Every day I scan through our neighborhood newsletter and every day without fail, someone has posted asking for help. I promise I'm a good Christian boy, born and raised in the Church and taught about helping the poor 'amen'...and I do. But, and this is a big BUT, these guys in the newsletter are "repeat performers". The same names, the same stories, over and over. It's like the guys who drive their new pickups and Lexus' to their respective street corners to hold their "Will work for food" signs. Have you ever rolled down your window and offered work to any of these guys? They don't want to work. If they did, they would be working. I have a boatload of work any of them could be doing for me around our house and yard but getting someone out to actually do the work is pretty darn difficult.
I know this doesn't sound real compassionate but that's just not the way our generation was raised. There were times growing up when I wouldn't see my dad for a week at a time because he was "at work". He volunteered for every hour of overtime he could get, he worked another job as a stock clerk at a local grocery store, and for a time, when college costs were looming over him, he got a third job as a janitor at a local hospital. He would never in his life consider asking for a handout. The sad tidbit of this last information was, both my older sister and I were embarrassed about our dad working as a janitor. He was doing it for us and we were embarrassed.
I know my lofty pillar has been shaken in the eyes of loyal readers. I don't sound like a very nice person right now....but I am. Really! Trust me.... All of my sibs and I worked at our jobs like the dickens...that's a phrase used by my mom. We all worked part time jobs while in school to cover our personal costs, some of our clothes, and even a bill or two if we knew things were tight. My dad didn't know about Cindy and I paying some of the family bills for a long time because he wouldn't have allowed it. It was tough growing up in the Mihills' herd. And, none of us would change a single moment of it. We didn't think of ourselves as poor.
I remember visiting with a friend I grew up with one night. We started talking about our years at West Hurst Elementary. We had a snow day and the school was closed but there was a pristine lawn in front of the school and someone had to destroy the picturesque scene. My brother, Glenn and I walked the two blocks to the school and met Steve and his brother, who had come up with the same plan. We built snowmen, dueled out snowball fights, and generally acted like the idiots we were. The school was located on Precinct Line Road, a main artery through town at the time, so we had lots of onlookers pass on their dreary ways to work. One car stopped and the driver got out of his car. He came over to us and told us he worked for the paper. Would it be okay if he took our picture? Well of course it would be okay. We were going to be famous for sure. I remember waiting for our picture to show up and sure enough, within a couple of days there it was. Four clowns standing in the snow, soaked from rolling around, red cheeks, and silly grins on our faces. I was so proud! Now, this friend I mentioned earlier was Steve. While we reminisced, Steve pulled out from a drawer a copy of that picture. I hadn't seen it in decades. I remember feeling pretty doggone rich most of the time growing up and I'm sure most of my friends and classmates felt the same but when I looked at that picture, the shock of how poverty stricken we looked hit me like a truck. All of us were wearing wornout clothes. Steve and I, being the oldest were the hardest hit by the lack of funds because we were older. Our younger brothers got the hand-me-downs which were sometimes not great but at least everything fit. Steve and I both wore coats too small for us. Our jeans came up over our ankles and had patches on the knees. Our shoes were the official shoe of that era, "Tennis shoes". If the holes in the toes weren't obvious in the picture they certainly were to us. I also noticed and then remembered, my brother didn't have any gloves so I gave him one of mine. Each of us wore one glove and just let the other hand freeze. It was worth it to play in the snow.
That photo brought into focus how hard my dad had to work just to keep five kids fed, clothed, and educated. And he did it. He took care of all of us without asking anyone for a single penny. He also managed to provide Christmas for other families who were worse off, never let a Christmas go by without presents for us stacked to the ceiling, never let an Easter go by without something unique for each of us, took in his mom and sister for a short time when the sister developed MS, sent funds to re-carpet a church in South Dakota he had visited, and the list goes on and on.
The one thing that sticks in my mind the most happened when I was a junior in high school. I was going to a band banquet and wanted a white sports coat so bad I could taste it. I didn't say a word about it to anyone but my mom so I was surprised when my dad came home from work early the day before the banquet and told me to jump in the car. He took me to every department store around trying to find that white sports coat with no success. Just before the stores were closing he spotted one more store which just might have something. We pulled in and convinced them to stay open a bit longer because there was a fine looking coat on the store dummy (we never called them mannequins because dummy sounded funnier) in the window. My dad told them we needed to see that coat. They said they couldn't because it would mess up their display. He insisted on speaking to the manager who quickly got the coat down for me to try on. It was a perfect fit! My dad didn't even ask the price and I had the sports coat I had dreamed about. Now, this is the bad part. I wore that coat to the banquet and boy oh boy, did I ever look cool. No one else wore a white sports coat.....just me....all alone. When I got home I hung the coat in the closet and never wore it again.
I guess looking back I wasn't such a nice person. I thought I was. I try to be now but those lazy free-loaders out there really get to me.
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