It was the day before Christmas Eve, and recent homemakers Rob and Dianne Parsons were surprised with a knock on the door. Opening it, Rob looked upon a rather strange sight.
A man stood there with a wheeled garbage bin containing his possessions, and a frozen chicken under his left arm. Rob didn’t know it at the time, but he was in the middle of an interaction that wouldn’t just change his life forever, but his community too.
Rob vaguely recognized the man as Ronnie Lockwood, someone whom he’d been told he had to be kind and considerate towards, as he was “a bit different.”
“I said ‘Ronnie, what’s with the chicken?’ He said ‘somebody gave it to me for Christmas’. And then I said two words that changed all of our lives,” Mr. Parsons told the BBC. “And I’m not exactly sure why I said them. I said ‘come in.'”
Lockwood was not a native of the Welsh capital of Cardiff as Parsons was. He had been sent there from 200 miles away at 15-years-old to attend a school for the “subnormal” where he had no friends, no teachers who knew him, and no social worker. The autistic youth then floundered between homelessness and odd jobs, and was already 30 by the time he knocked on Parsons’ door.
That outburst of Christmas empathy did indeed change the family’s life forever, as Ronnie Lockwood became, as the British say, part of the furniture, living there a full 45 years as a member of the family before dying from a stroke aged 75.
Only once in 45 years did Rob and Dianne ever consider asking him to leave, and as strange as their arrangement appeared to others, it never bothered them. Recounting their late and dearest friend to the BBC, the parents of 2 and grandparents of 5 described him as “kind, amazing,” and a “remarkable” help with kids.
“He had a great heart Ronnie. He was kind, he was frustrating,” said Dianne. “Sometimes I was his mother, sometimes I was his social worker and sometimes I was his carer.”
“Somebody said to [our children] one day, ‘how did you cope with Ronnie when your friends came to the house’ and they said ‘well, we don’t think about it really, it’s just Ronnie.'”
On that first Christmas, Parsons had asked his friends and family to get some simple presents for their visitor, who was in turn overwhelmed with emotion from the kindness shown to him by the strangers. And it was a time of the year he always looked forward to, during which he volunteered often at the nearest church, and bought for Rob and Dianne the same Marks and Spencer gift card every year with as much delight in watching them open it as during the last.
It wasn’t long after Lockwood arrived that the Parsons, who were then without children, sought advice as to what they might be able to do to help the man get a leg up. They were advised by a social worker that in order to get a job, a worker must have an address.
Mr. Parsons noted the irony in that statement: that you have to have a job to afford an address—a catch 22 that many homeless people never escape from. They eventually got Lockwood a job as a street cleaner, and bought him his first new set of clothes since he was a teenager.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Woman Spontaneously Offers Homeless Man a Job on Her Farm Proving the Power of Kindness
Every morning, Mr. Parsons, a lawyer by profession, would leave the house an hour early so as to be able to take Lockwood to his job, an arrangement that lasted for years.
Lockwood was described as being an irreplaceable help when their children were born, and meticulous in his attention to volunteer work at the local food bank and parish church. After his death, a new $2 million wellbeing center that included facilities for the unhoused and homeless attached to Glenwood Church in Cardiff was named Lockwood House, after Ronnie, who left it some $52,000 in his will.
The story is a remainder of how much a simple act of kindness can do to change the world, whether your own, those of your family, or your community.
SHARE This Heartwarming Story Of A Family Making Room For A Kind Soul…