the sensitive Casandra

the sensitive Casandra

fiction
edward w pritchard

Sometimes the World's not benevolent.

It's so easy in a television news story. A righteous cause, caring friends, getting out the word, the ball gets rolling, the final sound byte of everyone happily eating cake on TV. Problem solved. When our friend got cancer without health insurance it didn't work like a TV story for us.

Our friend Jo, a girl, was 14 had cancer and there was no health insurance so all of us at the ninth grade sold pins with a puzzle piece on it and a bow to help raise money. Then we washed cars and we had a ravioli dinner and then we went to the suburban newspaper and several of our father's places of employment. After a couple of months we had by herculean effort raise about $800 dollars and we decided to try a new strategy.

We went to the community bank for a loan. We took the story about our fund raising and our friend's plight to the Community Bank to the President, Mr. Ray who had spoke to us in the business class in our ninth grade social studies class. He was very helpful, taught us a lot, and the Bank donated $50 and so did he, donate another $50, from his own money. We found out the World was not always benevolent. Not indifferent just preoccupied with other pressing concerns. We didn't get our loan.

Mr. Ray, the Bank President when we pressed and pressed him refereed us to Mrs. Brown. She was the only black lady in our Suburban neighborhood. She lived in a large brick house with an expensive fence around it. She worked on her gardens a lot. Her husband was dead and she didn't leave her house much. When we were in grade school and selling anything at school we would race to her house to get there first for she would always buy candy or Christmas cards or pins made of puzzle pieces and ribbon to raise money for a friend with cancer. She also would pay $15 dollars to have you shovel the snow with her snow shovel off her sidewalk every time it snowed. Completion was fierce every time it snowed when we ran to her house to ask to shovel the snow.

I went to see Mrs. Brown. I am Sheri, and I took Ossie and Lancey and our friend with the cancer is Jo, a girl but she didn't go, too sick. Mrs. Brown lives alone and listened to us and gave us some pineapple juice to drink. She gave us $25 for Jo. Lancy blurted out about the stock market. " We were desperate and the world isn't benevolent and we had to help Jo to help fight the cancer which was very expensive" Please help us I said.

Mrs. Brown said no. The stock market was too risky and we didn't understand.
We brought Jo over with her shaved head and then Mrs. Brown was sad but asked us to bring her a Wall Street Journal every morning. She would to have start reading it again if she was going to help us. Everyday we raced to her house from Feeman's drug store with a Wall Street Journal, one can of Pepsi for her, her favorite, from us and a different kind of candy bar, to her again, from who ever of us was bringing her the paper.

She eventually picked an IPO stock. It was 1997 and stocks were flying, it said in the Wall Street Journal. Jo's family needed the money for the cancer treatments.
We worked on Mrs. Brown's elaborate garden that Spring and she followed that stock. We went to the store for her and did errands for her for Mrs. Brown didn't get out of the house much normally.

It took about ten weeks but somehow Mrs. Brown turned $1100 dollars into 18,400 after commissions and taxes in the NASDAQ stock market. My Dad said it couldn't happen and after it did he said it was miraculous.

Jo's doing better with the cancer. Its in remission and its a year since we went to Mrs. Brown to help us.

Her nephew came to see me, I am Sheri and I am the leader of our group who wanted to raise money for our friend Jo with cancer. We were successful but now Mrs. Brown isn't gardening anymore. She can't. She can hardly leave the house, even with her nephew's help. Her nephew told me. She could study the stock market in the Wall Street Journal and was very good at picking stocks. If the market was going up, in a bull phase she was usually very successful at picking stocks. The bad part was studying all the inter relationships of the world and how they effected stock prices depressed her badly said her nephew. It was very bad for her and she had been told by her Doctor's not to do it. Mrs. Brown understood the inter relationships between events but it depressed her to study them and try to peer into the future, a necessary task to make money with the stock market.

Mrs. Brown can't garden anymore, at least not this year. Her nephew has asked us not to try to do the gardening now. The garden's not doing too well. The high fence is still around the large brick house and Mrs. Brown sits in the rocking chair on the screened in porch a lot, I can see her when I ride by on my bike. She nods I think, its hard to tell with the rocking. I am sorry I asked her but I didn't know and she didn't tell us exactly.

Jo is in remission now but Mrs. Brown is not doing well, at least not now.

The world's not benevolent sometimes.

End