Coming out of the attic—The weirdness and oldness of being kind.

We live in a world where cynicism has become the norm, and if someone does something ordinary, we often think they have done something amazing, or that they have some underlying agenda. We don’t expect anyone to help us. We don’t expect anyone to think about us. We don’t expect sincere, random kindness. We don’t expect someone to care.

I think we have so disconnected from each other that courtesy, gratitude, kindness, and just simply lending someone a hand has become uncommon. Instead of these ideas being a common thread, they have come to seem bigger than they were ever meant to be. The mere idea that someone would help us out or do something kind for us is so uncommon and unexpected that it feels more like a gift.

I know this, because I feel that way almost every time anyone helps me out in a pinch, or does something for me that I didn’t expect.

Hand made card from Kat Hodes. 

Five years ago, we moved from a large city to a comparatively small town.The town we live in now happens to have been established as a village for retirees who wanted a nice, quiet place to escape to—and to play golf. I almost immediately noticed that people treated each other differently here. I never associated it with anything but the fact that we weren’t in a big city anymore, and this is just the way small towns are. But in waking up at 3 a.m. thinking about it, I think it’s less about geography and more about time.

We bought, and moved into our house here just a couple of months before we had our daughter. Within a day or two, there was a knock at the door, and a plate of homemade baked goods arrived from our neighbors. We had lived in our previous home for about sixteen years, and we barely knew any of our neighbors, so this plate of cookies, and sweets seemed like a big deal.

The weirdness of people being kind didn’t stop there.

In the years since our daughter was born, we have gotten to know both of our next door neighbors very well. Our daughter frequently asks to visit one or the other, and she is almost never turned away. One evening, I was out on an extended errand. My husband had been battling an issue with one of his shoulders, and earlier in the day, had been given a steroid injection to help alleviate the pain. While I was gone, he had a bad reaction to the medication, and became acutely ill. I was more than a half hour away, and he really felt he needed to go to the emergency room. He was at home with our daughter. I wrapped up my errand as quickly as I could, and headed home. Within a few minutes, he texted that our neighbors were watching our daughter, and he was headed down the hill to the emergency room.

All the way back, I kept thinking “It’s so late. I’ve got to get to the house and get our daughter, so our neighbors can go on with their evening.” I drove right past the hospital, and directly to the house. I headed to the neighbors to get our daughter, apologizing for the inconvenience. My neighbor’s response was “Why don’t you go back down, and be with Jeph? Willow’s fine here with us. Don’t worry about it.”

Those precious books from Julie Lancaster.

I think my jaw hit the floor. As it happens, not only were 
they watching our daughter, but their son, who was there for a visit, had driven my husband to the hospital.

Over the last couple of years, they have watched our daughter at least two or three other times. One of those times, there was a knock at the door, and my neighbor said Willow was more than welcome to come over and play with their grandson. I was in yoga pants, with a mom bun, and I am sure looking God-awful. I quickly straightened myself up, and headed over. I didn’t want them to have to manage both their toddler grandson and mine. The least I could do was help out.

When I knocked on the door, my neighbor was surprised to see me.

“Why don’t you just go on home, and take a little bit of time to do whatever you want,” she said. Even now, when I think about it, I feel tears welling up in my eyes. It was the simplest thing in the world to her and her husband, but it felt like everything to me that someone would offer me an hour or two to myself. I don’t remember what I did, but it felt like I had been offered a new dress, shoes, and a night on the town.

My safety pin Lularoes from Amber. 

One day, as I sat at their kitchen table, chatting, I thanked her for letting our daughter just come over and “invade” their home—because when Willow goes to people’s houses, it is often a “home invasion.” My neighbor explained that it was no problem, and that they were returning the gift. When her husband was in the military and they were stationed in Europe, their children had spent almost as much time at the neighbors’ as they had at home. It seemed fair to them that their home should be open to their neighbors’ kids as well.

I could immediately picture her in a little European town, with her kids, and without a lot of personal connections to rely on. How amazing was it that her neighbors had made her children
welcome, and given her the break she really needed?

People just don’t do that kind of thing anymore.

That, I think, is the reason why it seems strange when people do something simple for us. It’s just not something people do nowadays.

When I was young, I spent a lot of truly happy times with one of my grandmas. When I went to her house for a sleepover, she let me be involved in anything she was doing. I was in the middle of her baking, cooking, and sewing. She always had Nesquik strawberry milk mix, and vanilla ice cream for shakes. She always had crunchy peanut butter, and Seven Up.

