My Friend George
In 1987, after my husband died at the age of 54, I took a leave of absence from my job and spent a month in my armchair, staring at the wall. We had met in high school and had been married 34 years, and I did not know anymore who I was, where I began and where he ended. We had grown into adulthood together and, as the only members of our families in the United States, we had made a life as a nuclear family, just him and me and our three children.
After a month of staring at the wall my money ran out and I needed to go back to work. I took a job from 4:30 pm to 12:30 am because I could not face spending the evenings alone at home. Every night, while I shuffled papers and typed at my desk, my mind was going through the various options of ending this misery of life – that is ending my life without having my daughter find me bloodied, or hanging from the light fixture, or pink-faced in the car with the motor running, or washed ashore bloated. I did not care how I died, as long as she was not traumatized from finding me dead.
On December 1st I came to work, like every day, but on this day, when I came up the escalator in my office building, I found the lobby decorated for Christmas with angels, wreaths, Christmas trees, lights and the baby in the manger and shepherds and their sheep, and Christmas songs were wafting through the high-ceilinged room. Memories of the Christmases past and the happy times with children and husband flooded over me, and I stood with my forehead against the wall and hopeless, in despair, I cried.
Somebody at the front desk saw me and walked over. “Come with me, Madam,” he said, and led me into his office around the corner, made me sit in a chair and brought me a glass of water. “You can stay as long as you like”, he said and left me alone.
I sat there and slowly the despair subsided and I was able to gather my things and take the elevator to the 9th floor for another evening of work.
Then, on all following days, I came to work, stood by the front desk for a few minutes and spoke to the man who had rescued me and showed me what a kind word from a stranger can do to a person in pain. And slowly I came to know the man better and learned that he and I were as different as night and day, and really, really, had nothing in common.
First of all he is a man, and I am a woman, and at times there are worlds between men and women.
Then he is black, and I am white, and in the Europe where I grew up, I had never even seen anybody who was not white like me. I never saw a black person, never saw anybody Indian or Japanese or Chinese, until I came to the United States and met them all during my daily subway ride into the city. And all of them were strangers to me because I had no opportunity to know them better. At that time I was not aware of my white privilege and the discrimination that black people were subjected to. I knew that I could live anywhere, work anywhere, travel anywhere – as long as I had money – and through my new friend I learned of the difficulties of finding housing in a segregated city, of being passed over at promotion time, of the daily indignities meted out by people who should know better.
He is Puerto Rican and speaks Spanish, and I am European and speak German. His culture is Hispanic and he is proud of the language, the literature, the poetry, the music, the dance. I hate that music and the dances –they are too loud and too boisterous for me. He was a high-school dropout and I was a college graduate. German language, literature, poetry and music were a point of pride for me. He liked to watch basketball and baseball on TV, and I loved lectures on philosophical subject matters. He was raised in the city, and my longing was for nature. I liked to travel and see new sights, and he found enjoyment in whatever environment he happened to find himself in.
Both of us had a hard childhood for different reasons. He grew up in Puerto Rican East Harlem and was raised by his grandmother. In East Harlem he was frequently beaten up because he was black, and when he crossed Lenox Avenue and entered Harlem, he was beaten up because he was Puerto Rican. He experienced crushing poverty and remained skinny as a rail all his life because food was scarce when he was a child. He worked from the age of 8, shining shoes, carrying grocery bags, sweeping out bodegas, and delivering the handful of pennies and nickels to his grandmother at the end of the day. My youth was overshadowed by the war, and the xenophobic Nazi worldview. There were bombing raids and little to eat, but thanks to the Marshall Plan I grew plump from school lunches after the war. And I learned to enjoy the comfort of food.
He has a delicious sense of humor and likes to laugh. He also likes to go with the flow, to easily change his plans, to accept new developments and new people. While raising his four children he never let them see the difficulties he went through, because he wanted them to be as free and hopeful as children should be. I, on the other side, had a rigidity, an inability to adapt, a Germanic desire for law and order, and a conviction that to be a person of character would mean that one holds on to one’s convictions and does not change. I thought that that’s what it meant to have character. I probably was a major pain in the butt. I had no humor at all and rarely laughed, because to me life was tragic and senseless, whereas he believed that without his laughter and good humor he could not have survived the tragedy of his life. I was hoping for happiness and he was struggling for survival.
At one time in his 30’s he was a platoon sergeant, leading his men into battle in Vietnam. I suppose he did what soldiers do in battle, and I imagine that he tried to forget the things he had to do, because he never spoke about his war experiences. But the Air Force also gave him the opportunity to take the college courses which he could not get into in his younger years.
He was raised by his grandmother in the Methodist Church, singing in the choir, going to Sunday School. I, on the other hand, grew up with little ties to religion because the Nazis, like the communists, considered religion “opium for the masses” and discouraged it. While I ended up as a liberal Unitarian Universalist, he converted to Islam as an adult and became a devoted follower of Mohammed. He loves Allah and the teachings of the Koran, and he said that he never felt comfortable in the Christian religion since he, as a black boy, did not know what a white Jesus would ever do for him. A Unitarian and a Muslim – oy vay!
We had long discussions about Islam and I read the Koran twice and learned about Islamic history and culture. As a Muslim he is very broad-minded. When I had objections about some part of the Koran, he attributed that to the fact that it reflected the state of mind of 1400 years ago. For him a jihad is a constant attempt to live a righteous life. He doesn’t follow the regularly scheduled prayer periods, because, as he says, his entire life is prayer in action. Islam, which arose in the Middle East and expresses the Arabic worldview, remained strange to me. Conversely, my friend was disturbed by the Unitarian Universalist belief that this life and our conduct in it is more important than a life of obedience to God.
Anybody reading the above will understand that we are two people who have seemingly nothing in common. We are different in race, nationality, religion, background, education, styles, preferences. Nowhere did we find a hook, a hint, a promise that we might feel a kinship with the other and not just tolerate the differences. Except for the fact that we are both human, and that our humanness makes it possible to be completely different and yet respectful of each other. The Unitarians believe in the “inherent worth and dignity of all human beings”, and when I looked at my friend I did not see foremost a black Muslim and all the other differences between us. I saw the light of his character, the goodness of his heart, the decency of his conduct, the gentleness of his attitude, the moral integrity of his being, the intelligence of his mind, the dignity of his bearing, and the honor of the man. And so, a few years after he rescued me from the lobby and let me use his office to calm down, he and I, two total strangers who still have nothing in common, found a way to be together as two human beings. That lasted an amazing 25 years. I miss him since moving away, and I don’t even know whether he misses me. It pains me that we could not succeed, in common good will, in finding some interests (above the most basic) which we could share in common.