The Groper’s Good Deed - Part III
There used to be a mom & pop hardware store conveniently located in our neighborhood. One of the employees was a friendly and very helpful fellow in his late forties, but he had one big downfall. He was a groper. Every woman in the neighborhood knew this guy because if he got you alone in one of the back aisles of the store, he’d cop a feel. Encounters with him made my skin crawl and I did my best to avoid him. But one day, out of desperation because I had no one else around who could help with an urgent life-or-death situation, I invited the groper to my house. What he did (and what I learned from his behavior) surprised me.
THIS IS PART 3 of a THREE-PART STORY
The best place for me to buy a crowbar was at our local hardware store. Grimy and sweat-stained, I hopped into my car and drove straight there, barely pausing at stop signs. Who was the first person I saw as I barged through the door, but the groper, a wide and delighted smile on his face. Ah yes, there I was, fair game. As soon as I saw him I burst into tears. “Can you help me?” I sobbed.
The groper’s smile widened. “I can try,” he said. I stammered out the details of the situation, and he immediately grabbed a crowbar and said, “I’ll follow you to your house.” It didn’t occur to me what that meant in terms of groping.
At my house, he followed me out to the deck where he swung the crowbar in the air and brought it down hard on two of the wooden planks. I held my breath as the planks were tossed to the side, and my spry little dachshund hopped out of his hot dark prison and trotted off over the gravel of the yard. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I sobbed.
I wanted to give the groper some money for his efforts, but he refused. “Anytime you need me, just swing by the store,” he said, smiling as if he meant it. The whole time he was at my house, he hadn’t made a single attempt to touch me.
I made it to the airport a few fashionable minutes late. On the drive I thought about the groper and about how people were not black and white, not all one thing or the other. The groper, who was obnoxious with his wandering fingers, had a good side to him, perhaps even a side that overrode his apparently uncontrollable letchy habit. He fondled the ladies a little, but so what? He had gone out of his way to rescue Corky and perhaps that outweighed his compulsion to cop a feel every time a woman entered his shop.
Perhaps it was time to stop being so judgmental and accept a person for the entirety of their qualities.
That didn’t mean I would stand there and tolerate a minute or two of the groper’s fingers on my skin. It meant I could see he had a kind and generous heart, and, as a damsel in distress, that was more important than a few moments of discomfort as I tried to dodge his wandering hands. You have to take the good with the bad, I thought. The groper confused me by doing a just deed. People were a lot better than their worst faults or best virtues. They were a mix and you had to accept the whole person rather than just a part of them. Which just goes to say, humans are a mystery and the riddles of human behavior will never be easily solved.