Some people make an impact on you that lasts a lifetime. For me, a company did that. This post isn’t about marketing, PR, social media, brand loyalty or reputation building. What I’m about to share is deeply personal – something I rarely discuss without breaking down and crying.
When I was 19 years old, I had been married for a year, had a one-year old daughter and was pregnant with my second child. My marriage was a mistake from the beginning, marrying a man I barely knew who happened to be the only one showing me attention at a time I desperately needed someone. I met him two months after my mother had died and only weeks after I had dropped out of college, moved back home and found my boyfriend at the time had been cheating on me with multiple girls. Rebound is an understatement. I was a lost little girl with no home and no support system.
The marriage was rocky from the beginning. We were young, immature and incompatible. Bad went to worse as infidelity and abuse began, escalating at an alarming rate. (The climax of that escalation is the subject of My Season in the Darkness of Domestic Violence.) It was early 1988 when I first left my (then) husband. My baby was almost five months old, and I was pregnant with her younger sister as my husband’s physical abuse triggered me to seek refuge. Though I lived 30 minutes from the home I had grown up in, I didn’t run there.
It was complicated. It didn’t feel like home anymore with my mother gone, and I didn’t think I was welcome. My dad didn’t know what to do with his life, much less how to help me. He had done his own grieving and quickly shifted his focus from grieving to moving forward with his life. (This was how he coped.) At this time, my dad was a newlywed, dealing with his own transitions with his wife and their new life together with my two younger brothers in the home. I knew it would be placing too much strain on his young marriage to ask to go there. So I called my Aunt Bobbie – a woman who exudes love, warmth and welcome to all who cross her path. People like this always feel like home. And Aunt Bobbie felt like home when I had no home.
She lived in Virginia; I lived in California. I was broke with no transportation, so my friend took me to the Amtrak station and purchased my ticket – a seat in coach. After spending all night on the train with an infant on my lap, I was exhausted. I had a couple more days left, and I knew I wouldn’t make it sitting in that seat for two more nights with my daughter on my lap. On a stop the morning after my first night on the train, I inquired about upgrading from a seat to a room. The price was something in the $400’s. Though I knew I had no way to pay for it, I also knew I couldn’t make the rest of the trip without being able to sleep and lay my baby down. So I decided to do something I never in my privileged upbringing thought I would do…I wrote a bad check. I wrote a check knowing full well I didn’t have the money to cover it. But I was desperate. For me, this was one of those “desperate times call for desperate measures” moments.
My father didn’t know I had left California. I called him from Virginia telling him what was going on and that I was at Aunt Bobbie’s. His words to me were, “Oh good. That’s the best place you can be.” Though I agreed, there was a sting in those words – a reminder that I really didn’t have a home with him anymore. When my mom died, so did my home. After he said those words to me, I knew it wasn’t just my sense that I might be a disruption to his life — it was his feeling as well. I knew I was in the best place I could be with Aunt Bobbie, but it didn’t hurt any less to be reminded that I had no home.
After repentant, remorseful begging from my (then) husband, I left my Aunt Bobbie and returned to California. What I went back to was a recurring cycle of a mentally and physically abusive relationship (abuse, apology, abuse, apology, abuse, apology).
Enter Amtrak
Not long after returning from Virginia, I received the notice from Amtrak for the bounced check. Penniless, in a turbulently destructive relationship back in California with my abuser, caring for an infant, pregnant with another baby, utterly alone with no friends or family for a support structure, I sat down and wrote a letter to Amtrak.
I don’t remember the details of all that I wrote – I just know I poured my heart out. You’d have thought I was writing my mom the way I shared my heart in that letter to Amtrak. In retrospect, I think writing that letter was my only outlet to tell someone about my life, to express how lost and alone I was. I was drowning, just trying to survive. That letter to Amtrak was my distress call to the universe, begging for help as I was sinking. Throughout the letter, I apologized repeatedly, promising to pay them back as fast as I could.
Amtrak wrote me back. They told me I could pay them back in monthly installments of whatever amount I could afford. Though I don’t remember the details of what else was in that letter, I know that what I received from it was kindness, care and compassion. Amtrak became a human presence in my life by showing me compassion when I needed it most. It’s 20 years later, and I still remember “Amtrak Revenue Accounting” – the first line of the address to which I faithfully sent $25 per month until they were paid in full. With each payment I made, I felt a profound sense of gratitude for Amtrak.
To this day, I still feel an abiding affection for Amtrak. The truth is, my letter to Amtrak wasn’t a business letter. It was a human being crying out for help. And when I was suffocating in distress and it seemed no one else in the world was there for me, Amtrak was. Their beneficence towards me in my time of trauma, turmoil and isolation translated into me feeling loved. This is what makes me cry. To think of the lost girl so desperate for love that she found it in the compassion of a corporation makes me well up. At that time in my life I felt more loved by Amtrak than any other entity on earth. It’s so sad to say it, but it’s true.
Amtrak – the corporation – showed compassion to a woman hanging by a thread. Now that woman is writing about it 20 years later, with tears in her eyes. That’s a lasting impact.
Photo credits: helppo , HungryHungry
