THE LONELINESS OF THE SECRET-SHARER [W, 8-12-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE LONELINESS OF THE SECRET-SHARER    [W, 8-12-20]

 When I was a junior in high school, my Uncle Johnny, my mother’s youngest brother, and my best friend, even though he was 16 years older, got me a job working for one of his good friends, Moe [John] Conley. Moe owned a… I guess you’d call it a convenience store, although that term was not around in 1954, at least not in Oakland City, IN. It had two buildings and two gas pumps. One building had a hydraulic lift, for oil changes and lube jobs. The other was a very small grocery store, mostly milk and bread and pop and cigarettes and lunch items. [Not the place  pictured above, but much like it.]

 Moe liked to sit with his friends in old mismatched kitchen chairs, drinking cokes, at one end of the store, while I drained the water from the pop coolers and refilled them with blocks of ice, and swept up, and stocked the shelves. If a car came for gas, when it was someone Moe knew, he waited on them. Otherwise he let me pump the gas. We always included cleaning the windshield with a shop rag, and checking the oil.

If someone came for groceries, I sliced the bologna and got a can of beans from the shelf, while Moe chatted with them. Early in my time there, Moe did the lube jobs and changed the oil and filters and fan belts, but he taught me as we went along, so by the time he felt okay to leave me there on my own, I knew all I had to in order to keep the business going. Sometimes I’d be under a car when someone came in for a pound of cheese and I’d quickly wipe off my oily hands as best I could and grab the cheese roll out of the display case cooler and start slicing. We were not the most sanitary place in town, but we were the only place that was open early and late and Sundays and holidays.

Moe liked to sleep late, and go out at night with his wife to socialize, and soon he turned the store over to me to open in the morning, and close at night, and work all day on Saturdays and Sundays and holidays. [1]

Those were the times when Clyde [not his real name] would come to the store to get a slice of cheese or pickle loaf or a loaf of bread. We hear these days about people living from paycheck to paycheck. Clyde lived from sandwich to sandwich.

He lived in one of several houses down a dirt road behind Moe’s that could be called shacks only to be charitable. They were inhabited mostly by people who were alcoholic or shiftless or retarded [that’s the word we used] or mentally unstable. Except for Clyde.

He worked at hard physical labor. Day labor. Whatever he could find. Usually the hardest kind of ditch digging or making hay. But he was well-spoken, pleasant, thoughtful, always used good grammar. Without his workman’s clothes and sweat, you might have guessed him as a teacher, although I’d be surprised if he’d gone beyond fifth grade.

Clyde would peek in at the back door of the store. If he saw me alone, he would come around and enter through the front. If Moe and his friends were there, he would come back later. I think he was embarrassed in front of them, for they were successful men, men who could afford cokes. So I was the one who heard him in his loneliness.

Each time he came, as I wrapped up his order, he would say one thing to me, about how things were going, usually not going, with his family. Each time he seemed to trust me a little more with his life and his loneliness. Each time his one statement was a little more personal. Each time, I handed him his parcel and said, “Thank you.” He always replied, “No, thank you.”

One day, he said, “I caught my daughter with that retarded Billy, the one who lives across the street, in bed. She’s so simple, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. My wife’s no help. I don’t know what to do.” As he always did, he made his one statement and left.

It was incredibly sad, that the only friend, the only person this man had to talk to, the only person he could trust with his woe, was a 17-year-old kid at a run-down little combo gas station and lunch meat shop. I think at that moment I was almost as lonely as he was.

Maybe you know someone who is lonely in this isolating time and needs someone to talk to. Here’s something you can do for them. The National Alliance on Mental Health has a 24-hour help line, at 800-950-6264.

Also, it goes without saying, in a Christian context, and so I don’t often say it enough: It’s not a bad idea to talk to God, or Jesus, or whatever you call “the ground of being.” After all, “what a friend we have in Jesus.”

John Robert McFarland

1] Later Moe was elected, several times, as the sheriff of Gibson County, even though, to the best of my knowledge, he had no law enforcement experience. But “Moe’s” was located on the main east-west highway through the county, and he had pumped gas and drunk cokes with everyone in the county.