Heartwarming story for a cold day

As a teenager my friends and I on summer days – when opting out of going to Revere Beach – would ride the Forest Hills-Everett Line (now known as the Orange Line) and transfer at State to the Bowdoin-Wonderland Line (now the Blue Line) to go to Orient Heights Beach and try to blend in with the locals. Not much wave action at Orient Heights and no place to buy an ice cream, but a beach is a beach, even though huge airplanes would not be that far away.

After the snowstorm about three weeks ago and for many previous ones over the decades, I’ve been blessed with neighbors who reach out to me and, among other things, let me park in their driveways for a spell. But the Jeffries Point story is much more than something like this.

It seems that an East Boston man – fed up with the vandalism happening to cars parked on the street in spaces another person had cleared out – on his own shoveled out a dozen or so spaces on the street on which his neighbors could park. The 31-year-old guy, now a software engineer but originally from a distant suburb, could not stomach to witness the tire-slashings and other forms of vandalism when residents dared park in a space shoveled out by someone else. Consequently, he spent about 48 hours cleaning up the nearby street, long after the city declared a snow emergency – without a snowplow attached to a pick-up truck, without a front-end loader, and without a Bobcat. Moreover, he didn’t even have a snowblower to show off: he did it the old-fashioned way – with a shovel.

We are used to hearing from the pulpit the Eight Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”

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Perhaps there would have been a ninth beatitude in the gospel were it written in modern times and in a different climate: “Blessed are those who shovel out spaces for their car-owning neighbors, for their reward will be great in the next life.”