When my mother was a small child, her father—beset by a bitter mother-in-law—left the marriage, becoming a reviled pariah in the family.
My mother's brother, the family favorite, walked down the street to get ice-cream and never came back, hit by a car and killed.
Because my mother looked too much like her despised father, and because she was not her beloved dead brother, she experienced unrelenting emotional abuse.
They—her mother and grandmother—routinely made her stand on the corner, waiting for her father to come by, to beg him for money.
Her grandmother and mother ordered her to say in school that her father was dead.
Scarlet fever left her deaf. In school, even the teacher mocked her deafness.
So it was for her, day after day.
Valentine's Day approached, and it was customary for the class's students to exchange cards, friend to friend. My mother had no friends. So she knew that, as always on Valentine's Day, she would receive nothing.
That day came, and a large envelope arrived on my mother's desk, inscribed "For Ruth."
My mother looked around the class to guess who sent it, but she saw not a single friendly face.
She opened the envelope and pulled out a huge card, bedecked with frills and ribbons. All eyes in the classroom stared at her and the card, thunderstruck that anyone would send Ruth such a thing.
It was signed: "Uncle Ed and Aunt Hattie."
They knew, you see, what Ruth endured. Somehow, they knew about the classroom Valentine's Day custom.
They cared.
All the rest of her life my mother remained close to her mother's brother, Ed, and his wife, Hattie. When my mother married, someone arranged a wonderful wedding for her. Certainly not her mother. It was not really a mystery who did that for my mother.
My mother's Uncle Ed and Aunt Hattie live in my memory. They were incontrovertible proof that, no matter what else happens in this world, there are moments of true decency.
There are truly decent people.
--Joyce