The foreigners next door

 

When I was a kid visiting my grandma, I knew to stay away from the next door neighbor. He had the reputation of being a grumpy old man. It was a tiny, grim looking house, anyway. 

When we drove back from Florida to California for Christmas in 1971, we stayed in that house. My grandma had asked a lot of family to come that year. The old man had passed away, and his family was looking for renters. My grandma was able to rent it for just a month. 

Sometime in the following year we started hearing about Raymond and Rosie, grandma’s new neighbors. They were refugees from Pakistan. They had come with almost nothing. 

Now, remember, my grandma was a farmer’s wife from the Ozarks. She didn’t have a lot of formal education. She was a person of her time and sometimes her words would seem rough to us today. 

But she had a good heart. She wrote in her etters that she sometimes had trouble understanding their accents. But then Rosie found out my grandma sewed. Her eyes lit up as she asked if she could come over to borrow my grandma’s sewing machine. 

My grandma’s sewing machine was her pride and joy. Also her constant tool. She bought the Singer Featherweight brand new in 1947. She sewed all of her own clothes, many quilts, and all my clothes until I was around 10. She began to teach me to sew on it the summer I turned 8.  The way she told it later was, it scared her the way Rosie sewed. “She put her fabric on there and just go ZZZZZZ! So fast I was afraid she would break something.”

I never met Raymond and Rosie when they lived next door. They only lived there a couple of years. Then they moved to Los Angeles, where they started a business sewing clothing. After I moved back to California in 1978, though, I met them several times. At least once or twice a year, they would drive up to visit my grandma. They would bring small gifts. They called her mother. 

I still have my grandma’s Featherweight. I was sewing on it the other day and started thinking about Raymond and Rosie. They came as refugees with no family here. My grandma, despite so many differences, became family. 

Because of this friendship, they were able to start a successful business in the LA fabric district. They paid taxes, employed people, and helped the economy of their new home. And now other immigrants and refugees and even citizens are being chased down in that same area. Without due process, they are being detained and deported. And somehow there are people who think this is good for us. 

My grandma was not “woke.” She was kind and caring. She had been a refugee in her own way, coming to California with nothing after they lost the farm. As far as I can see, so much of what is best in our country has been built out of just such kindness. 

“The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” – Leviticus 19:34