The Best Possible Construction

Asked to babysit for two children in an apartment made from part of an older house, I was horrified to see that they had eaten only Minute rice for dinner. A few grains were still left on their plates. The children, a boy of seven and a girl of eight, were pale, thin and quiet, their blonde hair curling about their faces in the heat of late summer. I could find nothing in the house to amuse them, but at 16, I had already done quite a bit of babysitting. I had a notebook with me and showed them some of the paper and pencil games I knew. 

When I suggested it was time to go to bed, the kids went willingly, climbing the stairs and showing me their room, which seemed to be full of old cribs. Each of them climbed into one of the cribs and lay down, as if they were tired. Again it hurt my heart to see how little energy they had, how willing they were to give up on the day.

When their parents came home, the mother, a sweet-faced, thin woman, carefully counted out the $1.50 I had earned. Her husband, a trucker, drove me home. He was shy and quiet too, but there was alcohol on his breath. I understood they had been to a roadhouse for dinner and dancing.

Safely home, my mother was awake, reading a magazine. “I was worried about you,” she said, “but I didn’t want to refuse when the woman asked me if you would babysit.” I told her about the meager dinner, the lifeless house and listless children. They had seemed proud of their bedroom. Perhaps they had seen even worse circumstances in the past. 

“I hated to take the money,” I said. But everything had been done correctly, with quiet pride. We didn’t know much about alcohol and I am sure mother worried that the couple would come home drunk. Plus, we thought, that money too could have been spent on food. In 1962, a dozen eggs cost $.54 and a gallon of milk cost a dollar.

My gentle mother said, “All’s well that ends well,” and “We must imagine they are doing the best they can.” Perhaps they became members of our church, but we left the town a few months later and I never heard more about the family.

Looking back, I still remember the details of that deeply wrenching evening. In the experience of my family of eight kids, there was never a missed meal and my spirited younger brother and sisters resisted going to bed like any fortunate kids. But there was also the poignancy of the young husband and wife, doing everything correctly, as if they had the means to do so. 

“We must put the best possible construction on their actions,” reminded Mother. It is the line from Martin Luther’s small catechism, a commentary on the Ten Commandments, which often comes back to me. “We should fear and love God, so that we do not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, or defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on all that he does.” It is Luther’s explanation of the eighth commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

We have all experienced the power of language to knock our feelings about. Ideally, what others say is meant to point us in the right direction, show us their resonance with us or lack of it, and awaken us to what is real. From inside our potent selves, we can’t always tell. Children and young people especially wonder “what am I like? How am I? How does the world see me?” Honest answers, leaning toward the positive, are certainly the most helpful. 

Language creates relationships, groups and institutions, but can also dissolve them. While participating in the fragile hold the family I was babysitting for had on the community, my mother and I strengthened their ties to it. This seemed to be something they wanted.

Netflix’ “The Crown” takes as its great subject the relationship of individuals to a human institution, the British monarchy, which by general agreement has a value for the United Kingdom. When the popular princess Diana took it upon herself to discuss her feelings in a BBC interview, what she says to its detriment detonates like the kegs of gunpowder stored by Guy Fawkes and his compatriots in 1605 under the Houses of Parliament. Words have power. Happily, the British monarchy remains alive and well.

In E. O. Wilson’s discussion of altruism in On Human Nature, he says, “It is exquisitely human to make spiritual commitments that are absolute to the very moment they are broken. … There is in us a flawed capacity for a social contract, mammalian in its limitations, combined with a perpetually renewing, optimistic cynicism with which rational people can accomplish a great deal.” This precise description of people and their social constructs seems quite true.

In the United States, it seems to me we have entirely given up on the two commandments relating to speech, perhaps due to our attachment to free speech. In addition to the eighth commandment noted above, we pay no attention to the second: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Recognizing the power of words, we might want to ask ourselves the meaning of and the reason for these two commandments. In my private life, I enjoy freeing my speech as much as the next person, but I am more circumspect out in the world.

I confess that, as children, we often repeated to each other the immortal lines of the little rabbit Thumper in the Disney movie Bambi, “if you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.” This may not be especially helpful in terms of honesty, but it does err on the side of putting the best possible construction on all that we see around us. We were as savage little beasts as the next, but as grownups, we are all close friends. It is a matter of valuing both the individual and the family context, all of it expressed in language.