Pay It Forward

The recent talks of quarantine due to a dangerous virus prompted my husband to tell of an old memory. "Before I was born, my mom had a bad case of scarlet fever. The whole family was quarantined for several weeks," he recalled of what his father had told him. That was before they had antibiotics to treat the disease, which was quite contagious.

Howard said his mother was expecting him at the time, which means his brothers would have been 9 and 3 years old. "The doctor said I would never have scarlet fever, since Mom had it when she was carrying me," he remarked. He told how worried his father was, not being able to leave the house and go to work.

"Dad said sometimes a neighbor man would come and park his pick-up truck out in the road by the mail box, and Dad would go sit in it and visit with him," Howard remembered. One day when the neighbor asked how they were getting along, his father said, "Well, we're getting by. My mother-in-law baked a big banana cake awhile back, and we have been eating off of that."

"Another thing," his dad said, "Since I can't work, I'm behind on my car payments. I'm afraid they will come out and get it," he said of his proud possession, a Chrysler. "In fact. I can't figure out why they haven't picked it up already."

The old farmer neighbor looked pensively out the truck window and said, "Well, that is kind of strange, isn't it?" Howard said his dad knew in that moment that the neighbor had been making the payments! It was never discussed, but the car wasn't repossessed, and his father resumed the notes when he went back to work.

Neighbor helping neighbor. It was a way of life back then, I suppose. Sometime later that year, the baby that would grow up to be my husband was born, a man of fairness and kindness, qualities passed on from his dad, learned under his tutelage while growing up working in the family grocery store.

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law," Galatians 5:22:23. These attributes cannot be restricted, quarantine or not.