A Glass of Sherry
The northeastern coast of England shapes the people who brace themselves against the gales of the North Sea. Life there is not for sissies. In the same way that New Englanders are frequently tough, self-reliant and certain that life is not easy, so the people of Sunderland learned long ago how to endure the sternest of challenges. Sea blasts are just the beginning. The diminishing ship building trade of the Tyne & Wear river region plunged the economy of that region, along with employment, into the bleak zone. A generation of young people either left home for brighter prospects or resigned themselves to very lean future.
As I served a congregation in that part of the world for a summer I had the great pleasure of calling on some of the saints who had become shut-ins. These were people who were only able to leave their homes with great difficulty. One of these visits was to Miss McKinsie.
She lived in a typical row house in a non-descript part of town. Every door looked pretty much like the one to its left and to its right. The sidewalk was crumbling away from the curb.
After she met me at the door and invited me inside the first order of business was the tour. We strolled from one room to the next, an entourage of cats trailing behind us, as Miss McKinsie described her life. She was a retired elementary school teacher and the closets were still bulging with the evidence of her craft. Left over art projects and stacks of books and materials overflowed the closets. There was a large, hour-glass shaped water stain in one corner of the bedroom near the ceiling. The large flower print wall paper was pulling away from the wall at the seams.
The centerpiece of the little kitchen was a long, porcelain sink and drain board. A few dishes sat upright in the drying rack. Out behind the kitchen was what she called the garden, but it was really more like an alley. Every Brit needs a little garden, no matter how humble. It’s a marker of basic self-respect.
Then we settled down in the living room, a space no larger than ten foot square. And she began a time of show and tell. Miss McKinsie moved from one bureau to the next, opening drawers and pulling out her knitting. They were all projects for children – little caps, gloves, and blankets. They were, as she said, for the less fortunate. Ever so often, when she had accumulated a goodly store of these knitted pieces, she called the church and someone came to retrieve them, passing them on to where they would be distributed.
“I’m just a little knitting factory,” she said. “I can’t participate like I used to, but this is a way I can help.” Indeed. For the less fortunate.
She carefully tucked her inventory back into the drawers and headed back toward the kitchen. Soon enough I heard her call out from the kitchen, “Would an American pastor like a glass of sherry?” Well, yes he would.
She came into the living room carrying a mildly rusted metal tray, and on the tray sat a small bottle of sherry, two jelly glasses and several biscuits, which we would call cookies. She carefully sat the tray in front of me on a small table.
As she took the bottle and began to pour the sherry into the jelly glass she put her index finger inside the lip of the glass, a strange way to serve a guest I thought to myself. “I hope you don’t mind the taste of my finger,” she said as she smiled. It was only then, at that moment, that I realized Miss McKinsie was totally blind. She was measuring the fullness of the glass in the only way she could, by feeling the liquid on her finger.
There are many things that we don’t see in life, and it’s not because our eyesight is poor. We are blind because we don’t notice. And because we don’t notice we assume lots of things about lots of people and events. We miss life while it is happening. We don’t see that the woman standing right before us can’t see. We don’t notice that she is living alone and caring for those she calls the less fortunate. We haven’t taken note of the fact that she doesn’t think that she is doing anything heroic. This is just how she lives and what she lives for. And though our eyes are open our awareness is somehow not.
Ever so often, even in the act of pouring sherry into a glass, we are graced with wakefulness. It is possible to wake up and actually see what is before us.
As I said goodbye to Miss McKinsie she walked me out of the front door onto the sidewalk. And as I started the car and began to pull away from the curb I looked into my rearview mirror. There she was, waving her handkerchief toward the sound of my car, fanning the embers of some shared spark that cannot be seen with the eyes but most surely can by the heart.
