Rational acts of kindness
Exercising extraordinary generosity comes easy for these Southwest Floridians with huge hearts
BY ROGER WILLIAMS rwilliams@florida-weekly.com 
Remember the do-good advice that broke out like a national rash on bumper stickers in the '90s? It said, "Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty."

The thought is lovely, and every so often people actually do it: They'll hand a stranger $500, or pull into a toll booth and pay for the car behind them, or anonymously pick up the tab for the single mom in the grocery line in front of them.

But that's just random. All the more lovely, perhaps, are rational acts of kindness aimed simply at halting suffering, on some level. Here, during Christmas week of 2007, Florida Weekly celebrates such acts by individuals. Inside, you'll find three stories of seemingly ordinary men and women who live and give in Lee County.

None is likely ever to qualify as a wealthy philanthropist, and none define giving as sitting on the boards of charitable organizations, or handing out large checks. For some reason, however, that hasn't stopped them from exercising extraordinary generosity toward others, sometimes just one-on-one, or one-on-several.

And why? Why do these seemingly ordinary people give away their time, spend their money and even share their flesh and blood to help somebody else?

No one has ever managed to answer that question precisely. These folks appear to be in full, rational control of their faculties. They determine what good they can do, they calculate how best to accomplish that mission, and they do it.

On the surface, the reasons are often identifiable: the intense love of a mother for her dying son. A religious persuasion that suggests we move forward only by helping others. An epiphany born of illness or despair that points the way to generosity. Or the humane calculation that someday, we might find ourselves in the same boat as those we seek to aid.

Most of them can cite guiding lights, not just reasons: parents, a deity, other helpers, a teacher, a spouse, a code of ethics.

To a man and woman they insist that the act of giving (like the act of love) returns a deep personal pleasure, a physical warmth. It shows, too. They look like people who feel exhilarated, no matter what the state of their health.

That makes sense, given recent discoveries about neurohormones produced in the brains of generous people. An ABC news report last month cited an article in the "Public Library of Science," which described elevated levels of oxytocin in people who habitually help others. This brain-energizing hormone may spring from a hard-wired human imperative to help children, according to some medical researchers (oxytocin levels increase in mothers nursing infants, for example).

"When people give out of compassion or because they really care about someone, there is a biological system at its roots," said Stephanie Brown, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, who was quoted in the news report.

Not only that, but "people who behave more empathetically tend to be happier, live longer and are less sick," noted Paul Zak, the article's author, who heads the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate School in California. "Although it might be monetarily costly to be generous in the short run, there are long-term health benefits."

And there are spiritual benefits, perhaps. Each great religion reveres the giver, and each defines giving as one of the great virtues.

Professor Sidney Burris, director of the Fulbright College Honors Program and Religious Studies at the University of Arkansas, describes giving as part of "this common, widespread and powerful human conviction that suffering must be alleviated through institutional acts of compassion."

And institutions, after all, are nothing more than groupings of like-minded individuals.

Writing for the Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas, Burris cites a variety of wealthy helpers in the United States who created programs to stop suffering, including individuals who formed non-profits, or corporations that require employees to give a minimum percentage of their earnings to charity (at the international investment firm of Bear Stearns, it's 4 percent, he says). From those examples, he draws this conclusion: "Whenever we act on our natural sympathy toward those who are suffering we are manifesting Chenrezig (a Tibetan Buddhist deity of giving). It is not a Tibetan sympathy, nor an American sympathy, nor an Israeli sympathy, but a human one," Burris explains.

"The point is that we see something, and that we know it as compassion when we see it. And that we understand compassion as one of the paths toward generosity."

And generosity, according to the Tibetan Buddhists, is the First Perfection. That's probably true for Christian, Muslim and Jewish apologists, too, as well as for the many generous souls who live in Lee County, although their terms of definition may be different.

Here, then, you can meet three individuals or couples who have become their own institutions in the practice of the first perfection, both during Christmas, and long after it.

Maria Valenti-Sizemore

At 66 and standing 5-feet, 2-inches tall, Maria Valenti-Sizemore appears to be in perfect condition. Relaxing with her husband, Bruce, in the couple's immaculate home in Heritage Palms off Six Mile Cypress Parkway, she is trim, fashionably coiffed and sprightly, a swimmer and golfer. The 18 holes of her home course, verdant and flawless, beckon from beyond her window and swimming pool in the December morning sun.

A few weeks ago, all of that hung in the balance. She was saying goodbye to her son Earl, just before trying to save his life by giving him one of her kidneys. A mid-40s brittle diabetic with heart problems whose threetimes per-week dialysis wasn't getting the job done, Earl had flown in from Connecticut, where a wait for a matching kidney averaged five years.

