Loving the Case girls was gift to all of us
August 14, 2015
Today is your 55th birthday, Marrianne, and, on
this day I want to publicly share my own testimony of respect and love for you.
I know I don’t need to say I love you. You know that.
Our friends and family know who you are, too, know that they can rely on you to
be present when they need you. They know they can count on you to listen, to
support, to comfort, to counsel, to give fully and not to demand more than they
can give back. None of that requires repeating, either.
Your colleagues, past and present, know you will fully
invest in the work that needs to be done, pursue just outcomes, and follow or lead
with respect for the abilities that each person brings to the work you do
together. These qualities are evident to almost everyone who has had the
opportunity to work with you for any appreciable length of time.
As for the few who have decided to move in a different
direction, somehow concluded that you are actually in the way of whatever it is
they may be trying to accomplish—well, we know from experience that the work
that is important to you requires progress, not unanimity. Or, as your
plainspoken mother put it when you were seven years old and struggling with a
mean teacher, “Honey, some people are just a**holes.”
But, even though so many people understand and appreciate these virtues, I still
want to take this opportunity to testify in some detail about one continuing
aspect of your life that captures something singularly important about you and
about our almost 30 years together as partners and parents and comrades. I do
this now because I’m 13 years older than you are and who knows how many chances
I’ll get to celebrate you before I wear away and lose my mind in the process? And
I do this also because I’ve been thinking about it since earlier this summer
when we headed to Fort Wayne for Joyce Case’s wedding to Larry Hout. Though a
good number of our friends know something about your history with Joyce and her
sisters, the details about your relationship with Nancy, Allie, Leslie, Mary
Ann, Kathy and Joyce says something unique about your ability to overcome
obstacles to loving and being loved. For these reasons, today seems a good day
to testify.
Some 30 years ago, as a member of the West Elkton, O.
Friends Meeting you had made an effort to get the meeting more involved in the
surrounding community. At the time, the Friends meeting was approached to help
a family of girls who weren’t going to school because they didn’t have shoes.
As with so many other things in your life, you decided to get personally
involved and ended up making a deep commitment to the Case girls.
They were Irish twins, to be sure—six of them between the ages
of five and twelve years old. Their father, inclined only to petty theft and
other criminal schemes, got himself busted shortly after you met the girls. His
parents, sometimes employed at primarily low-wage jobs, had somehow managed to
buy themselves a home. It was barely adequate housing, but it was a place where
their son could live with his family, while they lived in a trailer out back.
But having put the home up as bail, they lost it and
inherited the care of the girls when their son and his wife skipped town. As it
happened, though the grandparents were able to keep the girls together, they
were poorly equipped to do anything else to help them thrive. And though, from
time to time, a social worker took an occasional interest in helping the girls
in their growing up, the truth is that from the first, and for decades after,
you would prove to be the one adult in their lives who made a constant
commitment to them, and who would do her best to give them the love and
attention that we all require as we make our way through the world.
While they were still preteens you would pick them up at their house and bring
them to yours to spend the weekend with you. You’d take them places they’d
never been before, to libraries, museums, music festivals, performances, to
Sunday Friends meeting where they could participate in the youth group and
learn to interact with a much wider world. And before every school year began,
you would take them shopping for a new pair of shoes, for new blouses and
jackets. Those weekends continued, sometimes two or even three weekends a
month, even after you moved to Dayton, further away from their grandparents’
home.
Not so long after you first met the girls, you and I, both working for the
American Friends Service Committee, had also met. By 1988, though I was living
in Ann Arbor and you in Dayton, we were deeply involved and I, too, would
occasionally visit you, in the process meeting the girls, also.
When the oldest, Nancy and Allie hit adolescence they ran
away with young men much older than they were, bouncing from one rural trailer
park to the next. The weekend they ran away, I was visiting and tagged along
while we searched the backwaters of southwest Ohio, looking for two girls the
world had long ago decided were expendable. I remember being astounded that we
spent our weekend in a hunt for two runaways I would not otherwise have met,
and even more surprised when we found them.
Though the girls were not done rebelling, they came back to Dayton with us
quietly enough. After all, you were the one adult in their lives who had ever
put aside the priorities of her own life to focus on theirs. You even went and
got yourself certified as a foster parent so that you could legally take them
into your home and keep them outside the juvenile system.
This would prove not to be enough. Dayton public schools
would also prove incapable of reaching them and the streets of Dayton, rougher
and infinitely more exciting than the roads of rural Ohio, overwhelmed and
seduced Nancy and Allie, and the juvenile system ended up getting them anyhow.
Now is not the time to tell the whole story of the Case girls, nor am I the one
to do it. You might be that person, or one of the girls, Allie, perhaps, or
Mary Ann. Who can say for sure?
But what I do know is that if not for the commitment you made, I would never
have crossed paths with the girls. And I wasn’t equipped to love them without
hesitation, either; not the way you did. Nor, for that matter, were they equipped
to easily survive what the world does to poor, mostly abandoned children, with
only a single adult around to treat them with respect. For Nancy and Allie, the
oldest, who suffered longer and more relentlessly from neglect and abandonment,
your love, coming as late in their childhoods as it did, had less of an impact
than it did on their younger sisters. Still, the girls were each distinctly
different personalities and, each with a different set of skills, made their separate
ways in the world.
Mary Ann, the most reserved of the sisters, likely learned how to avoid
self-destructing from watching how challenging adolescence was for her older
sisters. The only one who went to college, she has proved to be a capable,
careful and thoroughly committed mother, able to put herself second and insure
that her daughter, Kiya, would have a secure childhood so very different from
her own.
Joyce, the baby, always seemed to be the most comfortable
with the thought that someone could absolutely like her and love her. The
stable home and family life she has built for herself, with her daughter,
Alisha, husband, Larry, and her stepdaughters and their children, makes it
clear that one can start off on a hard road and still make it to a very good
place.
Allie, too, bright and always quick to fight, has somehow survived multiple
tribulations and gotten to a place as an adult that seems to suit her. Along
the way, she has acquired a delightful and capable companion with whom she
shares life, work and travel.
Of course, these are not happily ever after stories. Life
does not stop throwing mud pies and bricks at us. Thirty years ago one might
have guessed that the girls faced a future filled with nothing but sadness,
want and tragedy. It has not happened that way for Alice and Leslie and Mary
Ann and Joyce, mostly because they found within themselves the strength and
endurance to overcome.
But they also found you. They are your daughters, not
because of some miracle of birth, but because you volunteered to love them a
long time ago and never stopped. In the process, they are mine, too, and let me
say now that I love them because you showed me the way to do that.
Have a happy 55th b-day, Marrianne. You flat out
deserve it.
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