Love for No Reason by Marci Shimoff

Author:Marci Shimoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Twelve years after leaving Nicaragua, I was living in Santa Monica, California. One day the phone in my apartment rang. When I answered, a man’s voice asked me, “Do you remember Julio, Ana Raquel, and Jorge?”

After a moment of stunned silence, I burst into tears. “Remember them? Of course I remember them!”

The man said, “Would you like to talk to Ana Raquel?”

Before I could answer, she was on the line, and we were laughing and crying, both of us trying to talk at the same time. They had tracked me down via an internet search! Somehow they’d managed to keep the little slips of paper with my name and my phone number for all those years even while they’d been living on Nicaragua’s streets.

Jorge, by then a grown man of twenty-five, had used the money I’d sent him to go to high school and college, eventually becoming a psychologist. He told me he was the director of an orphanage that housed thirty children. He was married and had given his first daughter the same middle name as mine: Christina.

A year later, I took a trip to Nicaragua to see my “street kids” again. Jorge greeted me at the border. I threw myself into his arms and we hugged each other for a long time, me crying for joy, Jorge grinning from ear to ear. After our initial excitement, Jorge bought a mango from a street vendor for us to share. Then he pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket to cut the fruit and I recognized it at once. It was the knife I’d given him thirteen years before. When Jorge saw me looking at the knife, he stopped peeling the fruit.

“Chevita,” he said, “there were so many times when I was tempted to go into drugs, crime, or prostitution to get food to survive, but then I’d think of this knife in my pocket, and the beautiful flowers that had grown from the seeds you gave me, and I’d tell myself, ‘No! I have a mother in Canada, a mother who cares about me, and someday I’m going to find her again and make her proud of me.’”

I couldn’t speak. I could only shake my head in disbelief, the tears streaming down my cheeks once more.

I now understand that every act of care, every act of love has an impact and generates a ripple effect far beyond what we know. We don’t always get to see the result, but if we’re wise, we give whatever we can and know that’s enough. Because however much we may want to be superheroes, able to solve all problems in a flash, in reality we’re humans, able to give whatever we can and take great joy in the giving. That is the true gift of love, for those we care for, and for ourselves.

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