The operation required that Maria's kidney be removed from her left side, through a 16-inch incision in her back. It was then transplanted through her ailing son's stomach area. Doctors and social workers helped prepare the family at Southwest Florida Regional Medical Center, warning them of the significant risks, especially in the case of Earl, who faced a more-than-minimum chance of dying during the operation.

"If you could have seen my son and the condition he was in, you'd understand why initially it broke my heart," says Maria. "I felt that if I had the means, then why would I not do it?"

Which is easy to say and hard to do. "Was I scared?" she asks. "Yes, for my son as well as myself. But they have a social worker there, and the staff explains the logistics to you in detail. None of it was easy, though."

Bruce was scared, too, he says - all the more so because as a health professional (he's an administrator with a homecare agency called Assisting Hands), he knew enough to recognize how truly dire the situation was, and could become for his wife. "It was a major decision: should his mother donate at her age? But fortunately she's in excellent shape," he says of Maria.

A month of tests ensued before the operation. And Maria, a Realtor for McWilliams Buckley & Associates, hustled around Lee County and discovered a turnkey home, fully furnished, into which Earl and his wife could move for the three-month recovery period.

And then it happened, on October 25. Both patients went into surgery, and both came out. They did well, although Maria says there was a lot of pain afterward, especially for him.

Now her son is recovering, with a kidney likely to give him 15 or 20 years of a new lease on life. And Maria is swinging a mean golf club, the new long scar on her lower back a testament of love, a true tattoo of the heart.

There have been other consequences of her generosity, as well. Maria's estranged daughter, a Californian in her mid 30s who could also have offered a compatible kidney, flew in for the operation - her mother had not seen her daughter in almost 20 years. And now Maria and Bruce, along with both her son and daughter, all are sharing this Christmas season together in Fort Myers.

Crowning the event is the presence of Maria's 88-year-old mother, Elvira Mc- Cormick, who had already whipped up the homemade pasta the family will enjoy by early last week, while insisting that if no one else had stepped up to the plate with a kidney, she would have.

"I'm an only child," Maria says, reflecting on what's happened. "I had two wonderful parents, and they were always very giving. It was an Italian Catholic background (Maria grew up in Connecticut), and that helped, but they always gave me what I needed, there was never a question. "Both my dad's and my mom's families were close. They were always giving, always caring."

And now that generous tradition lives on in her.

Jerry and Mickie Bramlett

It's Christmas at the Bramlett's, but then, in the best sense, it's always Christmas at the Bramlett's.

There are two ways you can tell: first, by the entire Christmas village that glows exuberantly on their front lawn at the corner of Santa Barbara Boulevard and 38th Terrace in Cape Coral, along with 300 (count'em, 300) nutcrackers Jerry collected from all over the world. And second, by the people in the backyard.

Often, two or three friends gather back there, sitting on the quiet lanai overlooking the canal where Jerry keeps a pontoon boat. Some are in wheelchairs, some aren't. Some can still talk, some can't.

Like Jerry, some of them have Parkinson's disease, too, and Jerry has met them through the variety of classes he joins - and in the case of tai chi, the Chinese exercise regimen designed to improve balance, through classes he actually teaches.

Thanks to effective medicines, wonderful treatment, and most of all, his undaunted wife, the former pipe fitter is in fine condition, holding the disease at bay, he says. Which for most people would be enough.

But he and Mickie, both 63, spend a great deal of their time taking care of others who suffer from the same malady. That began to happen after Jerry had spent a year giving up, figuring he had a death sentence.

"After I was diagnosed, I just quit," he recalls of a period about four years ago. "I sold my boat, I became worse, and I just sat here. But she made me keep going." He nods to Mickie, who smiles and tries to find a way not to take credit.

Jerry and Mickie have filled every corner of their home with the rustic cheer of American folk arts - Mickie Mouses, Christmas ornaments, too many other things to count. There's a picture of Elvis hanging proudly on the living room wall - he would have liked this, as any who have been to Graceland would understand.

But in his absence, Jerry and Mickie have created a true land of grace.

They ferry their friends here and there, sharing meals with them, watching over them, understanding them. They travel to Immokalee regularly, where they deliver food collected from the entire Parkinson's group to an older woman there who can no longer get out, and who lives on only about $620 a month, $400 of it required for rent, Mickie says. They take her out and about, and do whatever she needs done.

A hairstylist, Mickie provides free haircuts to spouses of Parkinson's patients, as well as to the patients themselves.

"We have a man coming today with an extreme form of Parkinson's," she notes. "We lay a plank to the pontoon boat, and my husband marches him there - he says, 'Left, Right, Left, Right.' They're both ex-Marines, and that's how he can get him to the boat. He loves sitting on that boat looking at the water."

Jerry describes that particular man as "brilliant." He was a Marine, then a Navy engineer. His mind is a perfect mind locked in a broken-down body. He can no longer speak, but he's curious about everything."

