Everybody talks big about what individuals want, what communities need, what’s imperative for national progress and world peace – this is why beauty contests are held, for beautiful faces to remind us. Actually what people want is just to go home again, and be loved and feel safe again like when first they wandered off to strike out on their own.
Louella Mae Smith of the Independent writes that Ginger Sprouse, who runs The Art of the Meal in Clear Lake, Texas, drove past Victor Hubbard four times a day standing on a street corner, no matter the weather. The corner was the last place Victor saw his mother.
He stood there three years waiting for her to return. But winter was coming, so Ginger Sprouse worried. She would visit Victor on the corner during her lunch break and they struck up a friendship. She asked him how he would feel about coming out to her house to get out of the bad weather. “And that’s how we started,” Ginger said in a radio show.
She started a Facebook page to introduce Victor to the community, and get him the help he needed. He had mental health issues. The community responded. She gave him a job in her small business. She sent him to mental health clinics and raised $15,000 for his living expenses. 200 people turned up at a block party to show their support for the man they had seen stand on the same corner for years. Now he gets eye tests, clothes, and regular visits to the doctors. He still hasn’t seen his mother. But, he says, “I got to talk to her and I really feel like I accomplished something.”
They say you can’t go home again, you can’t turn back time, and what’s lost cannot be regained. But where there is kindness something like all that can be gotten back.
Despite the madness of politics and the evil of men, the world is still a beautiful place. It is people who make it that way.