On October 10th I turned the corner of one street onto another, ignoring the call of a woman on the other side. She said, “Excuse me,” and I kept walking. She called out again, “Excuse me, sir. You, across the street.”
I rarely respond to random hails from strangers on the street, but the woman was standing in the corner of the front yard of a home. I put my search for a daily paper on hold. I crossed the street to her, and she asked if I was busy. My filters discarded sarcastic responses and I asked how I might help her. She opened her gate and led me into the side yard of the house.
“We’re trying to get this up the steps,” she said. I peered through an open door and down a dark narrow staircase at three people clustered around a hulking white washing machine. I crept down the steps to also find a dolly. I made a quick visual assessment and some calculations: mass times space divided by big machine minus light volunteers, and decided the monster could not fit onto the dolly, swivel in the space and be lugged up the steps. Comments and suggestions were flying from the original volunteers and I said, “Let me think.”
“Let the man think,” said the other man in the basement. “We need a bigger boat,” I thought, but instead, we muscled the machine onto the dolly. Two people pushed as I bent down and pulled the beast up from the basement, one backbreaking step at a time. When we got the iron maiden to the top of the steps, it wedged tight in the doorway.
“When we got it in here, we put it in the door and turned it this way and that,” said the owner of the behemoth. I learned that the gargantuan was going to the junkyard and turned away and headed home for some tools. I came back in my car to find that the crew had managed to savage the brute enough to wrestle it through the door. “I guess my work here is done,” I said, brightly, but quickly recognized that the stone had to be rolled into the back yard and onto the bed of a pickup truck. This murderous fun was capped with, “Can you back the truck out of the yard? I almost scraped the sides driving in. You want some water, a pop, maybe?”
At the back-yard gate, I asked the vehicle’s owner if she could take it from there. “How am I going to get it down that bump?” she wanted to know. The “bump” was the curb she had mounted to get into the yard. With the truck in the street, I leaped from the cab. “Bye!” The woman and her friends waved and thanked me as I drove away.
That day, I had unknowingly participated in the Indy DO Day, a day when “the people of this city get to know their neighbors, take ownership of their neighborhoods and take care of one another.” I still do not know my neighbor, nor her friends, the four people I joined in battle with a World War II-era washer; we were five strangers (or four friends with one stranger) hammering away at a piece of life, trying to get a better fit. But after gobbling some ibuprofen, downing a frosty beverage and snapping open the pages of my paper, I realized that I did not regret having answered the hail of, “Excuse me…”
It was the least that I could do on that day.