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When I was a boy of about thirteen, which would have been around 1962, my family lived in a residential neighborhood in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts.  We were not wealthy, but we were not poor either.  I think we were probably what you would call a typical, middle class family.

Late in the year, as the weather was beginning to get cold, my mother learned from our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Fisher, that an elderly woman who lived nearby was alone and destitute.  She was without heat and didn’t have enough money to fill her oil tank for the winter ahead.  My mother called our oilman and told him to fill up the old woman’s oil tank at our expense, but not to tell her who sent him.

I knew about my mother’s act of kindness and generosity with the heating oil, but I didn’t know for sure who the recipient was.  I did know of an elderly lady on the next street who didn’t seem to have a family and who didn’t appear to be very prosperous, but I couldn’t be sure if she was the one or not.  Frankly, I noticed the old woman more because of her car than because of her poverty.  The car was an old, black Chevrolet in exceptionally nice condition.  It might have been a legacy of more prosperous times in the old woman’s past.

After a short time the elderly woman stopped driving.  The car sat in her driveway with an expired inspection sticker and didn’t move for a long, long time.  It might have sat there for a year or more and then one day, I noticed that it was gone. I never saw it or the elderly woman again.  I surmised at the time that she had either passed away or moved, perhaps into a nursing home.

I never spoke to the old woman and I never found out what happened to her, but eventually I learned that she was the one my mother had helped.  I was only a kid at the time, but I never forgot the anonymous gift and my mother’s compassion for a neighbor in need.