The Waitress Who Split Her Tips With a Homeless Man in 2011 Just Got a Call From His Attorney

Kevin flew in from Phoenix on Friday.
I picked him up at the Waterloo airport and I did not tell him anything until we were sitting at my kitchen table with the folder between us and coffee getting cold in his hand.
I let him read the letter.
He read it slowly.
When he got to the part about the tuition, his hand started shaking and he set the coffee down.
When he got to the end, he put his head down on the table and cried in a way I had not seen him cry since he was nine years old.
“Mom,” he said, when he could talk.
“Mom, do you know what you did.”

“I brought a man oatmeal, Kevin.”

“You saved his life.”

“He saved mine right back. Twice, apparently.”

Kevin looked up at me and his eyes were red.
“Three times, Mom. He paid for my school. I would have had to drop out. I know I would have. You were three months behind, you couldn’t have kept doing it.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way.
I hadn’t let myself think about it that way for thirteen years.
—

I said yes to the board.
I said yes to the six million too, though I told Douglas Wright I wanted to give two million of it back to the foundation.
He said Harold had predicted I would try that and had left instructions that I was allowed to give back exactly one million and not a penny more.
“He said, and I quote, that you were bullheaded and would try to reduce it and I was to let you feel like you’d won something.”

I laughed for the first time in a week.
I gave the one million back.
I kept the five.
I retired from the hospital laundry on a Wednesday in early December.
My coworkers threw me a party in the break room with a sheet cake from Hy-Vee and a card everybody signed.
I did not tell them about the money.
I told them my son wanted me closer to Phoenix and I was going to travel a little.
I have not decided yet whether to move.
I do not think I will.
Cedar Falls is where Ray is buried and where Harold sat on the bench and where I raised my son.
I have knees to fix, as Harold said, but I do not know that I want to leave.
—

The first board meeting of the Blue Plate Fund was in January in the same glass building in Des Moines where I had first met Douglas Wright.
There were nine other board members.
Two of them were Harold’s cousins from Kettering Industries.
Three were foundation professionals in suits.
One was a doctor from the Mayo Clinic.
One was a woman who ran a shelter in Omaha.
Two were lawyers.
Douglas introduced me as the founder’s oldest friend and the new chair of the board.
Everybody clapped politely.
I could tell most of them did not know why I was there.
One of the cousins, a woman named Patricia, looked at my JCPenney blazer and looked away.
I let the meeting go on for about twenty minutes.
They talked about grant distributions and quarterly returns and a partnership with a hospital system in Lincoln.
It was all very professional.
Then Douglas turned to me and said, “Mrs. Delaney, is there anything you would like to add?”

I had thought about this for weeks.
I had written a speech and thrown it away.
I had written another one and thrown that one away too.
In the end I decided to just say what was true.
—

“My name is Margaret Delaney,” I said.
“I worked at a diner in Cedar Falls for eleven years. In the fall of 2011 I met Harold Kettering. He was sitting on a bench outside the diner in a green army jacket. I did not know who he was. I thought he was homeless because he was homeless. I brought him oatmeal because it was cold.”

The room got very quiet.
Patricia was looking at me now.
“I gave him twenty dollars of my tips on Fridays. I could not afford it. I did it anyway. I did not do it because I am a good person. I did it because he was cold and I had a coat and it seemed obvious.”

I looked around the table.
“Harold left a letter for me. In the letter he wrote that I taught him what money is for. He said money is for oatmeal. He said it is for keeping people warm. He said it is for handing to somebody who needs it more than you do without asking them to explain themselves.”

I took a breath.
“I understand that this foundation gives cash grants with no application. I understand that is unusual. I want to tell you that it is not unusual enough. I want to tell you that every single person in this room, including me now, has more money than we need. And that every single person the foundation has ever helped had less money than they needed. And that the distance between those two facts is the only thing this foundation exists to close.”

I looked at Patricia.
She did not look away this time.
“I would like to propose that we double the grant sizes this year and that we stop asking for referrals from anybody. If somebody writes us a letter and says they are cold, we send them money. That is the entire process. If we run out of money we ask for more. Harold left thirty-two million dollars. That is a lot of oatmeal.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then the woman from the Omaha shelter, whose name was Denise, started clapping.
And then Douglas.
And then, slowly, everyone else.
Patricia was the last one.
But she did clap, eventually.
And after the meeting she came up to me and said, quietly, that her mother had raised her on food stamps in the seventies and she had not thought about it in a long time.
“Think about it now,” I told her.
—

I keep the green army jacket in my hall closet.
I take it out sometimes and I put my hand on the sleeve and I think about the man on the bench.
I think about how close he came.
I think about how close I came, too, though I did not know it.
Ray’s stroke was three months away.
Kevin’s tuition was due.
The mortgage was three months behind.
If I had lost that job at the Blue Plate, I do not know what would have happened to us.
Harold did not save us because I saved him.
That is too neat and life is not that neat.
But he did save us.
And I did save him.
And we did not know we were saving each other.
Neither of us knew.
That is the part I think about the most, now.
That neither of us knew.
I think there are more of us out there than anybody realizes.
People sitting on benches and people bringing oatmeal and neither one of them knowing what the other one is carrying.
I think this is what Harold wanted me to say to the board and I think it is what he wanted me to spend the rest of my life saying to anybody who will listen.
So I am saying it.
It is cold out there.
And most of us have a coat.
And that is the entire thing.
That is the whole business.
Bring the oatmeal.