Marvelous Kindness

The following is an excerpt from A Multi Colored Coat. It melds stories from my unusual past as a Orthodox hillbilly from an Ivy League educated family with what my wife and I have learned about living a meaningful life. If you enjoy it, please buy the book!I grew up in a house in rural Oregon. Unlike my parents’ house in Idaho, it was only 35 minutes from downtown Portland. We had running water from a well and electric power from the city (most of the time).

It had all the accoutrements of a proper house. But the neighborhood was still tough. Sometime before we’d moved in, there’d been a string of robberies in the area. The locals had worked out who was responsible. They went to the police. The police didn’t do anything. So, the neighbors banded together and burned the robber’s house down.

The robberies stopped.

The neighborhood wasn’t exactly welcoming to new folk. Perhaps thinking they could intimidate my parents, the neighbors apparently set up a shooting range which lined up uncomfortably well with the position of our new house. My dad and Mark Houston Haney put rifles over their shoulders and paid the neighbors a visit. The shooting range was adjusted. About a decade later, those same neighbors tried to claim half the house on the basis of a surveying error. The place was resurveyed and the property line was moved six inches over, into what had been their land.

Basically, the area had two sorts of folk. The mountain folk, such as they were, and the few very rich folk who came and built mansions on the hill. My parents didn’t fit into either group. Nonetheless, they established themselves in that place.

My mom designed our house, modifying what she found in a blueprint catalog. It had a two-story entry way which was basically an atrium. That entryway had a massive Oriental rug hung on a massive wall above the stairs. It also had, as any atrium must, a small tree.

The house was located at one of the highest points in the Portland area. It was, my father liked to point out, at 1608 feet of elevation. When I look at it on Google, though, it is only at 1500 feet)[1].

A scant 2 miles away, the elevation is only 50 feet above sea level. This suggests, in theory, that my parents’ house should have had a magnificent view.

It didn’t.

The problem was simple: my father was always geologically aware. Oregon has a history of infrequent, but massive, earthquakes. He also had an affinity for a certain kind of geological dome – something that would yield water and oil. And so instead of building near the edge of the hillside (literally across the street), he built at the high point. It was years before I realized just how close we were to one of the most magnificent views I’ve ever encountered – anywhere in the world.

I’m sure there’s some lesson in there about awareness and the broad vistas of reality available to you if you only make the effort to find them. I’ll work it out, someday.

 

My parents built the house on that land with their own hands, of course. As my mother used to argue, with a decent Liberal Arts education you should be able to learn how to do anything. That included building houses. My father was proud of how inexpensively he managed so much of the project. The whole thing cost $70,000 to build (in 1978). He didn’t build it for $70,000 due to his own skills at discount shopping, though.

The reason he built it so cheaply was because of the community he was a part of.

As a friend told me years later, when my father first showed up at Congregation Kesser Israel, the community didn’t know what to make of him. He was a mountain man; a massive, hugely-bearded, wild-eyed mountain of a man.

It is hard to get a picture (and my dad doesn’t like photos), so I’ll borrow one from legend. In our house, we used to sing John Brown’s Body. If you don’t know the song, it starts with this:

John Brown’s Body lies a moldering in the grave, moldering in the grave. John Brown’s Body lies a moldering in the grave, moldering in the grave. But his soul goes marching on.

I didn’t know what John Brown looked like. I didn’t know what he’d done. But years later, I came across a picture of him online and I read his biography. Today, I could almost swear that my father is the reincarnation of John Brown… His soul goes marching on.

It isn’t just looks (although they have exactly the same eyes), it was attitude and outlook and expectations. The two men share a detachment from reality, an inability to plan, a fundamental charisma, and a deep (although often misunderstood) sense of honor and justice.

They also tend to scare the crap out of those around them.

Rodney Cox, née John Brown

So, this reincarnation of John Brown, only not in the nice suit, shows up at Congregation Kesser Israel. And nobody knows what to do with him. And then he stumbles and mumbles his way through the mourners’ Kaddish. I can imagine him, saying that first Kaddish, being wracked by sobs and shaking with regret and sadness.

The community took him in. He built that house for $70,000 because this man found him marble from a bank building being demolished and that man found him leftover lumber from another project. And a third man found flooring, at a nice discount. And so on.

The community took care of my family as they literally built a new life.

I don’t know all the details of what they did, but in the week after my mother died my father was remarking at how naïve he was not to recognize that the prices he’d paid were completely absurd. He wasn’t just getting the opportunity to buy leftovers from projects and demolitions – the community was giving him charity. He would have been too proud to accept it if he’d known. But years later… he knew.

And he couldn’t help but marvel at their kindness.

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[1] My father has a tendency to see a reality that’s a little more exciting than, well, reality.

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