And he has Jerry to help him remain that way.

Both Mickie and Jerry grew up poor, she recalls. Part Indian, he came from a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, where he lived in foster homes, was beaten, and sometimes had to eat out of garbage cans. Her own mother was single. The couple met at 19, and made a warm life for themselves - 44 years of it, come May, complete with two children and "four wonderful grandchildren," Mickie says.

"Growing up was hard, but it didn't hurt me," Jerry recalls, looking back. "This helping somebody...I'm the one who benefits the most. And I have a wonderful wife."

Along with 300 nutcrackers, including two Marines in dress blues, each about 2 feet high, his favorites. On the step outside the front door lies a welcome mat embossed with the eagle, globe and anchor, the Marine Corps emblem.

Never was the Corp's motto better illustrated than in Jerry and Mickie Bramlett: Semper Fidelis. Always faithful.

Keeping a close eye on the needs of his friends, Jerry offers only a single observation: "I've been paid back triple," he announces. "And I'm going to keep helping as long as I can do it. I'll never stop."

Semper fi.

Burdie Baker

This story begins in 1959, the day Burdie Baker discovered that his mother and his seven sisters and brothers were trapped as sharecroppers on a white man's cotton farm in Georgia, about 20 miles north of the Florida line.

"They were payin' him just to live, and they were scared to leave - they didn't have a way even to walk out of there," the 68-year-old retired truck driver remembers. Now affectionately known as "the Mayor of Charleston Park," Burdie's stepfather had died when Burdie was a young teenager, so he'd quit school and begun to farm, himself, to help his mother. Then when he'd turned 18, he'd headed south to Florida.

Now he was going back. He borrowed a car from a girlfriend in Immokolee (a l957 or 1958 Ford Fairlane, he says with a pleased grin), and drove north, slipping onto the farmer's estate in the middle of the night, with the lights off.

In those days, a black man could get shot in Georgia for trying to do what Burdie intended - and the landowner in question claimed his mother owed him a lot of money for back rent, even though she worked everyday day for him.

Quietly and under cover of dark, Burdie moved every one of his family out of the shack where they lived. "I had to keep tellin' the young ones to sush," he recalls. "I thought that man was going to hear, and come with his dogs and his gun."

Then he packed them all into the Ford and headed south, putting the hammer down, as he calls it.

They never looked back. The Baker family moved straight to Charleston Park, where he bought the property he still maintains, now with his wife, Pansy.

That was the first time Burdie ever rescued somebody, and he's been doing it ever since, in large ways and small. For the neighbors around him, especially the old and incapable, Burdie does the shopping. He plants and grows vegetables or simply gives them some of what he grows in his own yard. He drives them to doctor's appointments or pharmacies to buy medicine, and he looks out for their interests.

He refuses to take money for any of it, though he is undeniably poor, himself.

"That's not my kind of give," he explains. "It ain't giving if it's for-hire, is it?"

In the case of the late Mrs. Douglas, who had no one and struggled just to keep up, Burdie simply stepped in and took over all the daily details for her. He cooked for her, maintained her garden, kept the keys to her house and car for her, and took her out for drives when she requested, and when he wasn't driving big rigs over-the-road.

That was a few years ago, but you can ask any longtime resident of the community about him, and they'll tell you similar stories.

A few weeks before Christmas, Burdie was feeding cows for a man who had once helped him. Burdie discovered that he'd taken ill, and volunteered to feed the herd every day.

"Well, he did me a good turn once, and I never forget that," Burdie explained. "It's pretty much true, that what goes around comes around."

In Charleston Park, he's waged a manyyear, unpaid effort to keep the community clean and safe - he picks up trash, mows the shoulders of roads by himself, and on occasion he's chased off drug dealers, usually carrying a shotgun.

Burdie refers to himself as "The Black Redneck, last of an endangered species," which means a few things to him. For one, he can grow and shoot his own food, and will - his freezer is full of wild hog, which he shares regularly with other folks, handing out hams or roasts or pork steaks, as he calls them, to neighbors and friends who might need them.

And it also means that he stays self sufficient, and self supportive, with Pansy.

He's always doing something for somebody, always," she says of her husband. "When we go out for a drive, if somebody's in need, he's going to help. Doesn't matter whether they're black or white."

Which is how his mother was, Burdie recalls. "She used to keep a big iron pot hanging in the yard with a stew in it and a little fire under it all the time, for migrants or anybody hungry," he says. "It was always full of greens and meat and whatnot, and you could get a big bowl of it when you had no money."

Mostly now, he says, Burdie tries to help the very old - people whose hands don't work, and who can't take the cap off a bottle, for instance, or any other small thing. "If I don't do it, who is going to?" he asks. "And I figure that someday, maybe somebody'll do the same for me, because I might be just as helpless."