In Kind

In KIND: you react to something that someone has done to you by doing the same thing to them

In KINDNESS:  with steadfast love, faithfulness, loyalty, graciousness, goodness

 Greetings Dear Ones!

A woman comes into my shop to pick up a pair of pants I have altered for her.  She sees another pair I have just completed, hanging next to hers.  She reads the name.

“I know her!” she says brightly. “That’s my neighbor. I’ll pay for hers too and bring them to her.”

“Really?” I ask. “I haven’t even called her yet.  I just finished them.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll drop them off.” Briskly, she slaps enough cash on the table for both and then grabs them and leaves, humming a happy tune.

After she goes, I panic.

“What if they aren’t friends?” says a fearful voice in the back of my head. “What if they are arch enemies who lure slugs to each others’ lettuce patches in summertime?  What if they really ARE friends but she forgets to give them to her and then leaves town for a month and the other woman gets mad at you and says ‘how could you give someone my pants without checking with me?’ What if they really don’t know each other at all? What if she lied and just got a new pair of nice jeans for the price of a hem?”

“Who are you?” I ask the voice, “and why are you in my head?”

“I’m friends with your inner Insurance Agent who is friends with your inner Lawyer.  We are here to erode your belief in simple human Kindness.”

“Ugh! I thought so… You fellas are really crummy.”

“You can’t be too careful when you live in a litigious society where it’s not about the law, it’s about the lawsuit—where a single bad review will sink the ship of a small business owner,” they say smugly.

“You are really BAD guys posing as good guys. You are the thieves of Joy. We need Joy right now.  We need these random acts of kindness.   Kindness is a wonderful Mender.  Kindness is our key to survival.”

It’s that ice-smashing time of year where the constant battle with Nature to stop hell and buckets from freezing over leaves us feeling brutalized, exhausted, wary.  We are tired.  We need Kindness.  And Tea, and Soup, and warm things like smiles and sweet people who pay for well-fitting pants.  We don’t need internal lawyers flinging poo at our happy thoughts.

Kindness isn’t always easy. Twice a day, before and after working at my shop, I slam the buckets until they dislodge their frozen Frisbees then refill them.  I climb the ladder to the loft, toss hay to the hungry cattle below, and pay a visit to the two barn cats, who now have a feline shanty town of cardboard boxes, blanketed dens, and nests in a large hay fort where they can hide.  I’ve used up so many bales of hay to shield them I’ve had to purchase more hay rather than let the sheep eat a supporting wall.  I feel their ears and paws--even at these single-digit temperatures, the exothermic felines are warm.

“Could you please come live in the house?” I ask. “At least visit and see how toasty it is?”

“No,” they say. “We want to be right here.”  Putting an ungloved hand into an occupied box is an invitation to get it swatted with a lightly clawed paw.

“Don’t ask again,” hisses Miss Kitty.

Almost daily I marvel at the miracle that is homeostasis and how Life can thrive in such harsh conditions.  It makes me think that even I could survive another trip across the George Washington Bridge with nothing more than a pick-up truck, some fiddle sets on Spotify at volume 11, and some adult nappies or perhaps a large, empty yoghurt container with a trustworthy lid.

After visiting my dad again, I am astonished both at how fragile life is and also how incredibly resilient.  His brain is doing two things—rewiring the damaged circuitry to his left side (he can now move both his left arm and his left leg) and deciding that he is going to make pizza for Everyone.   His conversation is mostly grounded in reality until he takes an unexpected sideways turn into pepperoni nonsense, then finds his way back.   Is his brain going to rewire this too?  Is this what a brain-as-construction-site looks like?  Is the verbal rubble cause for concern? Or are we trading increased physical capacity for the loss of mental acuity?

As a girl who just survived an accidental trip over the George Washington Bridge, I shudder to think what the implications are for my own brain.  MY brain was happily chatting to my sister through the truck speaker phone (which I just learned how to use) and totally forgot that we were still on 91 South, instead of 84 West and didn’t realize we should have made a right turn somewhere near Hartford until our eyeballs started reporting signs that read “Bronx,” at which point the brain started to panic and the bladder sent a frantic message that there better be a rest stop soon or we were going to need to shampoo the seat later.  The next thing we know, we have a choice of “upper bridge” or lower bridge.  I don’t know which to choose.  I am lost in a Dr. Seuss-esque nightmare of coiled roads and tangled ramps into space.  I turn on my GPS and say “Jesus, take the wheel!”   Instantly, I remember my Catholic upbringing and feel guilty. I realize it  is wrong of me to bother The Big Guy with my petty problems (not while there are wild fires raging in California and hostage troubles in Gaza) so I implore some of Heaven’s lesser bureaucrats to assist—the guardian angels and patron saints assigned to deal with the likes of me.  With the help of St. Christopher & Co., I make it through the wasteland of train tracks, iron stumps, and telephone wires that is eastern NJ after nobody heeded the Lorax, until I arrive at a toll booth.

I slow the truck to a stop.  There is a haggard blonde woman hanging out of the open window, with her claws out.  I worry about how cold she must be but she is scowling the scowl of a cat in her cardboard box.

“Hello?” I venture hopefully.

 “Ticket?” she snaps.  How quaint, I muse, this is one of those old-fashioned booths that has an actual person in there, waiting to charge us for the miles we just drove.

“I don’t have a ticket,” I say apologetically.  “I never saw a place where I could collect one.”

“Are you KIDDING me?” she screams, going from surly to berserk in a nanosecond.  “You think you gonna drive these roads for FREE? Gimme a break!” She acts like I am robbing her at gunpoint.

