A record early-season snowfall just plopped down on top of the Montana Rockies. Here, sitting beside my fireplace in South Dakota, I’m bracing for what I suspect will be a short autumn and an intense winter.
It’s about time to pull my winter coat out of the closet. Made of quilted goose down, it’s supposed to keep a body warm down to -40F. (Yep, it gets that cold up here on the plains in wintertime, before the chill factor.)
To tell you the truth, this bright red coat warms me in winter not only because of what it’s made from, but also because of what it’s covered with: hundreds and hundreds of signatures, all scribbled in black or silver marker. Last time I counted, people had signed my coat in seven languages besides English, from Arabic to Dakota to Chinese. Most of the signers have been complete strangers to me. What they’ve had in common is a hunger to belong. A desire for community.
All this coat-signing began eight years ago. That August, as I anticipated the approach of winter, I told my husband that I refused any longer to wear a cheap coat that was no match for the bitter temperatures and fierce winds of the high plains. We’d moved to South Dakota from my home state of Ohio nearly a dozen years before, and I’d grown weary of always being bone-cold during the winter months. I was ready to shell out the money for a serious coat. I’d wear it until it was reduced to a rag.
I soon found the perfect coat online. Asked for my preferred color when ordering, I opted for cardinal red. Color, too, can help keep you warm in winter.
The coat arrived at my door only two days later. In the August heat, I stuffed the coat into my closet with a satisfied smile and promptly forgot about it.
Then, sometime during October, I stumbled onto “Everybody,” a poem by Marie Sheppard Williams. The narrator of the poem tells how she was standing at a bus stop one day, when a seemingly poor (perhaps even homeless) man asked her to sign his “dirty canvas coat.” The coat was covered in signatures. He held out his pen to her, saying, “I’m trying to get everybody.” The poem concludes:
I signed. On a
little space on a pocket.
Sometimes I remember:
I am one of everybody.
Reading this poem, I thought about my new coat, so warm, so red, waiting in my closet. Weeks passed. Autumn grew more chill; trees bared their branches. All the while, that poem kept nagging at me.
At our first snow of the season, I knew what I had to do. I pulled my coat from the closet and laid it down on the family table. With a big black marker I printed on its back in bold letters, “The `I AM PART OF EVERYBODY’ coat. Sign if you believe!”
I was grinning now. (Better watch out for poetry. It can make you do crazy things. It can be downright dangerous.)
After my giggling nine-year-old son, the first person to sign my coat was a woman friend, a little older than I am. She was half-laughing, half-chiding, as she inscribed her name. “What would your mother say,” she asked emphatically, “if she knew you were ruining a brand-new coat!”
As I told my friend then, and many others since, my coat only becomes more valuable, not less, with each signature added. People have signed my coat in check-out lines, on street corners, in airports, in restaurants, in classrooms and auditoriums where I’ve had the privilege to speak. An introvert by nature, I usually don’t invite them to sign. I wait for them to ask. When they do, I pull a marker from my deep red pocket and hand it to them with a smile.
Once, on a flight to Washington, DC, I was sitting beside a little girl from China. When she signed my coat, she expressed concern that someday it might be too crowded for any more signatures. With a laugh I flipped the coat over to reveal its bright red lining. It hadn’t yet been touched. Her eyes grew wide and bright. Through an interpreter, I said, “Don’t worry! We can fit the whole world on this coat!” I truly believe we can make enough room for everybody.
I feel like I’m carrying the world on my back, in a good way. My hope is that everybody who signs my coat will feel, at least for one happy moment, that they belong. That their life is bigger than themselves. That they don’t have to be all alone, out in the cold.
And you know, I’m not alone, wearing my red coat. There’s a red-coat revolution underway. Through efforts small and large, people all around us are striving to build a society where everyone can feel that they’re part of everybody. Where everyone knows that what is good for them is bound up with what is good for others.
Can’t you see the red coats all around, inviting you to join them? Or maybe you yourself have already put one on.
