31 Parties

1982.  I’m guessing, but I’m pretty sure that this was the first year that I attended a local company Christmas party for the first time.  I wasn’t married, but my date was in his second year of working at the little television station in Victoria.  It was a kind of a roller coaster evening.  The party was held at a down town Victoria hotel, and it was very different from the Christmas teas that I was used to attending at the Vancouver Public Library.

First of all, a dinner/dance is obviously different from an afternoon tea.  The most excitement we would get from the library event would be from the type of goodies we got that year.  A lot of retired librarians came back for that year after year, and the tea flowed.  I was in my early 20’s and a room full of old librarians did not impress.

Okay, there was one other party that I never missed when I worked at the library.  If you happened to be working Christmas Eve, the folks in the bindery (these were the people who repaired and refurbished many of the books) had an all day party because they were upstairs in the building and out of sight of the public.  And the booze flowed.  We would go up on our breaks and have a drink, and needless to say we took a lot of “coffee” breaks on Christmas Eve 😊.  One year I remember showing up at my parents house completely drunk at about 3pm.  I had a hangover before Christmas Eve had even begun.

But a big company staff party in the fancy hotel where they actually gave away great prizes, including a brand new TV, was totally new and exciting to me.  The food was fabulous, there was live music and a lot of crazy partying.  That first year, there was a sales guy who, in a Rob Ford-like drunken stupor, asked my date where he picked up the hooker (me).  I was young and over-sensitive and I ran off to the bathroom and balled my eyes out in one of the stalls.  He was just having a laugh, but I wasn’t used to his kind of character.  I was used to librarians.

That same sales guy, who realized what a stupid thing he had said, later apologized profusely.  And at every Christmas party we attended after that, he would get down on his knees and beg my forgiveness.  He was actually a good guy, just a bit of a goof.

Every year there was different music to dance to, but there were always old favourites like the B-52’s “Love Shack” and the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”.  The occasional live bands we had were pretty good too and pumped out the top 40 hits, along with some older favourites.  That party was the only time in the whole year that I would dance.  And I danced. A lot.

The only Christmas party I had to leave early was when I was pregnant with my first daughter. But I still managed to finish dinner! At another Christmas party, something was wrong with one of the seafood buffet dishes and a lot of people got sick afterwards.  On even another occasion, a particular bad year for staff because there were looming lay-offs, the drinking was particularly heavy.  That was my introduction to, and my first AND last encounter with Sambuca.  I cringe just thinking about it.  The next morning my two young daughters came into my bedroom and laughed at me.  “Mummy’s got a HANGOVER!” they squealed.  Well, it sounded like they were squealing. Really loud.

There were memorable moments, sad times, silly gaffs, funny things that happened, and there were many staff who came and went through the years.  One couple once bragged to us that they had been to 20 consecutive parties, the husband having been an employee at the station for that long. The next year, as if he had jinxed himself, he was laid off and they were gone.

There was another year that we found out the station was going to be permanently shut down.  No one had stepped up with an offer to buy it from the owners, and we were preparing ourselves for the end.  That particular party was held at the Empress Hotel, one of the oldest and nicest hotels in Victoria.  It was beautiful, and the food was lovely, the music was great.  That year, a disposable camera was put on every table so that we could all take our own pictures of each other to be posted at the station later.  There’s one picture from that year of myself and one of my good friends, sitting there with tears in our eyes.  We really thought it was over.

Just months before the station was set to close, my husband was laid off.  And then, magically, the employees along with some help, bought the station, and my husband was hired back.  And guess what?  It was all in time for the next Christmas Party 🤶.

There’s a group of people that I know from the station who have been to many of the same parties. We used to be the “young” ones.  This year we were laughing at how we had somehow turned out to be the “old” ones.  We were having to work harder at recognizing some of the songs that were playing, and when one of the “kids” asked if we wanted to go to the bar for tequila shots, well, I had visions of that Sambuca incident and decided it was not a good idea.  I just can’t do that any more.  Just as well.

All in all, we have attended 31 consecutive staff Christmas parties.  I hope I haven’t jinxed myself.

IJ

(As of retirement, my husband and I attended a total of 42 parties. We didn't miss a one. Oh, except during COVID 🙄)

One Last Breath

 

One comment you often hear about grief is how different people grieve in different ways.  Well, not only do people grieve in different ways, they grieve differently for each loss, whatever that loss may be.  It can be a still, quiet kind of grieving over a long period of time.  Some people cry and cry, others do not.  Some take time away from things, other people jump right back in to work or school, finding comfort in ordinary tasks.

