In the past ten days I have sent a bunch of reruns. By that I mean the stories I published have gone out before. This was my attempt at giving myself a spring break, by lessening the need to create fresh content. Since the lapse of time was several years, I figured it would not feel stale to my readers. Yet the spiraling circumstances all around us seemed to render those words obtuse. Oblivious to the emergency we are all engaged in. 

 

Coincidentally, if indeed there is such a circumstance, I have been reading two books that are much older. One is To Kill a Mockingbird. This was in preparation for teaching it to a sophomore English class, online as it turns out. The last time I read the novel there was no such thing as online, unless you were talking about clothespins. No doubt you too have turned those pages, either recently or when you still had a summer vacation.

 

The second book was more recently published, but is from a decades old manuscript describing a young girl's life during the Depression. After It Rained tells the story of a girl named Reta attending the same school I am urged not to enter due to quarantine. She arrived by train from Western Canada at the tender age of fourteen, with a suitcase of drab woolen clothes. She housed with a family that coerced her to do all the cooking, cleaning, washing, childcare, and indeed foot rubbing for the poor mother's benefit. They handed her a quarter each week but made it clear she was not being paid. Rather it was proof of their generosity. 

 

One of the heroines in the book is my grandmother. Living on the same road as I do now, she offered the girl an escape from servitude to come live with their family. I pass the very house on the way to the post office and I can assure you that it is not big. But Grandma's altruism was, and having twelve children of her own was no reason not to add a timid girl to the mix. At first Reta expected to work for her keep, and soon found that theirs was a family that cherished children, giving them the freedom to climb trees, and eat bananas at any time of day. She experienced more hugs and laughter in a week than she had in three years as unhired help. 

 

Being transported from the dire news of 2020, and into the racial turmoil of the 1960's was anything but irrelevant. Atticus Finch is as inspiring now as he was when the book was written. The pandemic of bigotry was as insidious as any virus. It still is. 

 

Atticus did not succeed in acquitting Tom Robinson, who was falsely accused. But he brought a dose of integrity to a hurting world. Which is remarkably similar to what my Grandmother did for a lonely girl from Canada. 

 

In the end maybe it is the only thing that endures.