The Old Fisherman

This morning I took the opportunity to turn on some Christmas music and then re-type a story that I had received as a girl. The words of the story were badly faded and I wanted to capture them before they were lost forever. With the Christmas music reverently playing in the background, I thought as I typed the story, "This would make a perfect Christmas story! It portrays all of the elements of what Christ tried to teach us while he walked upon the earth: to love one another, to give our best, to have gratitude for the good and the bad, have compassion, and endure to the end." At first I thought I would save the story for "next year as a gift to loved ones and friends." But then the thought came, "No, share it now." So, here it is. Turn on some lovely, reverent Christmas music and bask in the true spirit of Christmas Charity:

The Old Fisherman

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic.

One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door, I opened it to see a truly awful looking old man.

“Why, he’s hardly taller than my eight-year old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But, the appalling thing was his face—lopsided from swelling; red and raw.

Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening, I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the Eastern shore, and there’s no bus ‘till morning.”

He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no success. “I guess it’s my face. I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments….”

For a moment I hesitated but his next words convinced me, “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.”

I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch and talk for a few minutes. It didn’t take long to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body.

He told me that he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from back injuries. He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; every other sentence was prefaced with a thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.

At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch. He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking for a great favor, he said, “Could I please come back and stay the next time I have to have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit...I can sleep fine in a chair.” He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.”

I told him he was welcome to come again. And on his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen. He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so they would be nice and fresh. I know his bus left at four a.m. and wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this.

In the years he came to stay overnight with us, there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.

Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail these, and how little money he had, made the gifts doubly precious.

When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next door neighbor made after he left that first morning, “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away. You can lose roomers by putting up such people.”

And maybe we did, once or twice, but oh! If they only could have know him perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear. I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.

Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed me her flowers we came to the most beautiful of all; a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise it was growing in an old, dented, rusty bucket. I thought to myself, if this were my plant I’d put it in the loveliest container I had. My friend changed my mind.

“I ran short on pots,” she explained, “And knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting in this old pail. It’s just for a little while, ‘till I can put it out in the garden.”

She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven. “Here’s an especially beautiful one,” God might have said when he came to the soul of the fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in the small body.”

But that’s behind now, long ago, and in God’s garden how tall this lovely soul must stand.

Author Unknown