I experienced my first death when I lost my mother.  I was only 14, and I didn’t know much about life, let alone how to grieve for the loss of it.  I didn’t see her die, I was kept away from it.  The loss of my mother at such a young age was enormous.  It was terrifying.  What is death?  Where did my mother go, if anywhere? Why did she have to leave me?  What do I do?

I was off for a couple of days from school but eventually I had to return.  My home room teacher assigned someone to watch me, to make sure I was okay.   Other kids looked at me funny.  They didn’t know how to talk to me, what to say.  It was almost like I had some kind of death disease and they could catch it.  I remember coming home from school one day and just calling out to my mother, just to hear the sound of myself saying it. It took a lot of years to figure it all out for myself, and I took many paths trying to find answers to all of my questions.  Every year on the anniversary of her death, I would count back.  One year, five, ten years, fifteen years.  I would cry almost every time I added another year.

When I lost my Dad only a couple of weeks ago, my feelings were equally as profound, but not about the same things.  I am 56, not 14.  The world is a whole different place at this point in my life.  I’m not terrified, the way I was the first time.  I know what death is, and I know my father didn’t go anywhere.  He just died.  And it was simply time for him to leave me.  I’m not sure I was prepared, however, for what dying really looks like and watching him go through it.

I experienced the loss of many others in between the deaths of my parents;  relatives, friends, acquaintances. Almost every time, it would be like revisiting my mother’s death.  Not as intensely, of course, but something of it would remind me of being 14 again.  That fear would come back, that sense of how utterly vulnerable we are, and how it could happen at any time to any one. Where did they go?  What does it mean?  For a long time after my mother died, I was afraid to ask my Dad what it looked like to see her die. I kept envisioning some sort of terrifying, thrashing, screaming event, having only ever seen it in the movies.  It was always curious to me to see obituaries saying that people died “peacefully”.  What is peaceful about death? I heard people talking about it as if it were a kind of “high”, experiencing someone’s death.  I never got that.

Last year I think I had a sense that it wouldn’t be long before my father was also gone.  I remember I started to have anxiety attacks and heart palpitations to the point of going to the doctor, which is a rare thing for me.  I thought it was physical, and then realized it was about me coming to terms with the fact that my father was going to die soon too.  What was that going to be like?

When I went over to the mainland for the last time, I was relieved to hear the doctor say that my father would likely have an easier time of it because he had pneumonia in one lung.  He said “If there’s any easy way to go…”   Dad had been refusing medication and food for several days, and the nurses had begun to give him regular doses of morphine to keep him comfortable.  He was pretty much asleep most of the time, except for occasional twitches.  On the last morning, however, as soon as we got there I could hear that his breathing was somewhat more laboured than it had been the day before.   And by the late afternoon, he was twitching and moaning from time to time.  I was worried that he was suffering, so the nurse gave him another dose of morphine and said she would do so every hour from then on.  I asked her how long it would take the morphine to kick in, and she replied it would take about fifteen minutes.

It was the longest fifteen minutes I’d ever experienced.  And when we reached that goalpost, he didn’t stop struggling.  At one point he opened one eye, and seemed to be trying to communicate. We kept talking to him, trying to calm him.

Then his body suddenly seemed more quiet.  I wondered if he was breathing at all.  And that’s when it happened.  He took in one big, deep, final breath, and let it go.  I knew right away.  “He’s gone,” I said.  I remembered hearing about that at some point in the past, about a person taking one big last breath and then dying.  That’s how I knew what it was.  I ran out to the hall to try to find a nurse.  When a group of them saw me coming, they came running.

It took a long minute checking for a pulse before the nurse finally said “He is gone.”  The next few minutes and hours were a blur…we were trying to call people, trying to grasp it had actually happened, someone brought us tea and sandwiches, we made more phone calls.  I kept thinking about that last breath and how profound it was to watch him take it.

I spent some time all alone with him once everything else had been done and everyone was gone.  I tried to say everything I needed to, I hugged him and kissed him and hugged and kissed him some more.  I didn’t want to have any regrets.  I didn’t want to leave him.  But then I had to.

I was walking down the hall of the care facility a little while later when it hit me.  That last breath.  I remembered.

A few years after my mother died, I finally got up the nerve to ask my Dad what it was like.  He said it was not anything like the movies, it was very peaceful.  She was there one minute, and then she took one long, last breath, let it go, and then she was gone.

