1978 and 2007, Boston, Massachusetts

By Sabrina Paradis

“Get yourself a Patrick Preston.”

I imagine that is what she would have said to me at this point in my life, if we had ever gotten to that point where women become friends with their mothers as adults. My mother died when I was still a teenager, long before she could impart much knowledge beyond, “Get your hair out of your face” and “That is not an appropriate outfit for school.”

To this day, I wonder about my mother and Patrick Preston, and why she did it. Patrick was our newspaper boy in the late 1970s. He delivered The Boston Globe on his Beacon Hill route, not on a charming 10-speed, but rather by jumping on and off the back of a grimy delivery truck.

I’ll never know for sure how they met or struck up a friendship, but they did. And somehow, he managed to make his rounds and make a visit each morning.

I picture them talking on those gray New England mornings at 5 a.m. over cups of Swiss Miss, my mother in a velour, floor length housecoat, so popular in the 70s, practical and surprisingly elegant.

Patrick’s story unfolded to my mother and trickled down to me over the next several months. He was from a large Catholic family, not unusual for Boston, and did his paper route before school. But according to my mother, Patrick was unusual.

Patrick was a hard worker and a nice boy with a plan. Patrick told my mother that he was using his route money to put himself through private school. He had worked out a weekly payment plan with a prep school in Cambridge. He wanted to go to a good private school so he could someday get a scholarship to college. His parents hadn’t had the money to send him themselves, so he had found a way to pay for it on his own.

I think my mother truly admired Patrick for this, though she rarely expressed admiration for anyone or, for that matter acted on it.

One day, my mother, who did not drive, put on her mink over her velour housecoat and took a cab over to Patrick’s school and asked to speak to the headmaster. She stated simply that Patrick Preston was her paperboy and that her paper had been delivered every day, rain or shine, since he had been on his route. And then she paid his entire tuition for the rest of the year.

Private-school tuitions were probably not astronomical, as they are today, and I imagine that the actual amount was nominal, probably a few hundred dollars, well within her means for a Beacon Hill lady. But my mother was not the philanthropic type. Sure, she gave old clothes to The Salvation Army and attended the standard neighborhood charity balls, but personalized acts of kindness were not usually her style.

Patrick’s thank-you note came with our paper the next morning and was written on plain notebook paper in loopy script. In my privileged 8-year-old naiveté, I remember thinking, “The least he could have done was to buy some proper stationery to write a note.”

His note described his awe and gratitude in poignant detail, even describing his panic when he was first called into the headmaster’s office regarding his payment plan. He was afraid that he was behind or that tuition had increased.

After I read the note, which was the topic of our breakfast table conversation for a few days that winter, I remember asking my mother, “Why? Why did you do this? We don’t even know Patrick Preston.”

And all she said was, “Because I can. Sometimes it’s nice just to be nice.”

I dropped the subject then, because at the time, I could not possibly imagine what she meant.

My mother kept Patrick’s thank-you note for years, and I am sad to say it is now lost among her effects, somewhere in my sister’s attic. More likely, my sister has even thrown it away, completely forgetting whom Patrick was.

And who was he, really? Technically, he was just our paperboy decades ago, but to me he symbolizes the best advice I ever got from my mother: That you never know for whom in your life you will make a difference. And how they will come into your life. And that it’s a great thing to meet someone who is working toward their dreams, greater still to give them something, anything, that gets them just a little closer to those goals, and to do so just because you can.

Of course, my mother never said a word of this advice, and she never even got the chance to tell me to get my own Patrick. That’s the thing about a mother’s good advice; it often comes unannounced and is rarely well-labeled.

Several years ago, I was on a train and reluctantly gave up the seat next to me to a baggy-jeaned young man who was dressed like a rap star and stood at a husky 6-foot-3.

I usually try to avoid any polite conversation during public travel and prefer to pretend that my seatmate is nonexistent. But this fellow managed to strike up a conversation with me when he noticed a company logo on my luggage. He politely asked questions about my work and my thoughts on the corporate world, and we shared a soda and chips from the café car.

He had gotten a scholarship to college and was returning to his dismal hometown to recruit for his bucolic New England school because, he said, “Kids from my neighborhood don’t even know places like my college exist.”

I gave him my business card that I usually reserved for fishbowls at local restaurants, and we e-mailed for the next few months. I sent him my advice on getting a job and an apartment, and on being a “grown-up” in general.

When he graduated, I sent him gift certificate to Kenneth Cole for some new work clothes. When I moved out of an apartment the next summer, I had my husband lug our old TV outside while we waited for my “train friend” to pick it up for his first apartment.

Under the weight of the TV, my husband asked, “Why would you do this for a kid you barely know?”

I answered without thinking, “Because I can.”

A mother’s advice is sneaky that way too. I had no idea that I had taken it until just that moment. Sometimes it’s nice just to be nice.

Sabrina Paradis is a freelance writer whose work has also appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Salon, and Babble. She splits her time between New York and Boston.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, August 24th, 2007 | Email This Post

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