Thursday, December 14, 2006
'Sunshine' breaks through darkness
Liza Field
Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.
Recent columns
When things get really difficult, know there is someone else whose situation is more difficult, and be strong. Let the world try to knock you down, but never let it be said that you did not love. Love in the midst of hate, and you will see the miraculous results.
— Hilda Charlton, Lectures on George Washington Carver
Each December, watching the hard, cold mountain landscape greet the dawn with joy, I think of Sunshine and his birthday.
Richard Lee Baldwin, years ago, named himself "Sunshine." No word better describes this soft-spoken, gentle giant of a man -- a familiar figure walking through downtown Roanoke and up his beloved Mill Mountain -- who has spread more light than any soul I've ever met.
His friends, fellow participants in the Mountain Health Clubhouse (a program run by Blue Ridge Behavioral Health Care), and parishioners at St. John's Episcopal Church know him for his "many-many poems" about flowers, clouds and stars, rivers and mountains, the moon and "our Creator," which he hand-scrawls onto notebook paper, makes photocopies of, and mails to a growing readership.
"If you got them in front of the right person, they'd be published," Julie Quackenbush told me.
She met Richard while volunteering for the Community Living Club at St. John's. His kindness stood out to her, and they've now been friends for 26 years. "Snow Queen," as Richard renamed her for her love of skiing, now lives in Ohio, where she and her husband receive periodic visits and "many-many poems" from Richard.
"God just gives them to me," Richard said of the poems. "Writing them is like calling a spirit to life, and making some peace with the world."
Peace has come hard for Richard, whose sunny spirit began its life 62 years ago on Dec. 13.
As an abandoned toddler, he was sent to live in old Northwest Roanoke with a couple who spent his foster-care check on liquor, among other things. By age 3, Richard was standing nightly on a chair at the sink, washing the entire day's pile of dishes, having eaten little of their contents.
"They gave me steel wool because the food had crusted on the pans. It made my fingers bleed, and I would cry into the dirty water. I didn't know why I wasn't allowed to eat like the others. I would pray to God to help me make it."
Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times
Poet and hiker Richard "Sunshine" Baldwin
Poem about poems
"Writing Poems"
Writing poems is like calling my spirit to life and making some peace with the world.
When I write poetry it's like bringing life to the mountains — the flowers — the RIVERS — The butterflies and the birds.
To me writing poems is like doing the lord's work.
When I write poems, I want the people that read them to learn more about me and life in general.
I will remember the poems I write.
— R.L. Sunshine 2004
"How'd you know to pray?" I wondered.
"I don't know. God just somehow told me things would get better."
Richard's adoptive mother, whom he refers to only as "she," had six kids of her own, all of them living in a small shack with her boyfriend. Treated not as one of the children but a servant -- half-starved, beaten, overworked and acutely lonesome -- by age 5, Richard was plowing their field with a railroad tie she roped to his back.
"I was so hungry, I would fall down in the dirt."
She and the man would often go out drinking. "They'd come home late, falling-down drunk, and cook up a lot of food for themselves around 1 or 2 in the morning. Then they'd wake me up around 4 and make me wash all the dishes. I'd be so tired and hungry at school, I couldn't concentrate."
It didn't make for great learning conditions. "I'd smell the food cooking down in the cafeteria, knowing I didn't have no money to buy it. I was so hungry, I didn't know what to do, so I would just drink a whole lotta water!" he marveled, chuckling at the futility of this childish solution.
She soon made him earn his keep, despite the foster care payments he knew nothing of, from age 6 to 16.
"First I worked in the coal yard, putting coal in bags, for 2 cents a bag. I did 40 to 50 a day. It was hard because, skinny as I was, the bags weighed more than I did. I had to stack them up high inside the shed so they wouldn't get rained on. But I got it done!" he added with pride.
He later loaded groceries at the downtown A&P, shined shoes and ran a steam press at Sunshine Cleaners, set up pins at the Luck Avenue bowling alley, washed dishes at L&S Seafood, and put in 14-hour summer days pulling Jerry's Popsicle wagon, selling Clover Creamery wares.
"She would show up around 4 o'clock, wherever I was, and take my money. Then I'd get home after working all day, and there was no food left for me. They kept a lock on the refrigerator so I wouldn't get in there."
Hearing Richard describe his past, I often feel angered. Yet Richard tells the story without bitterness, only happy amazement that "God got me through all that."
"In spite of all that's happened, he gives out nothing but love and joy," Quackenbush remarked. "There's not an angry or mean bone in his body."
"Of course," she added, "People take advantage of that. They'll target him simply because he's black and has a disability people can sense -- a spirit of meekness. Yet he responds with dignity, so that's a lesson to me. I guess," she concluded regretfully, "I just would wish he didn't have to."
Liz Sullivan, another longtime friend and poem-reader, agreed. "After what he's been through, it's amazing he has not let anger rule his life," she observed. "Instead, he embraces God's creation, expressing awe of nature and love to all."
"I don't know why some people act mean," Richard told me. "I figure someone's treated them bad, so they treat others that way. And some people feel they must rush, rush, rush. ... I think God will help us understand better someday. The truth always comes out when the time is right."
Today, Richard feels exuberantly happy just living on a monthly Social Security disability check for $603, which covers his rent, electricity, telephone and water bills, bus fare and postage stamps. The one luxury he'd like, "if I ever get the money together," would be to legally shed the darkness of his adopted name "Baldwin" and officially become "Sunshine."
"I feel free and loved by God and the angels in heaven," he said. "I feel God has a purpose for me here. I just pray and pray that he'll show me what it is."
Quackenbush has glimpsed it. Richard's friendship taught her long ago not to judge people who appeared different from herself, she told me. Moreover, on one visit to Ohio, he unwittingly led her -- at a church youth event -- to her future husband, Rick Duff.
"Isn't that just like God?" she said. "I'd been praying all my life God would lead me to the right person, and he used Richard to do that."
Sullivan also has glimpsed Richard's vocation. "His utter devotion and faithfulness keep me in line spiritually." Through Sunshine, she added, people can "see God's goodness."
And that is what sunshine does, I realized. Especially now, in the shortest days of the year, sunshine reveals the beauty of even a winter landscape -- connecting, in those brief moments, heaven to earth.
