‘Four more lies’

She was small for her age.

Probably because she didn’t eat regularly.

But she was gritty and could run like the wind.

Sometimes there were laces in her tennis shoes and sometimes there weren’t. I wondered about it but didn’t ask because I didn’t want her to feel embarrassed.

She needed a ride to and from every practice and every game, and since I was coaching the nine- and ten-year old’s little league softball team she was on, I figured I should be the one to shuttle her back and forth.

“The Projects” — that’s what everybody called the place where she lived. Government housing. You know what I’m talking about. Every town and city has a section like it.

When I was a kid, there were people who were described as living “on the other side of the tracks.” They were poor, not well dressed, and not well thought of.

Unfortunately, and sadly, that’s how most people feel about those who live in government housing today.

But you know what? Forty years ago, when I was in “The Projects” picking up my little ball player, I saw something that made me take note.

It was always late afternoon or early evening when I drove through, and out on the stoop of the apartments old people were sitting in chairs, fanning themselves with funeral fans, and talking to each other, sometimes from across the street.

They were smiling, laughing, slapping their thighs over some tale somebody was telling.

And then, when I drove out of the projects through the “whiter” part of town, everybody was closed up in their air-conditioned houses, probably glued to the TV. The “boob tube” it was sometimes called because it was thought watching too much TV dumbed you down. The precursor to cellphones.

Nobody was out in the yard or on the porch engaging with neighbors. I thought it was sad.

Anyway, after one particularly hard-fought ball game that my team lost, all the girls were crying and upset.

I tried to cheer them up by telling them, “You played a good game, and you almost won. Don’t worry, you’ll win the next one. We’ve got four more games to go before the season ends.”

At that point, standing behind me and speaking to no one in particular, my little ball player said, “That’s four more lies my mama’s gonna tell me.”

Later, one-on-one, I asked her what she meant by that.

Here’s what she said: “My mama always say she gonna come see me play, but she don’t never come.”

Yes, I did tear up. How could I not?

Now here’s the twist on the story. Twenty or twenty-five years later, on my counseling schedule for the day was a woman who was bringing her child to see me. When I went to the lobby to meet them, it was my little ball player, all grown up with a little girl who was the spitting image of her mother at that age.

She said to me, “I’m hoping you can do for my little girl what you did for me a long time ago.”

You’re probably thinking, “Aww, David was such a great guy.”

But that’s not the point of this story—far from it.

The point of this story is how a tiny gesture of compassion, expecting nothing in return, can shine a little light in the dark life of a child.

Everyone has children orbiting around them, whether it’s neighbors, kids at church, friends of your kids, nieces, nephews, grandkids, etc. Never in my life have I seen a greater need for small acts of compassion extended toward children. We have given them a world that’s broken and seems impossible to navigate.

It might mean the world to a child for you to light a candle of kindness for them.

* Taken from The Wit and Wisdom of David Johnson, Volume I1: The Hairy Catfish Caper.