My grandma worked in a factory for more than twenty years. She always talked to me about the people with whom she worked. She would tell me about the cake that she had taken to work for this person, or the sock monkey she had made for this one’s grandkid. Of course, she would also tell me about the practical joke she had played—leaving a rubber bug on the seat of the woman who worked next to her. My grandma was always doing something for someone else. She didn’t have much—she still doesn’t—but she always had thoughtfulness for other people.

When Ginnifer gives you the moon.

If she found out you liked something, and it was your favorite, she would make sure you had it when you visited, or got it as a gift from her. Sometimes, it would be something silly, like a jar of crunchy peanut butter, because your mom and dad only bought creamy. Another time, she would give you the aluminum tumblers your great-grandparents had that you used when you visited them decades earlier—just because she remembered how enamored of them you were when you drank orange juice out of them in the mornings while you were there. It didn’t matter if you hadn’t thought of something in years, because she would remember that it had once meant something to you.

It’s easy to say that of course she would do those kinds of things for me because she was my grandma, but she would do those kinds of things for anyone. She didn’t have a lot, but if she could do something small to make someone’s day, or help someone out, she would. Even after I grew up, if she ran across something that reminded her of me, or that she thought I might like, she would gift it to me.

It’s rare when people do those kinds of things now. It’s rare to do something for someone without occasion, and that rarity perpetuates our feelings that small, kind gestures are strange.

As often as I have been on the receiving end of these rare gestures, I have probably more frequently been on the giving end. I don’t say that to pat myself on the back, or qualify myself as a professional kindness administrator. I just think that maybe a little of my grandma rubbed off on me. I can’t count many things that my family passed down to me that were positive, so I will happily note anything, no matter how small or quirky.

I am a deep feeler. I see that a lot in my daughter. I form attachments to people quickly, and those attachments often run deeply. I don’t know how to just care a little bit. From time to time, it hasn’t worked out well. I think it’s the strangeness part of kindness that makes people uncomfortable, or uncertain.

I lost my dearest friend for a while, in part because of my inability to measure how much I cared for her, and how much I just wanted to spend time with her. Somewhere along the way, she mistook something I wanted to share with her for something I didn’t intend. She had no idea how important she was to me. It was the start of my learning that I have to make clear to people who I am, and what they mean to me. I consider that lesson a gift, and that gift gave back when we were able to get back in touch with each other, and I could tell her all that had taken for granted that she knew.

I am sure that I have inadvertently “chased off” other friends who didn’t understand me, or who were just used to people doing things for them with an occasion, or an agenda.

People often talk about “old souls.” I don’t think I really considered myself to be one before. I just thought I was weird—that I am weird. I know I my path got twisted by trauma early on, and then twisted more later. I know that continues to color who I am. But I think the “weirdness” of simple kindness, a willingness to lend a hand, or to remind people that they matter is “oldness.”

It comes from thinking in a different time. It comes from the place in your mind that stores the stone you picked up in Limerick, the screw back earrings you fell in love with when you went garage saling with your lifelong best friend and her grandma when you were kids, and the Lularoe leggings with safety pins another friend surprised you with when you were just starting to become an activist. There is nothing that someone does for me that doesn’t get stored in that dusty old place. There is no memory or gesture that doesn’t find its way into that trunk. I don’t know how to quantify or meter out caring about people, and thinking about what I would want or need if I were in their shoes.

Some people might skip the mental “attic” and call me an empath. Maybe I am. I don’t know. I do know that it is sad that we have gotten so far away from realizing we’re all in this life together that we are surprised when someone does something human for us. It’s not a judgment about individuals, backgrounds, or socioeconomic identity—none of those things. It’s not even necessarily a judgment, but an observation.

Does it really require magnanimity to help someone find the right person for a job they need done? It’s maybe a text or a phone call—not crossing a highway in heavy traffic. Is honoring someone for their selfless hard work under sometimes tough conditions generous? Is a friend mentioning something they love, and you diving into the internet to find it, or learn how to make it a grand gesture? Is a friend or neighbor offering to watch your child for an hour or two a wild imposition on them? Should any of these things be strange or uncommon?

Call me old fashioned, but when you look at the world around us, and the direction we seem to be going, isn’t it possible that a few more simple gestures of kindness, or a willingness to help someone out of a spot might actually be the way to really make things great again?

Things don’t get better, and the potential of humankind isn’t realized by keeping our heads down and staying in our own lanes. Our children don’t grow up knowing to step up when a classmate is being bullied when we keep to ourselves. Our friends don’t always know how much we love them if we don’t put ourselves out there and say the words. We don’t live the words so many claim in faith when we just take responsibility for ourselves and expect everyone else to do the same.

If all of these things seem like more, I think no matter how much we have—money, houses, stuff—we don’t have anything at all.

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