Neighborhood Ramp Miracle
September 10, 2022 – Athens, Georgia, USA
Gator Cobb was not a good person. As folks got to know him, they liked him less. Usually after complaining about another person, Athens’ residents felt obliged to add a phrase like, “But he’s a good ol’ boy at heart.” No one felt obliged when it came to Gator.
Gator was not his given name. His long-suffering mother gave him the name Gary. He decided by age six that he identified with a nasty reptile more than he did with “Gary”. He also liked being contrary. While everyone else in Athens rooted for the Georgia Bulldogs, Gator swore his allegiance to the University of Florida. He hung a flag with Florida’s Gator mascot from the porch of his mom’s little brick house. He added Gator stickers on his motorcycle and orange and blue Gator tattoos to his arms.
Those living closest to Gator suffered the most. He modified his motorcycle so that it sounded like a sick helicopter. In the middle of the night, he sat in his driveway revving the engine when he was not racing it up and down the block. He set speakers near his bedroom window and blasted music toward the surrounding houses. From the same window, he shot neighborhood pets with his pellet gun.
Gator poisoned trees, taught little kids to swear, and knocked over garbage cans. Random acts of vandalism and missing packages were blamed on Gator with 99% accuracy. Move-ins to the closely packed neighborhood asked the same question: “Is there something wrong with him?”
The typical response was, “He’s just obnoxious.”
“What’s his mother like?”
“She’s perfectly normal. A nice lady.”
“Was he dropped on his head as a baby? Was he teased in school?” the baffled move-ins continued to ask.
The preacher at the end of the street tried to look on the bright side of things. He saw the good in everyone. When it came to Gator, the preacher said, “Some people are put on the earth as unifiers. He seems to be the one thing the whole neighborhood can agree on.”
The preacher and everyone else on the street were not sure how to react when they heard the news about Gator and a motorcycle accident. Surely no one wanted him seriously hurt, but many voices concluded, “He was probably doing something stupid. Most likely, he deserved it.”
After a few days, neighbors remembered not to be too judgmental. The majority reaction mellowed to something more like, “What a tragedy for someone so young. His poor mother.”
While Gator was in the hospital, folks stopped by his house with sympathy offerings of food. They listened to Gator’s mom cry about how Gator would be paralyzed.
“The doctors say he’ll never walk again. He’s so young. How will he get by? If he’s in a wheelchair, how will he ever get into the house?”
One of the first to hear the paralysis diagnosis was Stew Parkinson. He lived right next door, and other than his mother, had probably endured the most abuse from Gator. But Stew had a birth defect. The cells in his brain dedicated to grudges had never fully developed. He wanted to do something for his neighbor and the concrete steps in front of the porch came immediately to mind.
Stew’s charity may have been helped along by the realization that every time Gator’s wheelchair needed hoisting up those steps, Stew would get a call. He imagined a sloping ramp instead of stairs. The ramp would start at the edge of the driveway, cut through the lawn, and end right at porch level. The slope would be so gradual, Gator could get himself from bottom to top.
“What would you think about a ramp?” Stew asked Gator’s mom. “How about if I got people around to help build it and you didn’t have to worry about a thing?”
“Thank you. It sounds lovely,” Gator’s mom answered through her tears.
Stew went to work. His first stop was a city office. He learned of a program dedicated to building projects for the disabled. If Stew provided volunteer laborers, the city would provide raw materials.
Stew’s next stops were to local churches to explain how a single mother needed help after a tragedy. When Stew told the same story up and down his own street, it was a tougher sell. “Think of his mother and not about Gator,” Stew told his neighbors.
Stew also leaned on stimulating Bible messages, quoting liberally from the Sermon on the Mount. “You know it’s easy to help those you like. A lot tougher to help someone you don’t, but it means more. That’s Jesus talkin’, not me.” By the time the first scheduled workday came around, Stew had the thirty volunteers he needed.
The city’s dump truck left a pile of topsoil and gravel in Gator’s driveway. With shovels and wheelbarrows, the volunteers moved dirt and rock around in preparation for a layer of cement. The base layer covered up the porch steps, two feet above the ground, and then curved across the lawn. Stew used a tape measure to ensure the slope met wheelchair standards, dropping one inch for every foot of ramp length.
After the dirt and rock were smoothed with a rake, one neighbor used a gas-powered compactor to thump the ground hard and flat. It was hot and exhausting work. The teens and adults handling the shovels and wheelbarrows sweated out the cups of ice water delivered by children. By the end of the first Saturday, the beautiful dirt ramp was in place and boards secured along its edges to hold in the future cement. The volunteer team congratulated themselves and took turns verifying Stew’s measurements.
The second Saturday was dedicated to mixing and pouring cement. The gray rock soup was poured between the wood rails and then smoothed out. Aching backs were ignored until the last foot of the ramp was in place. As the cement hardened, every volunteer etched their initials near the spot where the ramp met the driveway. People took pictures and talked about how amazing it felt to build something so useful.
The ramp transformed from “Gator’s ramp” to “our ramp”. Somewhere in the transition, the memories of Gator also changed. Neighbors told stories of him as a little boy. He had wandered through mud puddles and chased away aggravating opossums. He was a bit of a scoundrel, but in the end his heart was in the right place. Folks were eager to see the look on Gator’s face when he realized they had helped him.
Meanwhile, at the hospital, Gator’s prognosis had changed dramatically. His mom was called for a private meeting with his doctor. She arrived expecting the worst.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like I was wrong,” the doctor said in a disappointed voice.
“You said he would live and be in a wheelchair,” Gator’s mother cried.
“Oh, he’ll live. It’s the wheelchair part I want to talk to you about. I must have missed something, or a miracle happened. I might have jumped the gun after my first look. He might not be paralyzed after all.”
“Oh, Doctor, isn’t that great news?”
“I hate to be so far off base like that. Maybe the X-rays got mixed up.”
“Or it could be a miracle. Maybe my Gator’s healed himself.”
“Anything’s possible. I’d like to move him out of the hospital and into physical therapy.”
As Gator’s mother watched, her son moved from lying in a bed to painfully standing. She kept the progress to herself. If she was witnessing a miracle, she did not want to undo it by expecting too much. She would be content with whatever progress her son made.
Gator’s mom let Stew know which afternoon she would finally be able to drive Gator home. Stew spread the announcement through the neighborhood and all the ramp builders gathered to see their creation put to good use.
Before Gator’s mom pulled up, Stew called to the crowd, “When they arrive and he gets out of the car and into his wheelchair, let’s all clap to encourage him.”
A few minutes later, a minivan rolled into the driveway with Gator in the passenger seat. His face looked thinner and his hair longer. He barely seemed to notice the crowd. The minivan stopped so that his door was aligned to the end of the cement ramp.
Instead of waiting for his mom to retrieve a wheelchair, Gator opened his own door. A cane emerged and then Gator slowly rose to his feet. He moved forward with a limp but with steady progress.
No one clapped. A little girl in the crowd called out in a disappointed voice, “I thought he was going to be in a wheelchair.”
Stew looked around at the stunned neighbors. He patted his hands together and soon everyone else joined him in confused, lukewarm applause.
“Good for you!” shouted Stew.
“Welcome back! It’s a miracle!” shouted someone else.
Gator turned back like he had noticed his neighbors for the first time. “What do you know? Who invited y’all anyway? And who put this stupid ramp in our yard?”
The clapping stopped and the crowd quickly melted away. The preacher from down the street looked on the bright side again and said, “That Gator did it again. He keeps finding new ways to bring us together when we least expect it.”
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