It’s not far, and I bike there and back regularly for exercise. Vonne knows every inch of the place.

Springfield is a depressed town that was once thriving. It is full of rich-people houses built decades ago and now barely holding themselves together. There is a big downtown full of large buildings suggesting an industrial past of great might, but there is also a lot of emptiness.

Springfield is big at 60,000, and it recently took in about 15-20,000 Haitian immigrants/refugees, which is a load and a huge shift for a decidedly insular population. Vonne, born in the northwest corner of Ohio, is pretty much considered an outsider at first by many of her clients. Trust is something that must be established, and she’s brilliant at it, but you get the point.

So, yeah, it’s been a tough fit for the Haitians, as there are all sorts of stuff they need to learn about how life unfolds in a city in Ohio on a daily basis. It’s the small things that drive people nuts and burn through their capacity for empathy, like, Don’t you know how to put out your garbage on Tuesdays! Stuff like that.

Have the Haitians provided an economic boost to the town? By most descriptions, yes.

Are they dutifully employed? To a great degree, yes.

Do bad things happen (like a local kid being struck and killed by somebody new who didn’t have their driver’s license yet?)? Yeah, stuff like that will happen in a town approaching 75-80,000 souls. I will tell you flat out: drivers around here do not give a damn for pedestrians or bicyclists, so these tragedies are far too routine here.

Can you imagine somebody just here from Haiti thinking it would be okay to snare a goose in a local park and take it home for dinner? Me? I contemplate a mass killing of deer in my backyard almost every night, so, yeah, I could see somebody committing that faux pas without understanding how the locals might take it (I can tell you that, in hippie heaven Yellow Springs, I would be drawn and quartered for such an offense against our sacred deer, who actually play in our backyard with our dog on occasion and decorate my yard with their copious dung).

Did that story actually happen in Springfield? The goose story? For now, no evidence but a ton of accusations and stories floating about.

How about all the family pets allegedly being caught and eaten? For now, zero actual evidence in Springfield, but, yeah, it happens somewhere in this world all the time.

So, of course, as we live in the age of the internet, these images and legends can be conjured up instantly from anywhere in the world … or maybe just Columbus.

Once an urban legend like that gets started? Then it’s Katy bar the door, particularly in Trump country, which Springfield somewhat is (along with most of Ohio, save for our blue dot).

So, yeah, Ohio is as polarized as anyplace else you can name, and now we have our own immigrant crisis … except it’s not the crisis it is made out to be. It is more a difficult cultural fit that is still working itself out.

Has the city done enough to work that friction point? Nope. It could have done better with the money it was already allotted for such purposes.

Can Springfield, the county, and the state do a whole lot more? Sure, and with Gov. DeWine hailing from Springfield originally, this shouldn’t be that hard.

So, everybody is scrambling right now, and DeWine, being a good man, will mobilize things to a certain extent, but it’s going to take some time and some understanding of people who’ve (a) been through a lot, (b) left that scary landscape to come here, and (c)are now scrambling to figure out all sorts of stuff in a new and alien culture that is dealing with a lot of xenophobia right now.

None of it easy, all of it fraught with opportunities to screw up royally, and yet, we’ve got to make it work somehow.

Til then, Springfield is a rich vein for conspiracy types and those eager to demonize others and immigrants in particular. That’s sad, because it serves no legitimate purpose other than political aggression.

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