View from the Cottage

Small kindnesses and considerations

April 8, 2018

In what I’m coming to think of as the Age of Anger, I’m increasingly aware of small kindnesses and considerations. Caught myself in a slip which would have gone against my Society of Uplifting the Language, but it shows how we repeat phrases ingrained from childhood on. I try to teach my grandchildren to avoid words like “hate,” but today I was proofreading the draft of a novel in progress and realized I had said someone let her children “run wild like Indians.” How many times in your life have you both heard and used some form of the phrase, “wild Indians”?  Caught myself this time, but no telling how many times I’ve missed simply through automatic thinking—or writing and speaking.

Lately I’ve been a tad touchy about aging. It seems to me that, for some people, the day I first used a walker I instantly became old. I was no different mentally or in appearance, but after surgery I never could walk unassisted again and I used the walker. And I became old. I see it in attitude, in non-invitations, in a subtle altering of friendships, in lots of small ways. But there’s a huge reverse to this: people are extraordinarily kind—stepping out of my way, holding doors, the little courtesies that have gone by the wayside until you need help. I’m grateful, and I find it reassuring—there are a lot of good people left in this world.

I’ve also in recent times noticed a tendency in me to be snarky, to latch onto the negative in my first reaction to someone. Recently I saw a man who’d gained a lot of weight, and that was about to be my first comment later to the friend with me. But I made myself stop and think how cordial he was in greeting me, how glad I was getting around well. I’m trying to teach Jacob to look for the good in his friends and not latch on to whatever displeases him—this one is mean, that one swears, etc. Hard lesson for an eleven-year-old, since I think I didn’t fully learn it until I was in my seventies. And I’m sad to say I think it’s something society does to us.

And along the line of positive thinking, a friend, a woman nearing seventy who is raising an infant, posted today about how lively that child was and how tired she was. I couldn’t help preaching—I wrote back and suggested she approach it the other way, give thanks for the life and love that child brought her, and downplay her tiredness.

I watched a video today narrated by a woman who apparently is on TV sharing recipes, etc. (I’d never heard of her). She’s thirty-one, with an unusual autoimmune disease that means she won’t live to be seventy, and a lot of gray in her brown hair. Someone had told her to cover the gray with dye, and her response was spot on. It amounted to being grateful for every day, for every sign of aging that she didn’t think she’d see. Her husband, she said, wanted them to grow old together. Her ultimate lesson, that it had taken her a long time to learn, was to be satisfied with her body with all its many faults—a weird jawline, a hook nose, weight that fluctuates, etc.

I took it to heart. With me what you get is an almost eighty-year old female who is blonde (with help) because she has a blonde soul and has been blonde all her life. A lady who is, I hope, not elderly, but uses a walker. A mom, beloved by children and grandchildren (and one dog), whose brain, thank the Lord, seems intact (I read today that the elderly grow new brain cells as fast as teenagers). A lady who lives in a cottage and is most lucky but needs help putting on her left shoe!

That’s another story. I ordered some black shoes that looked cute, had soft uppers but good support on the sole. Turns out those soft uppers won’t stay open long enough for me to get my left foot in (I can do the right just fine). Told Jordan I should return them, and she said no, she thought they were cute. I warned that she’d have to come out to put that left one on, and she didn’t waver. So last night, with Jordan gone, I went to dinner with friends and had to ask the one who came to pick me up to please put my shoe on. There’s something that hip surgery changed that I just can’t get down to that left foot. So if you ever come pick me up, be prepared for shoe duty!

In terms of thankfulness and positive attitude, I’m a work in progress. But I’m trying, and tonight I’m going to write a list of ten blessings and then I’ll list ten friends and what I appreciate about each one. How about you?