The Parable of the Bowl of Soup (Part 1 and 2)

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The Parable of the Bowl of Soup-Part I and II
By Hal Haralson, Austin, TX

The phone message said, "Hal, this is Elton Moy. I`ve been thinking about you. Call me at 505-462-XXXX."

Area 505 is New Mexico-out of my territory. The name Elton Moy was vaguely familiar. Toward the end of the day it came to me.

There were four of us standing by an open grave in the cemetery in Kenedy, Texas. The year was 1995. I read the twenty-third Psalm and said a prayer. We buried 90-year-old Lennie Pierce. The four were Mr. and Mrs. Moy, their son Elton, and I. We buried the "Bag Lady" from San Antonio.

I returned Elton`s call. "I`ve moved," he said. "I no longer live in San Antonio. I sold my restaurant and moved to Taos, New Mexico, where I manage the Taos Inn."

I was excited. "Elton, I`ll be in Taos in two weeks for a four day writing conference. Let`s get together."

Two weeks later at the Taos Inn I asked, "Elton, how did you come to know Lennie Pierce?"

Over a glass of tea, Elton unfolded this story:

"I stepped into the alley behind my restaurant in San Antonio to empty some trash. It was barely light enough to see. An old woman was going through one of my garbage cans. She did not see me and I remained very still and watched.

She would take leftover food from the garbage can and take a bite of it. If it passed the `taste test` it went into her bag for later consumption. If it did not pass, she threw it on the ground.

Her clothes were rags on top of rags. Her outfit looked like Joseph`s `coat of many colors.`

As I looked at her sad condition I made a decision that started me on a journey, which eventually led me to you at that cemetery, and now here five years after that graveside gathering.

I said to the old woman, `Would you like to come in and have a bowl of hot soup with me?` She was startled. She bent her entire body backwards so she could see me. I looked into riveting, beady eyes that were filled with distrust and hatred. No one had offered her anything in many years. She was estranged from her family and obviously had no funds. I figured her to be at least eighty years old.

Her first instinct was to escape, but the offer of hot soup was just too tempting. She came through the door and into the kitchen. After laying her bag on the floor she slowly lowered herself into a chair. She slurped up the soup. Not a word was exchanged. She left.

So began a ritual that would last for over five years and affect my life forever. Each morning when I opened the door she was waiting. `Would you join me for a bowl of soup?`

Gradually the hostile glare began to soften. On a morning six months later she uttered her first words, `My name is Lennie Pierce.`

`I am Elton Moy.`

Her story came slowly-bits and pieces. She was seventeen years old, living with her family in East Texas. `No, I can`t remember the name of the town,` she said. `It`s been so long.`

`They said I was acting funny and needed to see a doctor. They said they were taking me to a hospital for a few days so I could get help. It was in San Antonio.`

`They said good-bye and left. I was put in a large room with twenty other women. There was a bed and three meals a day.`

`I waited. No one came to get me-no one at one week, one month, many months. No letters came from my family.`

`A year passed . . . then two. Eventually I realized they weren`t coming back. I spent my days exploring the grounds of the hospital. There were fruit trees and pecan trees. I got Styrofoam cups from the cafeteria and watered the trees. As I walked the boundaries of the fifty acres an idea began to form.`

Segments of the story came faster now. Lennie even smiled when the back door to the restaurant was opened each morning.

She continued: `Ten years passed, then twenty and I lived my life within the fence that surrounded the San Antonio State Hospital for the insane. I spoke to no one. I watered plants and picked up pecans and fruit. I stole bread from the table at mealtime and hid it in my pocket. I rolled it into little balls and sat in a chair on the porch and thumped bread balls to the birds. It was my most exciting time of the day.`

`One day the attendant came in and said, Lennie, your doctor said you can leave. You are free to go!`

`It had been forty-two years, since my family left me.`

`I walked out that day to live in what they called a group home. It was small but clean. The five women I lived with didn`t bother me.`

`I continued doing what I had done for the past forty-two years. I walked . . . wandering aimlessly around the city of San Antonio.`

`I got a bag and picked food out of garbage cans and ate it when I became hungry.`

`Sometimes people threw clothes in the garbage cans. I put them on.`

`I spoke to no one. My world was within me. It wasn`t so bad.`

`Then one day my world changed. You invited me in for a bowl of soup. It was hot . . . and very good. You asked for nothing. You didn`t ask questions. I learned to trust you. You are my only friend.`"

Elton continued, "After about three years Lennie informed me that she wanted to leave the group home and live in the country. `Will you take care of that for me?` she asked, as though she had just hired a real estate agent.

