I had the pleasure of meeting the nicest person in the world when I was only 14. His name is Henry and, of all the nice people I’ve met over the years, he still holds the title. Henry is the father of a high school friend whom I have seen once in the past six years, but I know without a doubt that Henry would drop anything and everything to help me if I called him right now. Not just me, though. Anyone. Nicest Person in the Entire World.
When we were in high school, Henry organized several trips to Mississippi and Louisiana to rebuild in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Henry worked in sales and he did a lot of work in the Gulf area and just couldn’t stand seeing people in such distress without doing something about it.
Henry’s daughter, Emily, always went on these trips – a surprise to me because, even though she was related to the Nicest Person in the World, she rarely seemed to have any ounce of compassion anywhere in her tiny body. She was set to go on her second trip the summer after our sophomore year of high school with her boyfriend, whose name isn’t important. Three days before the trip, she dumped him. So I took his place. That first trip went by with little to tell about, other than Henry becoming obsessed with the song of the summer, I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry.
The next summer, Emily and Henry asked me if I wanted to go back to Slidell, Louisiana, to continue with clean-up. At this point it had been three years since the hurricane, but there was still a lot of work to be done. I agreed and set off on the drive to Louisiana with Henry, Emily, Emily’s boyfriend and a mutual longtime friend of ours. I don’t remember much about the work we did on this trip, but I do remember that none of us teenagers were getting along by the last day of the trip. The reasons why are no longer important.
On the last day of the trip, though, we decided as a group to do a short job in the morning before we needed to head out that afternoon. It was an easy task: we just needed to clean up a mess that an actual repair crew had left in a woman’s front yard.
When we got there, the “mess” was a little larger than we’d expected. In the driveway of this ranch-style house was a pile of shingles nearly as tall as the house itself. Apparently the homeowner needed her roof to be replaced after the storm and, after replacing and re-shingling the entire thing, the repair crew just gathered all of the old torn shingles into a pile and never arranged to have them picked up or addressed at all.
It was a large task, but an easy one for a group of seven or so people. All we had to do was throw all the shingles into the back of a rented truck and someone from the church where we were staying would drive it to whatever the appropriate place is for disposing of shingles.
As soon as we pulled up to the house, we got to work. Like I said, it was a fairly straight-forward task, but we were given one warning: watch out for nails. All of the short roofing nails that are used to fasten shingles to roofs were mixed into the pile and very hard to see. This wasn’t a problem for me because the thick-soled vans that I wore for most of middle school and high school were impenetrable, and I was given a pair of work gloves for the job.
About a half-hour into throwing these shingles into the back of this truck to be carted off to godknowswhere, the owner of the house, I’ll call her Shelley, returned home from walking her five medium-sized dogs, tied them to the tree in the middle of the yard, then came over to where we were working and proceeded to go absolutely nuts.
“What are you doing?!” She was immediately sobbing very real, very insane tears.
We were all completely stunned and a little scared. We were sure that we had the right place and were doing the job we were asked to do.
Before any of us could find any words, Shelley was in the bed of the truck, rifling through the shingles.
Henry finally stepped up at this point, practically begging her to stop and get down because of the danger of the nails. As he approached her, she turned around in a fury, eyes bloodshot and tears streaming down her face, hands cupped together in front of her.
“The nails!” She plowed past Henry and continued to maniacally pick through the shingles. She was picking out the nails and holding them all in her hands.
“Ma’am,” Henry said, all the patience in the world still present in his voice. “It’s OK. We know about the nails, but it’s fine. We can leave them. They’re all going to the same place.”
“You don’t understand!” she screamed, only looking up for a second before hunching back over and diving back into the shingles.
After some expert convincing comparable to a hostage negotiator, Henry got Shelley to stop and take a seat on the side of the truck. She took some breaths, then told us that her one and only mission in life, handed down to her by Jesus Christ, was to collect all the roofing nails from the giant pile of shingles that had been in her driveway for over a year and recycle them. Clearly Shelley had lost a little more than her roof and access to clean water after the hurricane. We finally calmed her down enough to explain to her that it’s not safe to wade through the ocean of shingles just to find these little nails because she would most definitely end up stepping on one. She agreed to supervise the mission and stood in the truck bed pointing out nails for us to pick up until all of them were out of the truck and in her hands. A few of us stayed in the truck to help Shelley, while the rest of us got back to the actual job at hand: the still-giant pile of shingles in the driveway.
We continued without incident or outburst for a while, all of us half-listening to Shelley’s stories about how much of a mess her life had been since the hurricane. She told us several times how we would never understand what it’s like to not have access to water and to have to ask the neighbor to borrow their phone anytime you wanted to make a phone call. Luckily, she was right. I do not know what that’s like. I also don’t know what it’s like to have two adult children who haven’t spoken to me in years, even after my (probably already messy) life was torn to literal pieces after a natural disaster. Shelley and I do not have a lot in common, and I am thankful for that.
Sometime between her telling us about her phone situation for the fifth time and her screaming at her dogs to quit fighting – “Biscuit! Cut that out! Diana!” Then she would turn to us and say “Mama fightin’ daughter, I just don’t get it” – Henry stepped on a nail.
Henry was wearing Sperry’s, which did not offer as much protection as my checkered skater shoes. When Henry sat down on the back of the truck and took his shoe off, all of us stopped what we were doing to watch in awe what was happening. Before he even got his sock off, blood was gushing out of his foot and onto the pavement, not unlike a fountain.
All of us were panicking, trying to find a first aid kit, while Henry explained calmly where to find it and what we needed to do to stop the bleeding.
Shelley had no time for this. The nails! As soon as the attention was not on her and her holy mission to recycle nails, she started crying again.
“No one is helping me!” she wailed a few times. What finally stopped her hysterics was something I still can’t believe I actually witnessed.
“Listen lady,” Henry said in a voice louder than I thought possible. “We have something more important to worry about right now. I’m trying to stop myself from bleeding out here on your driveway and you acting like a crazy bitch just isn’t helping! So I’m gonna need you to shut up for a few minutes.”
The feeling of shock that ran through our group was palpable. I honestly thought I was going to pass out, both from sheer shock and also the sight of all the blood that was still pouring out of Henry’s foot.
Shelley shut up for a few minutes, but as soon as Henry was bandaged and standing, she got right back to pointing out nails for us to pick up.
I can’t remember if we finished cleaning the shingles or separating the nails before we had to leave, but I do know that Henry apologized to Shelley for his outburst and injury before we left.
this day's disdain 