Front Porch: A time to give aid, and a time to receive help

I’ll start with the end of the story: Everyone is in a position to help somebody else.

Here’s how I know that.

As an older woman with some physical mobility issues – most notably a limp that is sometimes pretty obvious, depending on how my knees are feeling at any given time, plus a gait that is, at best, irregular – I have often found the kind people in my city (which is most of them) ask if I need a hand or if they can carry something to my car for me or provide some other help when they see me navigating awkwardly down a sidewalk.

I appreciate the gesture and sometimes take them up on their offer, but often I soldier on, as I don’t want to give in too soon to my advancing decrepitude and wish to do it myself as long as I can. Also, I’m trying with all my might to not appear so needy.

But sometimes I am, and so I graciously accept.

So there I was one day making my way carefully across a winter-encrusted parking lot outside a grocery store when I saw a woman ever older than me – no, no, really, such people actually exist – standing with her hand on the back of her car (which was parked in a handicap space) and looking toward the door of the store.

I wasn’t sure if she was in trouble or befuddled or what, so I made my way over to her and asked if she needed help. She wanted to go into the store but was afraid to walk without support to the door. What to do?

I knew that holding on to me would be an iffy bet, with both of us likely going down if she leaned too hard into me, so I told her to wait there while I went and got a grocery cart, which I brought over to her. She held on to it as she made her way into the store, and I made sure the cart stayed steady as we went.

That was me, the person others come to rescue in other parking lots on other days. It felt good to be in a position to be the helper person. (By the way, my fellow shopper, clearly not befuddled in the least, told me she’d get someone from the store to help her back to her car when she was done shopping.)

Another example. We have neighbors we’ve lived next to for 35 years, and have, over the years, taken in one another’s mail or watched each other’s houses when one of us went out of town or done any of those neighborly things that neighbors do for one another.

Of late we have joined forces in our battle with Waste Management over the garbage truck not coming down our short, but sloped, street to pick up the trash weekly – even if the street is freshly plowed and graveled. I have emailed up to the corporate level and neighbor Wayne has worked the phone.

I note here that I don’t want any garbage trucks to get stuck or drivers injured, but since the recycle and yard waste trucks make it down our street just fine in the winter, I don’t accept the explanation that “trash cans inaccessible due to weather conditions” is a real thing in most situations this time of year.

The solution, it has turned out, is to haul the garbage cans up the street to the corner, where they will be picked up by the truck that still goes up that particular hill. Do you know how difficult it is, even for the young and spry, to drag a can up a street through soft or bumpy snow or over ice?

Not something I can actually do anymore. My husband Bruce had just had hip replacement surgery early in November, so for a few weeks, he couldn’t either. Then we both got COVID, with it hitting him pretty hard, keeping him off garbage duty even longer.

So Wayne – my thin and frail-looking 86-year-old neighbor – stepped up, strapped on his crampons and wrestled both his and our garbage cans to the corner. He said he felt good being able to do that.

Funny side note: One particular garbage day, when I came home from an errand and noticed that the cans had been emptied, I tried to nudge one down our road with my car. It kept going crooked, so I’d back the car up and go forward again, tapping the opposite corner to straighten out the can. I repeated this several times before I wound up knocking the darn thing over, and had to wait for Wayne to rescue both cans later in the day.

I sure hope nobody was watching out a window at the Subaru-trash can ballet. It would have been a bizarre, though perhaps amusing, sight. Or a highlight of someone’s “Stupid Home Videos” recording.

So here we are, all of us being able to help, even though infirm or seemingly unlikely candidates to do so. The best thing about it is that pretty much everyone I’m aware of seems to be willing to lend a hand, no matter how shaky that hand might be.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net