Danny's Coming to Dinner

Our kids remember the lost ones as part of our Thanksgiving dinners.  They remember the welcome.  I’m glad. 

“When you hold a lunch or a dinner,
do not invite your friends or your brothers
or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors,
in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.
Rather, when you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.
For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Luke 14:12-14

I didn’t plan on our relationships with these lost ones.   Danny lived across the hall from me in what I now recognize as a “Men’s SRO” (single room only, bathroom down the hall) above the garage at Marygrove College.  I lived there because

I worked for the food service, and the room was part of my pay.  It helped me get through college without a pile of debt like the kids today.  Danny lived there because without the job on the grounds crew and the room and hot meals, he’d probably die on the street.  He was one of three or four men that the nuns at the college had given rooms to, men who could not make it in the world, who were wounded or otherwise withdrawn.  It was a great gift; I realize now, a home, really.  Danny was an alcoholic, the lonely single brother in a family of fathers.  He would, on weekends, get dressed in shiny-seated gabardine trousers and a dress shirt, Mennen Skin Bracer masking the single-guy-in-a-single-room smell that was his normal.  He’d slick back his curly black hair and shave, and he’d look pretty darned good.   He knew it, because when I’d hear his door close and smell his cologne I’d peek out to take a look at him and he’d give me a big, close-lipped smile, expressing his joy but hiding his bad teeth.  He would often be bringing a gift for a niece or nephew, one receiving First Communion or Confirmation, or celebrating a birthday perhaps. 

By evening he’d come back and a less joyful ritual would begin.  He would drink and call “friends” on the phone, friends who did not want to talk with an intoxicated Mexican.  Danny’s voice would get louder, trying to fight his way into their lives through the curly little cord coming from the impotent instrument in his hand, as if volume would convince them of his need, of his value.   He’d make call after call, his dirty little secret of loneliness no secret at all to any of us who lived along that echoing corridor with its shiny, yellowing paint and its square brown floor tiles.

On Monday morning, Danny would cough his lungs awake and shuffle down that corridor to the shower in his faded checked bathrobe, smelling of the sadness of the night before.  He’d put on his dull gray cotton work pants and matching shirt and his dusty work shoes, and head to the kitchen in the next building for breakfast.  There was no Skin Bracer on work days, just the mild scent of soap to try to cover all of that beer, all of that loneliness.  There was no proud smile on his lips in the morning; there was only the downcast eyes, the puffy eyes, the sad eyes.  By the time I was off to my first class, driving past the grounds crew’s garage across the driveway from our building, Danny would be wisecracking with his workmates, his bravado mask firmly in place, unaware that it was transparent, that we all knew how lonely he was, how worthless he felt.

When a couple of years after I’d moved out of that little room and Kathy and I had married and bought a house in the neighborhood, Danny came by to visit, wearing his shiny-seated gabardine trousers and his dress shirt, smelling of Skin Bracer.  His bravado mask came off more and more quickly as he accepted our invitation to come back.  By the time the kids came along he’d show up with little gifts for them, and he waited for them to adjust to his sometimes-loud voice.  He teased them a little, but stopped when he saw them feeling the slightest self-doubt, the slightest hurt.

I don’t know what happened to Danny.  After awhile the spaces between his teeth got wider, his shiny black hair turned eventually all silver, and then he said didn’t have a phone anymore in his new apartment.  He just kind of faded out of our lives.  So I think of Danny when this Gospel turns up in our readings every year or so.  Luke is right.  We are repaid in the resurrection of the righteous, when Danny returns to me in his younger guise, his Sunday self, still with teeth, with shiny black hair, smelling of Skin Bracer. And Kathy and I are repaid when our kids remember so warmly the love around our table, and when they keep watching for Danny’s in their lives, and are find being kind the natural thing to do.  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.