We love stories about the kindness of strangers. As if random acts of kindness in which people do or say the right thing to someone they don’t know is so outrageously difficult.
It requires almost nothing to allow the unknown person behind me with an armful of groceries to check out before me. It is a breeze to alert the stranger that she’s dropped some money. Give me, just give me, someone else’s child with food stuck in her teeth, and I’ll either politely keep chatting and say nothing, or use my very good and patient manners, devoid of all disdain and eye-rolls. Please, dear God of all Mercy, let me share 5 minutes with someone else’s husband, whose shortcomings don’t bother me in the least. I write checks for charitable donations but I will never, not once, not for anything, give money to the homeless woman I pass twice each day, wearing the same clothes she’s worn for the past several years and carrying the same cardboard sign, her craggy face and dirty body as familiar to me as if she and I went to high school together. She and the corner teriyaki joint she has claimed are predictable and familiar sites, breeding just enough contempt that apparently I prefer her to remain malnourished whereas, instead, from the distance of my checkbook, I feed many unknown women with craggy faces.
Random acts of kindness toward people I know well require far greater moral strength. To be kind to those whose hair is clogging my shower drain, who spend $700 on new clothes the day after we’ve agreed to tighten our belts, who speak with their mouths full, who are within my arms for hugs and embraces with morning breath and stinky feet, who repeat the same stories of prior victories and defeat, who enlist my sympathies for every last thing that the world has done wrong to them, who “forget” the small favor they promised, who need yet another thing, who require just a moment more of my time, those who, no matter how many times I’d prefer them to think or act or respond in a way that links them to any other person on this planet rather than the alien beings they reveal themselves to be – oh, being kind to people I know well is rather a challenge.
It won’t do me any good to pretend I don’t know my relatives; the family gathering requires a kind of kindness so unnatural to my own ears that I’ll search for the Candid Camera lens. I cannot fake interest at this week’s middle school Science Fair, and will instead oooh and aaaah at a bunch of baking-soda exploding volcanos and seeds grown with varying amounts of salt, sugar and other naturally occurring toxins; I will be oh-so-proud of my kid’s experiment and overwhelmed at the scientific minds of the other 542 budding Einsteins and oh-so-happy to see the friends and acquaintances and teachers and staff who I am deeply happy are making my kid’s middle-school life a great experience but the need to smile and make nice when I’d rather be home after a long day and a long week with my feet up and a glass of white Bordeaux seems more than ought to be asked of a mere mortal.
I have a greatest hits list of kindnesses from people who know me, which top any kindness done just because one human who doesn’t know me is having a decent day. The oncologist who gave me his cell phone number as we put together the “dream team” for the little white orb, long before he and I knew the orb meant nothing. The friend who hosted two simultaneous parties – one for kids and one for grown-ups, at two different locations, who, along with her husband and daughter, hung my twinkly Christmas lights so the rooms were particularly festive, cleaned two separate locales, purchased two menus of food, arranged and served everything with grace and then cleaned up both places without letting me lift a finger. The friend who listened deeply to my despair without thinking I was crazy. The school lunchroom lady who wanted me to know that she appreciated my son’s good manners every day so she took the time to go to the office, look up my number, and call me. Just to say something nice, to me.
Kindness that sails above the irritations, the tiredness, floats atop the burden of knowing a person well enough to be with them in their dirty, smelly, grouchy, unkind moments. I want a bumper sticker for that.