Promises, Promises

Connie Kendall finally sits down to write the letter she has owed her best friend Marcy for weeks. Marcy still lives back in California, and Connie has plenty of catching up to do. Odyssey is a small town, she admits, the kind of place where a person might expect to run out of things to do, but she has been busy with schoolwork, and her mom has been on her case as usual. Things have been hard since her dad left. Connie's mother had hoped that moving would make everything better, and it hasn't. Her problems moved right along with her.

The rest of the news is cheerier. The Kendalls have gotten a dog, a beautiful golden Labrador retriever, and Connie has named her Kitty, mostly for the looks on people's faces when a big dog comes galloping up to "here, kitty, kitty." She has also gotten a job, at a place called Whit's End. It sounds odd until you know that the owner is a man named John Avery Whittaker, and that everybody calls him Whit.

Connie fills page after page with the people there. There is Tom Riley, a retired farmer who serves on the city council and coaches Little League and sometimes has trouble keeping up with a conversation. When Whit mentions spending the evening with a cup of cocoa and Robert Louis Stevenson, Tom spends several minutes worrying about how rude it will be to read in front of a guest. And there is Whit himself, an inventor, a businessman, and a writer who once owned an encyclopedia company, and who can prove to a room full of delighted kids that he isn't actually there, since he is not in Cincinnati or Buffalo or Detroit, and so he must be somewhere else. Whit knows a great many things, but what Connie likes best is that when she talks, he really listens. He also takes his faith seriously, which means that sooner or later in any conversation, the Bible is going to come up.

That is exactly what happens one afternoon while the radio carries grim news about hijackers and hostages. Connie says the world's troubles could be fixed if everyone would just sit down and talk, because people are basically good deep down. Whit calls it a noble speech and also one of the most ridiculous things he has ever heard. He never has to teach the children at Whit's End how to misbehave, he points out, only how to be good. Connie insists that people can change if they simply promise to and stick to it, so she writes one out on the spot: she will treat everyone she meets with kindness, gentleness, and patience from now on. Whit gently trims it down to patience alone, for four weeks, and promises not to provoke her or tell a soul. Then he tells her he doesn't think she will last one week. "Just call me Patience," Connie says, and snaps at the very next customer who asks for a vanilla shake.

The first days go beautifully. Connie stays calm, people notice, and she starts to think four weeks will be easy. Then comes the afternoon of the fourth day, in the Inventor's Corner, where Whit is reading riddles to the kids. He gives them the old one about meeting a man with seven wives on the road to St. Ives, and the kids multiply sacks by cats by kittens until they arrive at two thousand seven hundred fifty-two. Their arithmetic is perfect, Whit tells them, but their listening isn't. Only one person was going to St. Ives.

Then Whit hands the riddle book to Connie. Hers is about an electric train heading east at forty miles an hour with the wind blowing from the west at fifty, and which way the smoke is blowing. The kids guess east. They guess west. Connie tells them it's simple, then that they aren't concentrating, and finally she blurts out the answer herself: electric trains don't have smoke. She tells them she can't believe they are so dense, and she storms out.

Whit finds her afterward, and Connie is scraping the egg off her face. He was right again, she says, and she supposes it's in the Bible. It is, Whit says. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, which is why he only shakes his head when someone promises to become a better person. A promise like that treats the symptoms and ignores the disease. When Connie protests that the Lord helps those who help themselves, Whit tells her that line isn't in the Bible at all, and that he isn't asking her to do nothing. There is hope, plenty of it, but she has been looking for it in the wrong place. Real change starts deep inside, in the soul. Do not be conformed to the world, the Bible says, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. God has to change a person on the inside before anything shows on the outside.

Connie gets the point. It is pretty silly, she agrees, to make promises about things you can't control, like your own feelings. That's in the Bible too, Whit says. Figures, says Connie, and the two of them head back out to tend to their guests.

She saves the last of the paper for something she hasn't told Marcy yet. When she first came to Odyssey she couldn't wait to leave. She had her bus ticket and her bags were packed. But these people have made her curious. She doesn't agree with everything they believe and she hasn't got it all figured out, but they mean well, and she really thinks they care about her. That is a good feeling. So she signs off with love, and with a decision: she is going to stay on in Odyssey a while longer.