A Legacy of Kindness

Arriving home from school one evening, my wife Julie told me that Gordon Liddle stopped over to drop off something. Gordon is our friend of many years; we were married on his farm just outside of Winchester, Kentucky, nearly thirty years ago. Eighty-nine years old, Gordon has a propensity for conversations about engaging topics, but it is difficult to get daily tasks finished when he visits.

 Julie told me she did a “Frank Sextro” when Gordon visited. The comparison immediately resonated to my Uncle Frank, dad’s brother-in-law. In my youth, about every two weeks during good weather, Frank would walk the half mile from his house on Campbell Avenue to 828 carrying two-quart Sanka coffee jars filled with bacon grease, the not-so-secret ingredient in mom’s renowned doughnuts, which she handed out as Halloween treats, Dad also used the grease to make the lye soap mom used to do laundry.

 Frank would also come to read The Sidney Daily News and visit. Frank was older and very methodical and deliberate in manner and speech, and these loving but time-consuming traits often conflicted with mom’s get-it-done-now mentality. So when he arrived, she would quickly find one of those daily tasks—like ironing or stringing beans—that she could do during Uncle Frank’s stopover. Growing up, I remember being disappointed in mom for thinking she always had to complete a job instead of just sitting and talking. 

That was then, but now I see mom’s action in a different light. Mom’s military-like focus on completing tasks was coupled with the equally intrinsic value of being kind to one’s neighbors. I am sure that Frank appreciated mom’s taking moments from her busy day to help Frank fill a void in his.

This helping one’s neighbors is a decency that plays out often in my life today. Either Julie or I go out every morning and walk down the street and throw the morning paper on one of our 85-year-old neighbor’s porch. Doing this simple task, I am reminded of that kind spirit of “doing for others” that our parents instilled in us through word and deed. 

Mother often cloaked these good deeds in “fun” activities for the six youngest Kerber boys, of which I am the third oldest. (I am pretty sure that mom figured out how to raise boys efficiently and uniformly by the time I came around.) As tasks were distributed on cold wintry mornings, we boys would position ourselves to be picked for the coveted job of shoveling the neighbors’ walks. We would start with Millett’s, our across-the-street neighbor, and shovel a path through the neighborhood, to three or four other older neighbors. We would make a game of our labor, having snowball fights and tackling each other in the mounds of snow we shoveled. Little did we boys know that we were tools of a higher calling, that of helping others who could not easily manage the job themselves. 

As I write this today, I am sure that mom had several different motives for making us boys the neighborhood snowplows—e.g. boys outside meant fewer boys inside under foot. But those other reasons have melted away through the years. This past winter as I was shoveling our neighbors’ walks here in Kentucky, I realized that I was living part of mom’s legacy, that no matter how busy our lives, there is always time to be kind to your neighbor. I not only do these tasks with a good feeling inside, but I also thank mom while I am doing them.

 

 

 

Fred is the first Kerber sibling to be a guest blogger for 828. The ninth-born (or, as is sometimes said, the third oldest of the six youngest), he lives with his wife Julie in Winchester, Kentucky; they have two college-age daughters, Maggie and Cora. Fred is semi-retired now but continues to teach English two days a week at at George Rogers Clark High School in Winchester, where he’s taught for the past twenty years, and Julie works as a massage therapist.