Last Thursday I had a medical appointment. While I was sitting in the waiting room, another patient and I got into a conversation. Within minutes, we were chatting about having grown up in Alabama; she in a part that I was familiar with because of visits to my grandmother. In addition, I told her about having met a man Sunday who was also from the same town!
In the course of the conversation, she told me about having grown up poor in Alabama (something I could relate to). She then told me about her marriage. When she and her husband got married, they borrowed $50 from one relative and a car from another relative so that they could have a honeymoon in the nearest large town. At that time, jobs were scarce in the area in which they lived. A popular job was to haul gravel in the back of a truck for a man who paid the drivers a fee. With no other options available, her husband bought a truck and hauled gravel, along with many others in the area. When it came time to pay the haulers, the man only paid a tenth of what he had originally promised. At this point, there were car notes, gas and (presumably) insurance to factor into the monthly expenses which were originally based on a much larger figure. In addition, she was now pregnant. A cousin who worked for the post office offered to put in a word to help her husband get a job as a mailman. He got the job, they soon moved and her husband started delivering mail. Over time, as a result of his work ethic, his managers promoted him. His final promotion – postal inspector – allowed them to live an exceptionally comfortable life far removed from the days of $50 honeymoons and underpaid gravel hauling. The job required that they move around quite a bit and the cities she named were all places in which I had either lived or were near where I had lived.
The family of three eventually grew to four as she had two daughters. She mentioned that, growing up, her family had never owned a house but over time she and her husband had owned houses and she herself had sold houses as a real estate agent. Her husband died some years ago and she said she missed him and wished that he were still around (they would have been married around 60 years by now). Her daughters moved to different parts of the country ages ago. Yet, the 76-year old woman I met was a vivacious woman who was looking forward to going through her scheduled doctors’ visits that day, then joining one of her best friends for a girl’s night out dinner and movie. Before we said goodbye, she wished me luck in what I’m trying to do. I told her that, during our conversation, I picked up that she was in a place of contentment in her life that shone through in her personality while we spoke and that I enjoyed our conversation.
Soon thereafter, my name was called and I was no longer waiting. Yet, I could have waited and chatted all day…