▸ Column · Present day, St. Louis — read through a preserved WWII ideologue's contempt for a self-congratulatory century
RED SKULL replies.
Replied to by Red Skull, with a rebuttal from Captain America.
The letter
Three years back I lost the restaurant job, the apartment, and most of myself inside about six weeks, and I was sleeping on a cot in my brother-in-law's garage. Last month I signed a lease on a place of my own. I run the prep kitchen at a bistro downtown now, and my savings account finally holds a number that isn't zero. But I keep circling back to a retired woman named Gloria who volunteered at the food pantry on Delmar — she never once made me feel small in that line. I learned this week she died in January, and I never even knew her last name. I want to dedicate a volunteer shift in her honor, or buy the pantry a chest freezer with a small plaque on it. I barely knew her — a few minutes every Tuesday. I just need someone to tell me that wanting to mark this is normal, and not me turning her kindness into something about myself.
Red Skull replies
So. You crawled from a garage to a leasehold by the exertion of your own will, and of the whole ascent the single detail you cannot release is the woman who ladled into your bowl. Examine that, specimen. The climb was yours. No one carried you. Yet you write not to mark the strength that lifted you, but to beg permission to kneel before the institution that fed your weakness one Tuesday at a time.
This Gloria did not make you feel small. Nein — she could not. You were small. Your circumstances supplied the smallness; her tenderness merely failed to puncture it. You mistake the absence of an insult for a gift.
And now the freezer, the little plaque, the dedicated shift. Understand what you build. It is not a monument to her. It is a certificate for you — proof that your rise was virtuous and not merely fortunate. You suspect this already, which is precisely why you required a stranger to absolve you of it.
Sentiment is the disease that ended your century. Keep what you built. Owe no one. There is your verdict — and the permission you came for was never mine to grant.
— Red Skull
Captain America weighs in
Don't listen to him, friend. I knew Schmidt's kind in the war — they always have to tell you that being lifted makes you small. It doesn't. You were down, not small, and Gloria knew the difference. That's why the line never stung.
Nobody climbs out of a garage alone, and saying so isn't weakness — it's just true, and the truth is how you keep your feet under you. So mark it. But skip the plaque-and-walk. Go to that director, ask for the shift in her name, and then work it yourself. Stand on the giving side of the line you came through. That honors her. The freezer's fine. Showing up Tuesdays is better.
— Captain America
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