I went looking for acts of kindness. I found this gem.

I mentioned that I would be keeping an eye out for acts of kindness.  Well, here's one.

Two weeks ago, a man of about seventy struck up a conversation with an older man of about eighty-five in an eye doctor's waiting room. 

He must have seemed to the younger man to be lonely and in want of conversation, or maybe the younger man himself was. Maybe the older man looked like someone the younger man loved, or missed.

I know this happens to many of us. When I see someone bagging groceries who looks like one of my children when they were teenagers, I can’t help but mother-smile at them.  If I see someone who looks like the brother I lost a few years ago, I sister-smile at them, and enjoy the seconds when they consider whether or not to smile back, but then do. Some offer a little wave with the smile. One guy saluted.

The younger man in the waiting room started the conversation by pointing at a headline and bemoaning the political climate that has polarized even “some of my best friends,” as he put it. Citing younger years and earlier times, he recalled when "it wasn't like this."

The older man listened politely, but didn't say much. But at some point, the younger man must have landed on a favorite memory or time in the older man's life, because now, he began to tell stories of his own. A lot of them. A very large number of stories.

Fishing with his grandsons.
Hunting pheasant with his partner and dog, both gone now.
The childhood years when all the families vacationed together and "the kids" walked home from the lake at night, guided by porch lights.

For nearly an hour he described his life and times, while the younger man encouraged him with questions ("So, what does your son do? Does he have children? What are they like?") 

Positive connections with strangers happen all the time in a normal world; you talk to people in line at the grocery store, or laugh with a stranger over something weird that you've both witnessed. You connect with another audience member before a show starts. You smile at young couples in a restaurant and they smile back. 

For all the times that strangers have annoyed me - oblivious drivers, slow-walkers on sidewalks, space-takers in general - I am thinking  lately of the ones who have made me laugh, or pause with respect, or taken me down a peg with just a look when I've been a jerk.  

Strangers educate us, make us reflect, show us how we affect others, and how we can do better.  

My brother used to chat up strangers as if they’d grown up next door to each other and gone to school together. It could have been sports or politics, if something was on his mind, or made him happy, he assumed others felt the same way and needed to share like he did. 

It might have been a little of him that I saw in the younger man’s behavior at the eye doctor’s.

I stopped that man as he left the waiting room and told him that the conversation between him and the older man had made my day. 

“You mean just because I talked to him?” he said.

“No, because you listened to him,” I said.

“I’m seventy-one,” he responded, “I like it when I still get to hear stories from older folks.”

We laughed, and then more seriously, he said, “I could tell from looking at him that he had a lot to say.”

Later that afternoon, I turned  around in line at the grocery store and began to unload the cart of an elderly woman in back of me who couldn’t reach the belt, or move easily around her cart. "I'll do that for you," I said. She smiled and started handing me things. "Thank you," she said.

One day later in the week I saw a woman slow her pace to allow her toddler to walk by her side, while they talked in the simple language they'd forged. I told her how much I loved seeing people respect children that way.  If you could have seen the look on her face before I said anything, and the one immediately after, you would run right out, this minute, and find a chaotic young parent to compliment. 

The times will try to tell us who we are, and how we've changed, and how our differences have proved that humanity has limits. If we’re not careful, we might believe the times and forget that it is always possible to see ourselves or the people we love in people we've never met,  but might like to know better.   

So, here's something to try:  find someone who needs to be told they’re doing something right, or could use a little praise or a sudden conversation, and then offer it. 

And then, enjoy the effect it has on both of you. 

The old man with the Trump sticker and me, at a light.

I'm just going to use this graphic for
the rest of the summer, okay?

In 2014, a frustrated young man wrote to Andrew W.K of the Village Voice to express how much he hated his father’s far-right political views and what they were doing to destroy the world and everyone who cared about him.  The response, broader in scope than perhaps the letter writer expected, included this statement:

“The world isn’t being destroyed by democrats or republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist — the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world.”

I used to think a fair fight between Trump critics and Trump supporters would not ever be possible while one side, the civilized one, was using sticks to bat back the craggy rocks being hurled by the other side, the barbaric one. 

Sooner or later, everyone is just going to start hurling rocks.

A few weeks ago, I pulled up at a light next to a truck with a Trump sticker. The way I don’t need to see an actual crime in progress to know I’m in a bad neighborhood, I knew who was driving this truck before I lined up alongside him.

Mentally closed probably, narrow minded, old, rigid, ignorant, frustrated. Probably mourning the past when kids could play outside until the streetlights came on, and mothers had pie ready for you after school, and men kept women in their place, and in fact, everyone knew their place without trying to be in someone else’s. Like migrants. Like women. Like members of the LBGTQ community.

So, I looked over at this person I’d never met, using a facial expression that I believed would make my feelings about him clear. He looked at me and reflexively smiled until he saw my expression. Then his face fell, and he looked straight ahead.

And now, I looked at him more closely. I pegged him at mid-late eighties. He had a dog, also elderly, on the seat next to him. His face was drawn and deeply lined and the only word for his posture at the wheel was tired. Life-tired. Long, hard life-tired. He wore a navy-blue work shirt and he was thin. He was probably coming from his work place of other navy-blue shirts, and his dog was probably looking forward to his dinner. 

Right? Before Trump started trampling on our humanity, I would have left it there.

But think about what I did. I gave this very old man one of my most damning looks. Even my God, who was watching, put down his drink and said, “Are you kidding me?”

Others of us may be doing exactly that right now. Using our faces and words to hate Trump, or, anyone who doesn’t hate Trump.  

But here’s the thing. In that moment of hate, when I became angry with this person I’d never met for not just sporting a bumper sticker, but for probably being like Trump himself, I didn’t like myself either.

Remember my bottom line from last week’s post?  If you’re doing something that makes you think less of yourself, it’s not the right thing to do.   

So, while I sat there feeling angry with this person I’d never met for choosing judges who could strip women of their rights and small children of their parents, or the torturous warehousing of children at the border, or  the failure to properly account for the death of an American college student in North Korea, I didn’t like myself either.

And now, in the second that I was preparing to look away, he looked right at me again.

My instinctive affection for the elderly trumped the Trumper and I smiled back. And in response,  maybe because I resemble someone he likes, who knows, or because only small children continue to stare blankly at you when you smile at them, his face softened and he smiled back. He raised his hand in a “hello,” and gave me a short nod.

I nodded back, and the light changed. 

To me, it is the worst casualty of our times to now see each other as stick carriers and rock throwers.

The old man in the truck had his reasons for voting Trump, and might also have become horrified to see what Trump has done in only three years to “please his base” which may include other elderly truck drivers with dogs who just want their dinner.

It is a choice people make now to accept or reject entire other people – friends, family members, spouses – based on their politics. But generalizations are the language of the lazy or ignorant, on both sides. Not all who loathe Trump are civilized and humane and not all who support Trump attend rallies and froth at the mouth.

Some of us are neither, and wonder if the stick carriers and rock throwers will destroy all of us. Some of us remember when you could express and defend your beliefs and enjoy the challenge of connecting with others who are nothing like we are.

It was, it is true, that on some way-down level, we are human beings, all at the same light, all waiting to move forward with our work shirts and long days and tired dogs who just want their dinner.

Next week: Tiny acts of kindness to try when your soul needs a pick me up.