We are to love God above all things and to love our neighbor as ourselves. If you don’t know who your neighbor is, I refer you to the parable of the Good Samaritan. I refer you to my parents.
If you needed help, my parents would give you help – not always money, which wasn’t plentiful – but certainly a bed to lie in and a place at the table.
When I was quite young a woman and her two children came to stay with us for a couple of weeks while she was getting a divorce. My father worked with her husband, which made it kind of awkward for him, but “He was abusing them”, my mother said, and that was enough.
A young woman living next to us had two illegitimate children. The oldest, a boy about two, was taken away from her for neglect about the time the baby was born. My mother thought she was neglecting the baby, too, so she told her, “If you don’t want to take care of that baby, give it to me.” The baby came home with her. She got the crib and bottles out of the attic, and the baby stayed for about three months before the woman went to court, got both the children back, and moved away.
Foreign students stayed with us, sometimes for only a few days while they were touring America. One, a college student from Zanzibar stayed a year. He was a dark skinned Muslim, rather quiet and modest. He was afraid of the family dog. My mother, never one to turn down an opportunity to learn something, studied the Koran with him.
We lived near the state fairgrounds, so in August we sometimes had workers or entertainers stay with us during Fair Week. I remember one summer a group of acrobats stayed. I don’t think my parents even charged them room and board. My mother said they had a hard life.
My sister broke up with a guy one time and when he lost his apartment, my mother gave him a room until he could find another. My sister was pissed, to tell the truth.
Then, after I left home and got married, my folks gave shelter to a family of Laotian refugees and their blind baby. They gave my mother parasites.
A Vietnamese high school student stayed for two years.
A Chinese college student stayed for about six years. My parents loaned her money to start law school so she wouldn’t have to go back to China. She is still close to the family. My father gave her away at her wedding.
This all in addition to various family members who stayed for varying lengths of time, Democratic campaign workers who stayed during the Iowa caucuses, and people they invited home from the soup kitchen they cooked at on Thursday nights.
My parents knew who their neighbors were.
