Rain pelted the windshield as my father pulled into the gravel parking lot of the local grocery store. He quickly dashed into the store for something my mother had asked him to pick up. I waited in the car. We were on our way home from school for lunch. I stared out the window on my side of the car. Something was lying on the ground a few yards away. Suddenly I caught my breath. It was a person lying there in the mud! I watched as a truck pulled into the lot and skirted the fallen figure. Then Daddy was back with a sack of groceries.
“Look, Daddy, who is that over there?” I asked hesitantly, wondering what my father would do if it really was a person lying there.
My father glanced over to where I was pointing. “Why that looks like Indian Dan!” he exclaimed.
“But, Daddy, why would he just lie there in the mud and rain?” I questioned anxiously.
“He’s probably drunk and just happened to fall there,” came his soft reply. Dad started the car. My heart sank. We couldn’t just leave the old man there in all this rain. What if he was sick and not just drunk as my father supposed? Without a word, Daddy pulled the car up beside the crumpled figure. Then he got out of the car.
Could it be that my father in his clean, well-pressed business suit and topcoat was really going to help that sodden, muddy figure to his shaky feet? As Daddy got the old Indian sitting upright in the puddle of water, the mud and gravel oozed from his matted hair and streamed down his face. They struggled together until finally old Dan was safely seated in the front seat of our immaculate care. Though my father took great pains to see that our care was always clean and polished, he didn’t seem at all disturbed about the muddy water that now was soaking the front seat off old Dan’s clothing, or aware of the nauseating odor that nearly gagged me.
I crouched in a corner of the backseat and watched wide-eyed as my dad got in and began to drive. Where was he going? What was he going to do with the old man? Questions stormed through my mind, but I was too scared to breathe a word. I’d never seen anyone drunk before, and now here I was in the same car with a drunk!
Indian Dan was a foreboding figure with his ruddy complexion and squinting, bloodshot eyes. We children had heard such wild tales about him that though our parents assured us that he was perfectly harmless, we were fearful of the very sight of him. In fact, we would go around the block rather than walk past him.
As we rode through the rain, I remember old Dan making some unintelligible noises and my father speaking gently to him. On out into the country we rode. We turned down a back road and suddenly I realized we were nearing the Indian reservation by the river. We pulled up in front of a small, tar-papered shack. My father got out and dashed through the rain to the door. A heavy set, worn, middle-aged woman answered his knock. They talked for a moment with gestures toward the car, but I couldn’t hear anything they said. Then Daddy came back to the car and helped old Dan out and to the door of the shack. The woman reached out to steady him and quickly helped him inside. The door closed. They were gone.
Dad quickly returned to the car and we headed home for our lunch. I don’t recall much else that happened. But recalling that incident as a young adult, I suddenly understood the meaning of the word compassion. It meant caring enough about someone to help them, even if it cost you something like a late lunch, a dirty car, or a dry-cleaning bill for a muddy coat or suit.
Years later in a tribute to my dad I wrote, “I am sure when you picked up old Indian Dan from the mud puddle, put him into our car and drove him out to the reservation you had no idea that you were teaching me a life lesson on compassion…a lesson that would follow me into adulthood and even be preparation for ministry I would later have with people at Oakton Manor and then around the world!”