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Bloom

An Unexpected Kindness

By Amanda M.Published 3 years ago 7 min read
14

It was just an average stiflingly hot summer Saturday in Brooklyn on the day that the package arrived. The sick-sweet and heavy smell of garbage in the alley behind my crumbling apartment building hung in the air and spilled in like invisible molasses through my open bedroom window.

Around 10am, I woke to the sounds of my elderly downstairs neighbor, Mr. Schunemann playing his baritone saxophone (badly) on the fire escape. He had received the instrument as a gift from his daughter two Christmases ago and had taken to practicing every day on the rusted metal structure outside his window. I didn’t mind it so much anymore. I even found the sounds of his clumsy playing (accompanied by the sounds of my upstairs neighbor, a sweet but wildly sarcastic old lady we all knew as Mama Bet shouting for him to “spare us this unending torment”) comforting in the days when I felt particularly alone and unbearably far away from what I used to call home — a small town in Kentucky called Bowbrook with a population of 802.

Once I finished high school, my parents soon after divorced and my older brother joined the Army. The ties that once held me firmly in place in Bowbrook were suddenly severed and I found myself faced with a question that filled me with an aching sadness, but most of all the electric excitement of unending possibility. Where will I go?

New York. It had always been this untouchable dream in the past — a magical city I could only visit in movies and books. I had always figured I would live out the rest of my days in a mediocre life with mediocre dreams in that tiny, mediocre town.

I wanted to be a writer. I never thought that I could be in previous years, but now with the seal of my little world broken and the world laid out vast and promising at my feet, I felt hope. I felt like I could be whatever I wanted to be and there was nothing that could stop me.

I arrived in Brooklyn in the Autumn of my 19th year and moved into my tiny (described in the listing as “cozy” and “spacious”) apartment with only my comically gargantuan suitcase. The landlady had promised that the unit would be furnished. Apparently “furnished” in Brooklyn meant that there would be a twin sized mattress thrown in the middle of the room and a rusting and bent beige-painted folding chair propped against a wall. It didn’t even faze me, honestly. I was just thrilled to have my own space. I remember clearly the feeling of the smooth brass key in my hand. It felt like independence. It felt like new beginnings. It felt like freedom.

Lying in my twin sized bed on that hot summer Saturday, I took in my surroundings and felt simultaneously a sense of contentment and a creeping hint of melancholy.

I was living in New York. I had my own apartment that I had filled over the years with my own furniture. I had shelves filled with all of my favorite books by all of my favorite authors. I had learned to cook in my dollhouse sized kitchen and consistently impressed myself with the culinary skills I had developed. I had paintings and prints that I had found in galleries and estate sales hanging on every free inch of wall space.

Though I was surrounded by all of this beauty and brilliance, I found that my life itself was sadly lacking. I worked as a barista in a small cafe on the corner of my block. I met countless unique people and had countless fascinating conversations. I started to realize over time that those conversations were fascinating for one glaring reason — they were about the lives of other people and not about me. I was 25 years old and even though I was living an independent and carefree life in the city of my dreams, I didn’t have much in the way of a list of achievements.

Since my arrival in New York all those years earlier, I hadn’t made any moves to pursue my dream of becoming a writer outside of enrolling in some writing courses in my first month in town and promptly realizing that I simply couldn’t afford to pay the tuition if I wanted to have a roof over my head.

I spent all of my time either working at the cafe or having tea and long heart to heart chats with Mama Bet. She always listened so intently when we talked. She was the only person I had confided in about my dreams of being a writer and she never let go her need to push me as much as possible. She loved reading my innumerable short stories. She would laugh until she snorted at the funny ones. She would “get something in her eye” when she read the sad ones. She would always ask to keep the little black notebooks I scribbled them in after she read them the first time so she could read them again before bed. She’d promptly return my notebook the following day, hungry for more material. She made me feel important. She made me feel validated. I had never really felt that before.

She told me my writing made her feel like she was looking through a window into her younger years. She had allowed her own dreams of becoming an artist slip through her fingers, instead opting for the practical choice of marrying her high school sweetheart and starting a family. Tragically, their only child, a carefree girl with wild red hair, died in a boating accident in the Hamptons when she was almost exactly the same age that I was when I left home. Mama Bet’s husband never recovered from the grief. All she would say about him was that he died of a broken heart, leaving her alone with nothing but her memories and dreams of a life that never was.

Once Mr. Schunemann finally “spared us the unending torment,” The balmy morning settled slowly into a pleasantly breezy afternoon. I moved slowly through my apartment, fixing myself a ham sandwich and settling down on my bed to watch the last of a jazz documentary I had been working my way through for a few days.

I was startled into hyper-awareness by a sharp rap on my door, a sound I only ever heard when someone failed to close the main entry door and the neighborhood Jehovah’s Witnesses descended upon the building to “share the good news” with us.

I waited for a moment for the obvious intruder to move along, then traveled the 8 feet from my bed to the door. Nobody visible through the peep hole, I opened the door a crack. My eyes landed on a thick yellow envelope sitting on my welcome mat. I reached down to pick it up, uneasy about this mysterious delivery.

I closed my door and slid down to the ground, my back against the peeling painted surface. I tore open one end of the envelope and peered inside. Stacks of what appeared to be 20 dollar bills stared back at me. I assumed that my brain was malfunctioning so I blinked to reset it and looked inside again. There they definitely were — twenty dollar bills. More twenty dollar bills than I had ever seen in my life.

Then I noticed the black notebook. It was just like the ones that I used for my stories. I pulled it out carefully and opened it up to find a note written in Mama Bet’s gentle and flowery handwriting.

“You are a beautiful blossom that needs to bloom. I have saved every penny that you paid me in rent and set it aside to give back to you when you most need it. Please continue to write. Use this to pay for some classes or workshops. Use it to pay for living expenses so you can work fewer hours and write more. Just do whatever it takes to BLOOM, my little blossom. Yours, Mama Bet”

I was confused for a moment. Paid her in rent? How did she end up with my rent checks?

Then it hit me like a freight train. I made the checks out to Elizabeth Warrington and placed them in a drop box in the lobby. I had assumed that I had never met the landlady. As it turned out, the landlady was my biggest (and only) fan.

Tears were streaming down my face as I heard a much softer knock on my door. I stood up and opened it slowly to find Mama Bet standing there, beaming.

“You got my special delivery?” Her eyes always had a mischievous spark in them. Today it was a mischievous FIRE.

I threw my arms around her and sobbed into the shoulder of the tattered robe she seemed to always be wearing.

I had never in my life had anyone do anything so kind and so selfless for me.

I looked up into her kind eyes. A pitiful “why” was all I could muster.

“A more appropriate question, my sweet child, would be ‘why not?,’ wouldn’t you say?”

And so, with the generosity of the most amazing human I had ever met, began the creation of my own list of achievements. I was going to be sure to make it a good one.

friendship
14

About the Creator

Amanda M.

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