When Edith Keep's name was called in front of the thousands of people attending San Jose's State of the City event on Feb. 9, the 84-year-old woman didn't stand up. She was being honored with the Good Neighbor award for District 10. But, Keep said, "I'm not sure why. I feel like I do nothing."
Doing nothing for Keep means waking up at 4:30 a.m. to catch three buses from Almaden to reach the Santa Clara Children's Shelter on Union Avenue. It means pulling on a purple apron and a name badge that reads "Grandma Edith" before walking into Cowell Cottage, where 5- to 12-year-olds are placed.
She heard about the shelter while volunteering in the nursery of St. Francis Episcopal Church on Sundays. Three years ago she visited the shelter to see if she could help.
"It seemed crazy to me," she said. "All these counselors coming and going, and there were so many kids."
But one boy made it easy for her to stay.
"You aren't going to come back," he said.
"Why wouldn't I come back?" she asked.
"Because that's what people do," he said. "They don't come back."
He was waiting for her at the bus stop on her first day as Grandma Edith.
She's not a certified counselor. She doesn't know the details of the children's lives before they arrive at Cowell Cottage for a stay that could last hours, or months. And doing nothing actually is the most important part of her job.
"When are you going to hit me?" another boy asked.
"Why would I hit you?" she replied.
"How else are you going to make me behave?" he said.
The children aren't always at the shelter because their parents are on drugs or in jail. One 8-year-old boy was so polite, so smart, that Keep wondered how he had ended up in Cowell Cottage. His mother worked full time but didn't earn enough to cover rent. "She was sleeping in her car," Keep said.
"I'm bored," another child said.
"When I was a child my mother asked me if I'd read all the books in the library," she said. "And I told her no."
"Why didn't you tell her you had read them all?"
"Because that would have been a lie," she said.
"Well, that's what you have to do," he replied.
Sometimes she plays games or introduces the children to the small garden she tends outside the cottage, teaching them how to spell the names of pea plants and cherry tomatoes. "Today it was jigsaw puzzles. Other times I just watch the news," she said.
In return, she said, the children have taught her patience, and that many of them know cruelty beyond that experienced by most adults. For their brief stays she shows that adults can hug, not hit, and that there are safe places in the world with clean sheets and three meals a day.
One little girl haunts her. "She was supposed to be mute, but she talked to me. It was gibberish but I could tell what she meant. It takes one to know one. I could tell when she was happy. We'd color together," Keep said, smiling, but then looking thoughtful. "I remember her most because it seemed so hopeless."
Like some of her young charges, Keep's own story seems divided into "before" and "after." She married at 20, raised two sons—Fred R. and Gary C.—and taught school for two decades. Now the sons are grown, she's a great-grandma, and after 40 years of marriage, she's a divorced woman enjoying her solitude.
"I can go wherever I want, come home whenever I want," she said. Sometimes she takes a bus to Reno to play the slots.
Keep goes to sleep after watching David Letterman. Four hours later she wakes to get ready for the kids. "I see people doing nothing all day, just watching the calendar pages go by," she said. "I feel like I'm participating in something important. It makes life feel full, like you're living instead of existing." |
Photographs by Vicki Thompson 
