I spent two years living in an RCAF apartment complex with many other airforce personnel. It was exceedingly difficult to get into these quarters and actually through a stint of a couple of beers with the housing officer, my husband’s name was moved up the list. Yup, sometimes it is who you know.
We’d never “lived on the base” before so it was a new experience. Actually we weren’t actually “on the base” but several miles from it, but we were all together, a motley crew of officers and enlisted, all “keeping the peace” in a Germany barely recovering from the Second World War.
I arrived with a new baby and a two-year-old daughter and soon I was invited to be part of the occasional coffee groups. There were the usual groups…drinkers, non-drinkers, noisy neighbours and ones you never did get to know, church members, and those who never darkened the door of the chapel. Not much different from your own Canadian neighbourhood anywhere. But mostly we were just young people clinging together in a land far away from home.
My downstairs neighbour had a dark brown skin. I’d grown up in the Fraser Valley with all kinds of Japanese people…my grade one photo shows that over a third were Japanese children. Many years later my brother married a “coloured girl,” so I didn’t hesitate to knock on my neighbour’s door one morning, kids in tow, and invite myself in for a coffee. It was the beginning of a very special friendship. I had a car and she didn’t so we chased all over our little bit of Germany, mostly to American PX’s (stores) that let us shop for back-home treats. We ran around our little German town picking up things like meat and vegetables that we had to buy locally.
One day my friend hurt her hand and asked me to help her wash her hair. I bent over that head of black curly hair and almost stopped. Was that a tiny prick of prejudice I was feeling? There had never been a word of prejudice in my home.
For years it haunted me. What was that feeling that had been hidden deep inside me?
Then, one day my own hairdresser asked if I’d like to help out in her shop. My girls were in school, so why not. A few extra dollars always could be used. She showed me the ropes and then it was time for my first customer. I sat her down, wrapped her up in plastic and placed her head over the sink…I bent over her to add the shampoo and that same feeling from the past came back to haunt me. I started to smile. I wasn’t used to the intimacy of touching a stranger’s hair…that is what had shaken me so many years back…not the colour of the hair. The guilt I had packed around for so many years vanished!
I wonder how much guilt we pack around with us that would be erased if we just looked at the circumstances and forgave ourselves. Satan loves to torment us and the Lord loves to forgive us. Let Him.
Photo by Víctor de Lara via Flickr (Creative Commons)