Kenedy, Texas, is a small town about sixty miles southeast of San Antonio,. My parents live there. In Kenedy I found 20 acres of land, which already had electricity and could be connected to city water. The property could be bought for $2,000. In San Antonio I found an old house, which had been condemned for a right-of-way. There would be no charge to acquire the structure; however, it would cost $5,000 to have it moved to Kenedy.

I told Lennie and she got excited.

`Where do we get $7,000?` I asked.

I was stunned at her next move She looked in her bag, pulled out a checkbook and wrote me a check for $7,000!

The property was bought and the house was moved. Lennie lived in one room and used one bathroom.

She began putting seeds in the soil of her yard and watering them from a Styrofoam cup."

Elton Moty laughed as he completed this saga about his relationship with Lennie Pierce.

After practicing law in Austin for twenty years, I wanted to become involved with others who had experienced forms of mental illness. I had been diagnosed bipolar twenty years earlier and had gone to law school and practiced law after that. I wanted to repay those who had helped me by helping others.

I wrote a letter to the Mental Health Association and offered my services. I helped organize the first support groups for former mental patients in Texas—perhaps the nation. After three years of traveling Texas we had groups in 25 cities. I was then given an okay to organize a retreat for former mental patients.

I went to my longtime friend Howard Butt, Jr., and told him what I wanted to do. He graciously offered Singing Hills, the Butt Foundation’s beautiful Texas Hill Country facility, to be the spot to host the retreat. For the next seventeen years we held similar retreats—at no cost.

The time was set for Lennie Pierce to enter my world.

Once a month an MHMR (Mental Health and Mental Retardation) worker took Lennie by van from Kenedy to San Antonio to see her doctor. The trip took the entire day. During one of these visits Lennie was invited to go to the Laity Lodge retreat that I had planned. She was excited.

I was elated by the response to our invitations. Seventy-five participants had come.

One person caught my eye immediately. She was an old, hunchbacked lady dressed in rags. A bag hung on her shoulder. She looked at her feet as she hobbled along. She was clutching a Styrofoam cup. . . and watering plants on the grounds. “The bag lady from San Antonio.”

This was my first encounter with Lennie Pierce, but certainly not my last, for she attended this retreat for the next nine years.

I made it a point to get to know Lennie. I can’t say that we were friends, but we knew each other. She knew I was a lawyer.

One morning my secretary buzzed me and relayed the message that Lennie Pierce was on the phone.

“I need a lawyer! Will you help me?”

“Of course,” I replied. “Tell me what has happened.”

“I sold my house to this man two years ago. The man who bought it has quit paying. He still owes me $18,000. He’s moved. Can you find him?”

I went to San Antonio and met with Lennie. I told her to bring all the papers concerning the house’s sale to the meeting.

All she had was a copy of a deed conveying the house to a Sam Jones. He was to make payments to Lennie. There was no note and no deed of trust.

Lennie said that Jones was a real estate broker who had told her that the deed was all that was needed.

The deed had been properly recorded.

After holding the property for two years, Jones had sold it. Since no note or deed of trust had been recorded, the record implied that Jones owned the house debt-free. He took the money from the sale and split.

I had been an investigator for a law firm for two years while I attended law school. If you are out there, I can find you. After several weeks I located Jones living in Houston attending South Texas College of Law.

In order to cover the $18,000 still owed, I drafted a note and deed of trust. The payout to Lennie would be $200 per month for the next twenty years. In my cover letter I told Jones that if these documents were not signed and returned to me within ten days the only bar he would practice before would be Maggie Mae’s in Austin.

He sent the signed papers back. They were properly recorded and he never missed a payment.

Lennie now had a lawyer.

Lennie also had cats. Nine cats shared her one-room living quarter in an old house in Kenedy. The house was behind a row of trees so that it could not be seen from the street.

When I drove up Lennie was in her yard, watering her plants from a Styrofoam cup.