I love you, Pop.

IJ

From The Inside Out

As some of my readers know, my 91-year-old father has dementia, “probably Alzheimer’s” as his medical chart says.  In the last few months his health has declined considerably.

It’s not that this has been unexpected, of course.  But I more or less made the decision a few years back that I wasn’t going to “study” Alzheimer’s.  You might think that is counter-intuitive;  why not understand the disease as much as you can so you know what to expect?  A friend even loaned me a book, a fictional account of someone dying of the disease, but I chose not to read it.  It’s not that I am in denial, although in the very beginning when he was first diagnosed I had trouble accepting it.  I can see very well what the disease has done to him over these past ten years.

No, it’s more because I don’t want to be sitting here anticipating every symptom of decline in him.  I won’t drive myself crazy watching for signs that the disease is progressing because I worry enough as it is.  I just want to make the most of the moments when he seems his old self…those moments still do happen, but with less and less frequency.

I’ve been travelling to the mainland every three weeks or so lately, spending time with him when he is awake or just sitting with him while he sleeps.  He sleeps a lot.

About a week ago when I was there, I arrived around 9:30am to find him in bed, which wasn’t a surprise. The nurses let him sleep in because he’s “less grumpy” if he does.  He has become more easily agitated in the last few months, some of which has been calmed by low doses of a new medication, but he will still have outbursts every now and then when he’s confused or embarrassed or simply tired.  He is also physically very weak, his old legs barely holding him up whenever he moves around.  He has lost considerable weight because his appetite has declined.  It’s not that he isn’t hungry, but often he just gets confused when there is more than one thing on his plate.  He doesn’t know what to eat, as if there is some mysterious order to eating that he can’t figure out.  So he gets up and walks away.

He heard me when I entered his room, so I sat down on the edge of his bed.  I found him curiously engaged that morning and we held hands and ended up talking on a variety of topics for a good forty minutes.  It was uplifting for me, because he hadn’t been as talkative or interactive for a number of visits before.  His nurse came in to help him get up and dressed, so I left his room and waited for him down the hall.  He finally came out, fresh and dressed with his walker and the nurse beside him.  I walked with him to his seat in the dining area and watched him eat breakfast.  A few tables away, a resident was calling out, over and over, as many of them often do caught up in the fog of their dementia, not realizing where they are or what’s going on. Most of the time the other residents pay little attention because it happens so frequently, I suppose, that they stop hearing it.  Not all of the residents have dementia, but many do.

When my Dad had enough breakfast, we spent a little more time together in his room, and then I had to leave.

The following morning I went back, not expecting to have the same interaction with him, and at first it looked like I was going to be right.  It was a little later in the morning when I arrived, so I assumed he would already be up.  As I came off the elevator I heard someone calling out again and at first paid no attention, until I realized that it was my father’s voice.  I followed the sound, and found him sitting on a piano bench in the common area, his hands cupped around his mouth, yelling “Could someone please tell me where the hell I am?”  I hadn’t seen this behaviour in him before, so for a moment I was taken aback.

I walked up to him and gently took his hands in mine, bending down to be at eye level with him.  “Hi Dad. It’s okay.  You’re at home.”  “Where’s home?” he asked, a little surprised at my sudden appearance.  “Home is Rosewood.” I said, naming the care facility he’s been living in for the last several years.

“Rosewood?”  “Yes, this is your home.  Would you like to go back to your room?”  “Okay.”

I helped him up and held his arm as we walked gingerly back down the hall.  On the way, he suddenly said “Sometimes I feel so useless and stupid.”

I was surprised to hear such a revealing comment and tried to reassure him that he was not useless or stupid.  When we got to the door of his room, he expressed relief at recognizing it.  Once we were inside and sitting down, the conversation continued.  I said it must be scary to not know where you are sometimes.  He said it wasn’t scary, just frustrating.  I told him that he had dementia and that’s why he was having trouble remembering.  I’ve told him on other occasions that he has dementia, but of course, he doesn’t remember.  “Dementia?” he said and I nodded my head.  “It sounds too close to the word ‘demented’,” he smiled.  I laughed at that little hint of my old man who had always had a cheesy sense of humour.  He repeated the joke a number of times to his own delight.