The sparks in her fierce blue eyes ignite a burst of nervous laughter out of me.

“After a full thermos of tea and no restroom in sight, we’re lucky nothing else came out,” says Prudence.

Maybe it’s that I have the company of so many lesser saints on board—I have the sudden impulse to crawl out of my window and give this enraged woman a hug.  I don’t dare.

“Ma’am,” I say as soothingly as possible. “I’m sorry. I drove down from Vermont.  I missed my turn.  I’ve just been following the GPS. I never saw a toll booth.  In New England, most toll centers take a picture of your license and send you a bill.  I assumed that was the case here. We don’t get to meet toll booth operators like you anymore.”

“Well, since you ain’t got a ticket, you’re going to have to pay the whole damn fare! That’s $18.50 from the GW bridge until here.” She is livid, as if my money is her money and she needed it to buy eggs.

“I’m happy to pay it,” I say, unable to repress more nervous giggles.  This woman is so outraged, she is like a cartoon.  “Besides, I actually DID go over the George Washington Bridge.  There didn’t seem to be a choice. I probably owe the whole fare anyway.”

“I know what you did,” she says grudgingly. “You came over the upper bridge.  There’s no booth there.” She’s still upset but at least she understands.

I nod, handing her a twenty dollar bill.

“And I know Vermont,” she says authoritatively. She squints suddenly in an awkward attempt to unfold the WTF crease lines of her face into something like a smile. “I go up there all the time to ski.” We are practically kin, she is admitting.

“Well, I hope you come back soon. We like visitors,” I say.

As I pull away, and leave that ruffled soul in the middle of that wasteland of a landscape, I think self-righteously, ‘If you’ve been to Vermont, you know how KIND people behave.  You know you don’t just start screeching when someone makes a mistake.  And you know that we don’t charge you to drive on our public roads—roads with no billboards, no acres of bombed out scrap metal beside them… I hope you go back soon and fill your soul with beauty and I hope people are NICE to you! No one has filled up your Nice Tank in a while!’

In the rehab center, I notice how kindly my father treats all the staff helping him.  I mention it to him.

“It must be hard for you, Dad, to be in this situation.  Yet you are decent to everyone.  Everyone tells me that they enjoy taking care of you. I’m proud of you for that.” He shrugs.

His words are slurred as they pass through his drooping, half-paralyzed lips. “The world has an abundance of jack-ashes.  It doesn’t need another one.  I don’t like doing what I’m told any more than the next guy but I don’t want to cross the line where it makes someone’s job harder.  It’s not anyone’s fault. Every one of us is carrying something heavy. Every one of us is in a fight.”

I tell him about the toll booth operator.  He shakes his head.

“You’d think I was the very first and only idiot to accidentally leave the George Washington Bridge without a ticket,” I say.

“Wrong,” he corrects me. “You were the forty-seventh that hour.  When dealing with folk like that, never forget, you’re the lucky one.  Ask her what she wants on her pizza.”

Humbly, I realize he is right.

I get even more humbled when I forget the security code I must use to get out of his building.  This is a code one needs to open the door so that the residents who might wander out and get lost are protected.  I try a number of combinations, all of them wrong.  Finally, I track down a nursing supervisor who tells me the code. 

“It’s a square,” she says kindly, “3-9-7-1.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to keep me here?” I ask. She shakes her head and laughs.

“This happens all the time,” she says smiling.

Once in the parking area, I cannot locate the car.  It’s my dad’s.  I use it when I am there because a farm truck with an eight foot bed is hard to park in tight spots.  Dad’s car is small, grey, and looks exactly like every other car in the lot. (A reasonable person might think I would have remembered the license plate. But then, a reasonable person would need to be reminded that I am incapable of remembering a four-digit code that they gave me when I signed into the building an hour ago.)  I have to roam the asphalt hitting the unlock button on the key fob, whispering quietly “here car, car, car! Come out, come out wherever you are!”  Eventually, I locate a car that lets me use the key I have to drive it away.

I pull out of the lot onto a small road, lost in thought.  I drive, and drive, and drive.  It dawns on me that I have seen the sign for the “Skilled Nursing” facility multiple times now. I am on a ring road that circles the complex.  Like a turd in a toilet bowl, I am just going around and around, about to commence my fourth lap.  I begin to scream.

“THIS is how you wind up on things like the George Washington Bridge,” says Prudence smugly from the back seat of my head.  “You aren’t paying attention.  Maybe YOU are the one whose brain is broken. Maybe you need to go tell that nice lady who helped you with the code you need to live here now.”

Again and again, I realize how very Attached To Outcomes I am. I want to go Where I Want To Go but I keep winding up somewhere else. I think many of us do. 

The very core of Kindness is paying attention.  Traumatic relationships, no matter how fleeting or extended, are the ones in which people consistently deny, overlook, refuse to hear, or avoid each other’s truths. It’s hard to accept the truth of where people are, including ourselves—especially when we are blindly rushing to get somewhere else.  Here’s where we hit the weeds, or the upper level of a bridge, or a toll booth with no ticket. Kindness is a form of Witness.  The people in our lives are here to teach us and help us to evolve into the truth of who we are.  They are the mirrors we need as we Mend. We don’t get to change anyone else—hell, it’s virtually impossible to change ourselves or what happens to us.  But we can choose our response. We can choose to pick up each other’s pants.   We CAN choose Kindness. It matters.

We are worthy of what we want. (Kindness)

We are willing to do the work (to be Kind).

May it be so. 

Keep up your Good Mending, Dear Ones!

With Sew Much love,

Nancy