The first thing I do after starting the car in the morning is pray for the day ahead, and on the particular day in question, I had a lot to pray for.
It was a Monday for starters, and that’s never a good thing. The bills coming in and the money going out simply would not meet in the middle. The Ebola outbreak is affecting the community around the children’s home I help in Uganda (as if Edward doesn’t have enough problems feeding 23 homeless orphans). That hero of the animal rescue world, Jennifer Witkowski, looked liked she hadn’t slept in days, and I felt bad for having sent her three folks with hardluck kittens in just the past week. Several close friends were dealing with major crises that there was no way in the world I could help solve. My own ongoing health issues had beaten me down over the weekend, meaning several vital projects remained undone.
I finished my prayer at about the same point I usually do, maybe 50 feet from one of our game cameras, and I saw a little gray shape standing in the road. Soon two more materialized in the morning light. Carl is the head squirrel, and was one of our releases from more than a year ago. He was standing up keeping overwatch on two younglings. It reminded me that I needed to pick up a bag of squirrel-and-bird feed on the way home.
I’d been so busy, caught up in everything, that nothing was getting done. Seeing Carl patiently sitting there, his front paws crossed, staring confidently at the car, reminded me of the things that really matter.
Outside the gate, a female box turtle had stalled in the middle of the road, right where she would inevitably get whacked by a logging truck, a tractor or one of our less-desirable neighbors. I blocked the road for her and gently urged her off the pavement. And I felt better for it.
Dealing with a particularly noisome problem an hour or so later, I made it a point to be extra-nice to the bank representative who was trying her best. The fault lay at a paygrade far beyond her, but it would have been easy to vent my frustration on a stranger at the other end of the telephone line, but that wouldn’t have accomplished a dodgasted thing. In the end she solved my problem, which had been ongoing for months. I did make sure that the supervisors who monitor the recordings of such calls would have no choice but take note about how helpful she had been.
The day before I spent more than an hour on the phone with a 90-year-old friend; I had heard some of his stories before, but that didn’t matter. As he had been there for me in the past, I wanted to be there for him. If I am ever in that condition, I sincerely hope someone will be there for me, but I really did it for my own benefit.
There’s a proven link between being nice to folks and improved health. I’m not talking about the kind of good deeds folks photograph and share on social media – or even write about in the news – but the type of acts we once took for granted. In this day and age where people seem to avoid contact even more than they did during the pandemic, we all can be a little nicer to our neighbors.
I guess I got the habit from my Old Man; not that Miss Lois was rude or anything, but Papa made it a mission to befriend the folks behind the counter, answering a telephone for their boss, waiting a table or fixing a car. I try to do the same; I may not know all the cashiers at my favorite stores by name, but I try to, and I try to genuinely leave them smiling.
Trying to be a decent person and not a potato-head helps take my mind off my barely-functioning legs and trainwreck of a back. I don’t know how many fellow cane-users I have challenged to a race across a parking lot, but no more than one or two have ever given me a strange look. All have either smiled or laughed, and one or two have even taken me up on the offer. We declared it a draw in each of those impromptu Olympiads and went away laughing.
It’s easy these days to be angry, or at least sad and resigned all the time. Let’s face it: gas and other prices are ridiculously high because we’re in a war. More and more of our state and federal government’s misdeeds come to light all the time, and the ones who discovered or revealed those misdeeds are usually castigated in the press more than those who committed the evil deeds.
Sad lost souls try to disrupt church services, or worse. Paid protesters are once again rioting.
It seems like every grove of more than three trees or a cornfield is being wiped out for a housing development that will flood the next time we get a good summer rain. Data centers will outnumber Bojangle’s restaurants in less than a decade, and the average power customer and taxpayer will be forced to pay for those electricity-hogs, just like we were forced to pay for solar farms that don’t work when people need more electricity.
People don’t want to work for a living, but those who are seeking and serious about jobs have a hard time keeping their heads above water while the people they support live high on the hog. Inept politicians who promised to be stewards of the public trust act like adolescents when the people who elected them demand accountability. People have forgotten how to use turn signals, ashtrays or trashcans, and everything is always someone else’s fault.
It’s easy to be grumpy and mean.
I try to choose not to be.
I try to be nice, even when I’m in a lot of pain, or the bills ain’t paid, or the coffeemaker quits, or one of the dogs is sick, or the goats have scratched the car again, or the bank makes me go through the entire alphabet, my place of birth, three different forms of identification, five secret questions and a sacrificial chicken just to have to start over again. I don’t try to avoid the perpetually unhappy people, but I can refuse to let their misery infect me; I have enough problems of my own, some of which seem insurmountable, but I don’t see a reason to inflict them on other folks.
Instead, I try to help others laugh. I try to reassure them. I tell folks about salvation when the Holy Spirit kicks me in the rump and instructs me to do so. I try to celebrate the small things, the happy things, the simple things that brighten even a moment in an otherwise frustrating day.
I try to enjoy the lightning bugs of an evening and ignore the mosquitoes. I try to enjoy little Tiger, the hardluck puppy, as she toddles around and learns about life. I try to celebrate the little good things in life, the kids who create a dust storm or a dandelion blizzard, the teens getting their licenses, the friends getting new jobs.
I try to go barefoot outside as much as possible, feeling the mud and the grass and the dirt. I laugh with my wife and spend too much time on the phone with my siblings and howl back at the coyotes while the baby goats sleep securely under their mamas.
I used to try being a gloomy potato-head; I have discovered that life is happier when you just feed the squirrels.
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