MOLI VIEW™

A month or so ago, I opened my front door to find an elderly neighbor standing on the porch. She is not my next-door neighbor or a directly across-the-street neighbor. In fact, she lives across the street and three houses down. Our neighborhood is zoned for single-family homes, but the 78-year-old widow from Jamaica rents out rooms to make ends meet. My introduction to her came when a car belonging to a tenant slammed into my car and destroyed the alignment. Our only other exchange was when another tenant discarded a refrigerator on the swale across from her house; I was one of several neighbors who let her know that this was not acceptable. We never learned each other's names.

Yet here she was, standing on my porch, holding an insulated nylon lunch bag full of financial documents and a few tissues that she had discarded after wiping a runny nose. After I invited her in, she dumped the contents of the lunch bag on the family room floor and sifted through the pile until she produced a letter from a bank about a "reverse" mortgage, a sort of loan offering the elderly steady monthly payments until they pass away and the bank takes the home. From what I could figure out, she needed to complete some repairs to finalize the deal. The repairs were done, she told me, but she had been in the hospital and had not been able to contact the bank. Could I help her write a letter?

Lately she was having trouble remembering things, she sighed. She could not see well. Her hands shake. Soon she was a regular fixture on my porch: Could I help her write a check to the insurance company? Here was a letter from the electric company threatening to cut her power (she had been in the hospital again and fallen behind on her bills), could I help? I learned her name, but she could not remember mine.

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