“Sometimes I’m in a movie and I can’t tell what is real.” he said, revealing something again about the life he has been living.  And the conversation continued on in fits and starts over the next hour or so.  I didn’t want to leave or let go of this experience of finally hearing my father’s description what dementia is like from the inside out.  Finally, the topic changed to other things, family, the weather and more mundane subjects.  He was tiring, his eyes sometimes closing when we weren’t speaking, and I knew that the window of opportunity was closing too.

When I had to leave to catch the ferry home, we hugged and kissed and I told him how much I loved him and what a good father he is.  “And you’re a good daughter,” he said, “say hello to Michael and the girls.”  I know he doesn’t remember names very often, he often calls me by his sister’s name, but it was nice to hear that he still knows who we all are.

The next time I visit him, I don’t know what I will be able to expect, and I don’t particularly want to know.  But I will be happy with even just a moment or so, just a hint, of my “old” Dad.

IJ

What’s In A Blog Name?

I tossed and turned last night because I decided that I wanted to change the name of my blog.  Why on earth would I do that?  Toss and turn about it, I mean 🙂

At first I created this blog because I wanted to express my thoughts outside of songwriting.  I have had songwriting articles online since 1996, which translates to eons in the web universe, but I decided awhile back that I wanted to have another place to write about things that interested me outside of songwriting.  So the name became IJ’s Blog because a lot of people followed the links from my website and already knew me as IJ.

A few articles ago, I wrote about my father’s battle with Alzheimer's and a couple of fascinating discussions we had in between his foggy moments.  I called it From The Inside Out because I was finally getting a glimpse of what his world was like these days under the influence of that disease.  On a walk yesterday, it occurred to me that everything I write about in this blog is more or less from the same perspective, from my inside out.

As I thought about it, I realized that we all experience our lives from the inside out.  Not only that, but our outside is very much a reflection of, and affected by, our inside.  None of us experiences the same thing in the same way.  When I sit with my husband’s many siblings, for instance (he has five of them), and they talk about their childhoods, they each remember different things about events they all experienced together.  This boggles my mind, having no blood siblings myself to reminisce about my early childhood with;  that they would each see the same event so differently, and sometimes one or two not even remember it at all!

As time goes by, I realize more and more that not only does my inner self affect my outer experience, but I can work to change myself to affect a more positive experience of my life, from the inside out.  This has become more important to me as I see so many changes happening around me and become increasingly aware of what Buddhists call “impermanence”.  If we hang on too much to the way things were, we suffer.

My friends have always considered me somewhat of a “philosopher”, and as far back as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by what makes people tick.  When I was a little girl, instead of the usual stuff, I wanted to be a “wise old woman” when I grew up.  Not a nurse or a teacher, but a wise old woman.  I imagined myself helping people with their problems, having answers for them. Thinking of that now it sort of astounds me.  Either I was a weird kid, or I had an inkling of what was going to be required to get through life, not just for myself but for everyone around me.  Perhaps I should have been a psychologist or a social worker.

But I’m a songwriter and a musician.  And I have spun the “wise old woman” idea into simply trying to understand and reflect the world around me.  From the inside out.

IJ

Everybody Can Sing

 

It drives me crazy when I hear of another incident of a teacher saying or doing something to belittle a student because of their less-than-perfect musical skills.  But it still happens, and it happens all the time.  And students don’t just hurt for a minute and get over it;  they often carry that scar for the rest of their lives.

I first experienced the sensitivity that people have when it comes to musical ability many years ago, when a good friend of mine and I were having what I thought was a pretty mundane conversation about singing.  She asked me why she couldn’t find the right note when she was singing, and I told her it was because she had a tin ear.

Yes, I said that.

I immediately realized what a stupid idiot I was when I saw her eyes well up with tears.  I was probably twenty years old and had been singing and playing music all my life with little or no idea of how lucky I was to have it come so easily to me.  It’s not that I thought everybody was the same, I knew that wasn’t true.  I would often get picked to sing a lead part in a choir, and even though I wasn’t a particularly talented clarinet player (I got impatient with reading notes, so I made things up by ear!), I could pretty much pick up any instrument and make something musical come out of it.  I knew that other kids couldn’t necessarily do that, but it never occurred to me that they cared much.

When I first started teaching guitar back in the late 80’s, I belonged to a local non-profit organization that was a group of music instructors.  We once held an open house in the basement of a local church, where people interested in taking lessons could come and meet us all.  One of our teachers taught voice, and she had an almost holistic approach to her lessons.  She gave a talk about her teaching style and mentioned the fact that many people are particularly sensitive about their voices and whether or not they can sing.  There were several people there who had come that afternoon because they were interested in voice lessons, and after her talk I could see that a couple of them were particularly emotional, openly crying.  When I spoke with that teacher awhile later, she told me that it happens all the time with her adult students.  In working with them, she finds they often become extremely emotional opening up and singing out, and a lot of it has to do with having been belittled or ridiculed as children because of their voices.

