In the middle of a conventional diner, busy fingers silently twist and bend discarded straw paper. A pen comes out, the hunched figure goes about doodling something. Then up he gets. Scans the room for just the right person...a child, or a stranger...then over he walks silent as a ghost and places the thing he's constructed on their table. Such a tiny thing. A paper puppy. I watch as he does this again and gifts another one to a different table. Finally I approach him, "So you're the one who leaves the paper animals for people." "Yes I am," he humbly replies. Then quietly returns to his seat across from his wife. I follow to introduce myself as a writer and shake his hand. "My name is Sherman. This is my beautiful wife. She has dementia. We come here every day. And I make the paper animals and I give them to people. I like to see them smile." I had to ask Mr. Sherman to tell me a little about himself. I especially wondered what compelled him to do this, daily. I wanted to know his story. "Well, I'm the last living survivor of the massacre in Ducduc during the Vietnam War on March 29, 1971. Sgt. Dennis Sherman. I was a Marine Lieson at the time. When you look it up on the internet you'll see my group in a photograph. The smiling happy guy right in the middle...that man was dead less than 24 hours after that photo was taken." This information was much more than I had anticipated. I'd find that Sgt. Sherman and the other Americans had come to aid the innocent Vietnamese villagers and defend them against the approaching Viet Cong army. They were however unsuccessful and by the end of the slaughter almost all of the men, women and children they were there to protect, along with most of their company were dead. [In the photograph to the right, Sgt. Sherman stands the following day after the attack...thankful to be alive.] This now older man sitting in an American diner 47 years later changed something in me in the telling of his story. What gratitude and humility one gains from meeting death face to face...surviving and somehow granted a beautiful life after filled with meaning. Dennis leans in to tell me that his wife is British and he still remembers her in his favorite blue dress and that she is just as beautiful to him now as the day they met. They come, they quietly share their meal, he makes paper animals while they wait, he gifts them and then like that they are gone. Once a mother was so happy her child received one that she left a gift card for Mr. Sherman the following day. My eyes see the world in different way and I have Dennis Sherman to thank. If they happen to visit the diner during one of the Shermans' daily visits, some might see an old man tinkering away at straw paper...but I know this isn't true. I see a magic man who makes toys out of nothing sitting across from his beautiful princess. And that is altogether worth far more than gold. Wherever life takes them, I know that grace will touch their footsteps always. And I am grateful to know them.
~author K. Day Post Script: After reading the article himself, Mr. Sherman told me there was one very important thing I left out... The reason that he does what he does. He does it, he says, for Jesus...in the hopes that others will be touched by the Spirit and in turn seek as he has. And that is a beautiful and powerful sentiment.
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We encounter the most intriguing individuals on our wandering adventures, my significant other/very best friend and I. Like Mr. Jimmy Davis here, a former army medic and veteran. Jimmy grew up in a poor part of New York state next to a steel mill that his father worked at. He was the only white kid in a neighborhood where most were African American and Native Americans. He told us that he never considered himself color blind and never felt he had to because to him, "human beings are human beings, no matter what they look like". He's traveled the world several times over and fell in love with a Turkish girl who one day in his elderly years he actually ran into here in San Antonio...all the way from Turkey, by happenstance. And he still calls her a "girl"...the heart knows no age. He tells us he's an incredible dancer and isn't much for ballroom dancing but loves to shake a leg to any kind of music that has a good beat. And he still pushes his walker aside to show us a trick or two. When I grow up, I hope to be just like Jim Davis. For what it's worth, I think he's still teaching us all how to live. ~author K. Day |
ArticlesThis is an assortment of words --- thoughts, dreams, confessions, advice, experience, love, war and hope --- contributed by people who inspire or move me. Archives
May 2018
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