Lennie needed someone to bring her food and assist her in taking her medicine. I ran an ad in the Kenedy paper and interviewed twenty women. I hired one of them. It took Lennie only one week to run her off. Lennie did not want anyone looking after her.

I finally found an older woman who was kind and very gentle. She ignored Lennie’s insults and brought her food each day. She also saw that Lennie took her medicine. Her name was Mrs. Moy.

For the next ten years, on the last Thursday of each month, I went to Kenedy to check on Lennie. It was two hours down and two hours back.

“Next time you come bring your shovel . . . we are going to dig a flower bed!” Lennie considered me to be her “man servant.” What she wanted—she demanded—and I complied with her demands.

Cornelia buzzed me. “Lennie is on the phone.”

“The bus broke down. They can’t take me to the doctor in San Antonio. I need for you to pick me up at 7:00 A.M. tomorrow and take me to the doctor.”

I canceled my next day’s appointments. At 4:00 A.M. I got out of bed. At 7:00 A.M. I pulled up to Lennie’s “house.”

My pickup is not adapted for anyone who is physically challenged. Lennie couldn’t get up into the seat of my pickup from her wheel chair and I could not lift her. She weighed at least 200 pounds and was as limber as a sack of deer corn.

Finally she rolled herself into a ball and I pushed her onto the floorboard of my pickup. She rode in that uncomfortable position for the two hours that it took us to get to the hospital. The return trip was the same.

Sandwiched between our travel times in the truck were the eight hours in the hospital. I waited as she went from one doctor to another. I had a close-up view of what day in the life of Lennie Pierce was like.

She asked me to prepare her will. “I want my estate to be left in trust—with you as trustee—to be used for former mental patients.”

I humored her. Estate? What estate?

Lennie was living in a nursing home. She would never leave. She could not walk and was unable to tell one medication from another.

I met with funeral director and made pre-need arrangements on Lennie’s behalf. He was instructed to take care of everything whenever the inevitable call came.

On March 16, 1996, I was informed that Lennie had died in her sleep. She was ninety years old.

I was one of the four who were at her graveside to say farewell. Mr. and Mrs. Moy of Kenedy came as a courtesy. The fourth person there, Elton Moy, was Lennie’s one true friend. Their friendship had grown from a tenderhearted offer, “Would you like a bowl of hot soup?”

I began the arduous task of going through Lennie’s things in preparation for filing probate papers. Among the disheveled possessions I found correspondence from the Merrill Lynch firm in San Antonio.

“Do you have client named Lennie Pierce?” I inquired.

“Where is Lennie? We haven’t heard from her in three weeks. She calls at least once a week about her stock,” a Merrill Lynch associate said.

“Her stock?”

I subsequently learned that Lennie had over $75,000 in stocks and bonds. A monthly statement from anAustin savings and loan institution indicated that there was an account holding $22,000. When all assets were tallied, Lennie Pierce’s estate totaled over $125,000.

The trust was formed. According to Lennie’s wishes, the money was used to benefit individuals who had experienced mental illness.

Lennie never mentioned her stocks and bonds or her savings. I had no idea as to the source of her funds.

For two hours Elton Moy and I sipped tea and traded stories about Lennie Pierce. “Elton,” I asked, “do you know where Lennie got her money?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered. “After nearly a year of mornings sitting with her as she had her bowl of hot soup at my San Antonio restaurant the ‘Bag Lady’ confided in me.”

“Lennie painfully realized that her family was not coming back for her. As she roamed the grounds of the San Antonio State Hospital with her white Styrofoam cup in hand, she formulated an idea that blossomed into a plan. Once she had emptied the cup of its water, she began to refill it with the fruits and nuts, which she harvested from the trees of the season. Then, with her shoulder bag full, she would make the rounds of her ‘customers’—employees at the hospital.” Elton said.

“There was no stated price. Customers paid whatever they wanted to pay. The ‘Bag Lady’ became an entrepreneur.”

Elton looked at me—there were tears in his eyes. “Do that for forty-two years and it adds up.”

$125,000 was left in trust to help others who had perhaps experienced pain and discrimination similar to what Lennie had known in her lifetime. Those funds undoubtedly would have ended up in the State’s coffers had it not been for the heart softening actions of a friend—of a man who found a bent old lady scavenging for food in his trash and asked, “Would you like to come in for a bowl of hot soup?”

And He said unto them, “In as much as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.