One of our mottoes in that little non-profit was that everybody can play and everybody can sing.  We wanted to bring the joy of playing and singing back into people’s lives, instead of this idea that if you weren’t a Mariah Carey or an Eric Clapton, you were wasting your time.  The person who started that organization those many years ago, Becky Bernson, died of cancer in February 2000.   But if it hadn’t been for her and that group of people, I don’t know that I would have understood as much as I do today how deeply people feel about their ability to sing and play an instrument, and how devastated they become when someone tells them they can’t.

I’ve been teaching guitar now since 1989, and I have witnessed this from time to time in my own students.  They tell me that they WANT to play or sing but they really can’t because someone, a teacher or a parent, told them so.  I’ve also heard horror stories from my friends and from my friends’ children that have so angered me, it’s hard for me not to go and find those teachers or choir leaders and simply rake them over the coals myself!  Do they realize that all they have to do is to give a child (or an adult, for that matter) one dirty look when he or she sings off key or out of time, in order to give them a life long inferiority complex?  What they are “teaching” is that these people are not good enough!  What kind of a life lesson is that?  The Simon Cowell’s of the world, and those who fancy themselves as being musical experts, have done more damage than they will ever realize to those who were not born with natural musical abilities.  That’s why I don’t watch those “talent” shows;  all I can imagine is how horrendous people must feel when they are considered not good enough.

It won’t be  long before it is Christmas again, and we all know what a huge part Christmas songs and carols play in the joy of that season.  What can more beautiful than seeing a happy, smiling, enthusiastic class of young children belting out a Christmas song at the school Christmas concert? What is more joyful than your friends and family playing or singing some silly or sentimental tunes, sipping eggnog by the fire? That’s what it’s all about!

Those many years ago when I realized what I had done to my friend, I apologized profusely to her.  To this day, I hope she can forgive me for being so stupidly insensitive.

Because the truth is, everybody can play.  And everybody can sing.

IJ

My Grandfather The “Slacker”

 

I bought a poppy the other day, as I often do this time of year.  A red one, not one of those anti-war white ones.  I’m sort of peeved that this movement grabbed the very symbol of Remembrance Day and twisted it to their own political purpose.

It’s not that I love war, or accept it or even simply tolerate it.  I don’t.  But the poppy, to me, represents the people who have sacrificed, often everything, because of war.  And that’s it.  It’s not about politics to me.  It’s about life.  And often death.

My father served in World War II even though he considered himself a pacifist.  His father, my Grandfather, as I found out very recently, was actually a draft dodger.  The war he was refusing to participate in was World War I, and in those days the dodgers were referred to as “slackers”.  He was in the U.S., having been sent over by his family in Denmark to be educated by his wealthier aunt and uncle in Montana.  It didn’t work out too well between them, so my teenage Grandfather left and wandered around the northern states, hopping trains and getting work where he could.

I never could figure out what made him cross the border into Canada, until my cousin recently uncovered a U.S. document that showed he had been drafted.  We more or less put two and two together;  he came to Canada to avoid the draft!  It actually made me chuckle to realize that my Grandfather had the guts to run. Some might see that as cowardice, but I believe it’s a lot more brazen to avoid being herded into a horrid war.  I can imagine how he viewed it;  he was not an American citizen, so why would he fight as one?

Not long after spending time in Canada, he went back to Denmark and married my Grandmother and they both came back to Canada to settle.  My father, the first of four children, was born in Calgary.

I wonder how my Grandfather felt about my Dad enlisting when he did.  Did he agree with it, or simply accept that there was not much that could be done?  My Dad never saw any action in World War II, he was stationed in Alberta and here on Vancouver Island and basically just worked on fighter planes testing instrument panels.  Although he was, as I said, a pacifist, I think he felt he had to do his duty, as much of a contradiction as that was.  He was a history nut, and could tell you something about any and every war on the planet since the beginning of time.  I might be exaggerating, but not by much!  In that respect, he knew more than many what war was all about.

These many years later, his favourite grandson, my nephew has had five tours in Afghanistan and is now training troops elsewhere in the world.

