Journal of Narrative
Iatrogenesis & Repair

Paul said love is patient and love is kind, and he was right, and what he did not say is that he was describing a party. Not the kind you schedule. The kind you are born into and spend a life learning to deserve.

If I were to join the party of public love, I would join because kindness lost in the last election. We saw it coming and did not want to believe it. Love is kind, and kindness lost, and I am not willing to call the result the will of a loving people.

I would join because I do not let anyone treat my grandpa without kindness. A country is only a block, and a block is only a grandpa, scaled up until we forget his face. He worked at a lathe and kept his life at the Deaf Club and gave the good thing away for free.

I would join because love can wait for an eternity, and will, if you let it. Love is patient. It is so patient that we have abused its patience for two hundred fifty years. I do not want it to wait any longer.

I would join because I would point out how magnificent everyone is. Love does not envy, and envy is only magnificence that was never told the truth about itself. I would tell everyone the truth about themselves until there was nothing left to envy.

I would join because love does not boast and is not proud, and every closed door is a boast, and every form that made you prove you were worthy of help was a quiet way of making you small, and I am done being made small.

I would join because love keeps no record of wrongs, while the institution keeps an archive it is afraid to have read. Love does not need a finding aid. Love does not fear the reader. Love was made to be read.

I would join because the gift was meant to move in a circle, and I am tired of watching it stop at the people who already have enough. Care was never scarce, only the permission was, and nobody should have to earn the thing they were born deserving.

Philanthropy is the partial thing. It is the love of the human seen through a glass darkly, turned into something you have to apply for, qualify for, prove you deserve. Civility is the childish thing, the manners we put on so we would not have to do the harder work of kindness.

When the real thing comes, the partial is put away. Not in anger. Because the full thing arrived and the substitute is no longer needed. We put away the application and the proof and the waiting with a kind of tenderness for who we were when we needed it, and no intention of picking it up again.

And now these three remain: the porch, the gift, and the neighbor. The open face of the house. The thing that moves in a circle. The person in range of you. And the greatest of these is the neighbor, because the porch is only wood and the gift is only motion until there is a particular face across the table in the warm evening.

The neighbor is Tony, across the table, one of three households left on our block who were here the whole time. My knee, his can, the warm evening. Nobody planned it. That photograph is the whole platform. The party of public love has one plank and it is a porch.

I am done being civil to the gate and ready to be kind to the neighbor. I am not listening to the pioneers, who told the story of what was claimed. I am listening to my ancestors, who gathered because gathering was the only wealth they had, and they are telling me to set out more chairs.

So someone has to say it plainly, and I will. I love you. I loved you before you did anything. There is nothing you can do to earn it and nothing you can do to lose it, and a country built on that would be a country worth its birthday. I am starting it. The chairs are out. The porch is warm. Come sit. The Tuchman/McAleavey House — designed by famous Indianapolis architect Avriel Shull.