CALL ME SNAKE

A friend called yesterday to tell me that he read an obit. in the Boston Globe the other day about “Brother Mike,” who died last week. I hadn’t seen Mike for several years but saw a lot of him during the seven-year stretch when my friend and I ran a tutoring program for children in one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. The program was reasonably successful (though it’s hard to measure “success” under such circumstances), but there would have been no program without Mike, who devoted his life to serving the city’s youth. He drove the children to and from the program in a van, often stopping to buy them food. He wasn’t paid for any of this–or for hundreds of other things he did–but was happy to serve as a mentor for children who lacked so much.

Earlier this week I read an item (also in the Boston Globe) about college students who decided to do a “good deed” tour during their spring break, working at a homeless shelter here in Boston and an orphanage in some other city, etc. They called it a “Pay it Forward” tour–borrowing an idea, popularized in an unpopular Kevin Space movie of a few years back, that one good deed begets another. I won’t knock these students who decided to do this for a week rather than go to Fort Lauderdale. But you could say that Brother Mike spent his whole life, rather than a single week, “paying it forward,” so to speak.

Well so long, Brother Mike. You done good. And the world will surely miss you.