I respect my Grandfather for not wanting to be in a war.  I respect my Dad for enlisting.  I respect my nephew for risking his life in Afghanistan not once, but five times.  I’m never going to stop hating wars and the effects they have on so many.  But every November, I’m going to wear a red poppy because I don’t ever want to forget what so many have done for all of us.

IJ

What’s The Story?

It surprises me sometimes what I will discover or uncover while I’m out for a simple half-hour walk. Sometimes I experience little moments that surprise or entertain me.  More often than not, I come across objects about which I don’t really know the whole story, so I’m left to ponder.

Things found on the side of the road are common.  On just one such walk last week, I found a toddler’s bright white sock on the side-walk, a child’s toque stuck on a fence post, and finally, thrown across the back of a bench at a bus stop, a pair of man’s pants.  It wasn’t too hard to imagine how the sock and the toque got left behind, but the man’s pants?  As the expression goes, some things are left best to the imagination.

Lately we have enjoyed an extra stretch of sunny days, spotlighting all of the gorgeous fall colours. And the pumpkins!  So many houses have pumpkins proudly displayed on their front porches and fences, some of them carved, some simply left in their bright orange original state.  Halloween decorations are everywhere too, some of them store bought and others home made and entertainingly original.  On one front lawn, there are nothing but graveyard headstones with obvious names of historical figures.  Except one, which is marked “Usher”.  Not a fan of his music? 🙂

Yesterday on my walk, I was crossing a quiet intersection, passing a little girl on her tricycle accompanied by her mother who was carrying an infant in a snugly.  The little girl asked “The cat is just a decoration, right Mummy?” to which the mother reassuringly replied “Yes, sweetie, it’s just a decoration.”  I realized that they were looking at something behind me.  I wondered why she’d be scared of a cat decoration until I turned around and saw the giant blow-up black cat, menacingly perched on the roof of a house.  No wonder she was scared!  

Today, heard a cyclist coming up behind me as I was walking…when she passed by me, I noticed she was wearing butterfly wings that flapped in the wind.  Probably on her way to school, to a special school Halloween party, I surmised.

Soon after, I passed a house where someone had posted a piece of paper with a warning to dog owners.  I have seen that post for a few weeks now, and I often see posts like it, telling people to pick up after their dogs.  There are a lot of dog walkers in our neighbourhood, and most of them are kind enough to scoop the poop, but there are those rare few who have no such sense of decency.  I didn’t read that particular post previously because I was sure it was another exasperated home owner who had hit one too many piles of poop while mowing the lawn.  Today, I decided to stop and actually read it.

I was wrong about its content.

The text below the title may be hard to see.  It says:  “Please do not walk your dog too close to the hedge, as our cat is very territorial and protective of this lawn you’re walking on!  She hides in this hedge!  So walk on this lawn at your own risk! She does not discriminate by dog breed or size either!  Have a great day!  Woof! Meow! :-)”  

Below is a cartoon with a cat chasing a dog, who is exclaiming “There’s something wrong here…”

Having had several “territorial” cats, I can well understand the warning!  The picture in my head of that cat chasing dog after surprised dog made me laugh out loud.

Quite often people intentionally leave things on their boulevards that they are hoping to get rid of.  I’ve done that myself a couple of times with varying degrees of success.  But I’ve never understood the couch thing.  Why do people leave stinky old couches out, some of them for days IN THE RAIN?  How can they even imagine that someone would want to sit in something like that, let alone bring it home?  It defies logic.

Lastly, on one of my walks a couple of weeks ago I noticed something white on the ground.  On closer inspection, I saw that it was a note.  I walked past it, and then decided to turn around, pick it up and actually read it.  What it said surprised and delighted me:

I could only imagine the story behind that note.  There are no names anywhere on it.  Were they neighbours, family, or friends?  Why couldn’t the recipient cook?  Perhaps it was an elderly person or someone just home from the hospital, or otherwise incapacitated.  What struck me most, however, was the generosity of the person who wrote the note.  Somebody knew the recipient’s situation and went out of their way to make them a meal.  This wasn’t really what you would call a “random” act of kindness, rather it was a thoughtful and deliberate one. And it doesn’t get any kinder than that.

I still have the note and I think I will keep it to remind myself of all of the special moments that take place–the extraordinary events that quietly happen between people.  These moments may never make the local news or YouTube, but I am made aware that they are happening all of the time.

Whoever said walks are boring must be doing it with a bag over their head.

IJ