Rainbows and Kissing Puppy Dogs

Do you remember last Christmas when I was the recipient of a random act of kindness when someone left a large box of chocolates at my front door? I had posted about it on Facebook, hoping I’d be able to root out the person who did it. No such luck. I asked all my friends and family. No one fessed up. Yesterday I was talking to one of my neighbors---the one I’ve known the longest and who snow-blows my front sidewalk in the winters---and I asked her if she by chance left the chocolates. Nope, but she said she got a box at her door too! She did the same thing I did, checked it good for package tampering before eating it because at first, it creeped both of us out. While the mystery still remains a mystery at least now I know who ever left the box is someone I don’t know at all and who lives on my cul-de-sac…or maybe our local Jehovah Witnesses who do the door-to-door preaching from time to time? Maybe I got a payoff for always being polite and taking their pamphlets?

I was reminded of the chocolates because this past week I’ve been getting another kind of random act of kindness in the form of painted rocks left inside my mailbox. It’s dark inside that box and when I saw the first one I thought it was a wasp nest. Scared more than the crap out of me because I’m allergic to bees. If anyone was watching me with my can of Raid and a long-handled broom poking the rock out through the mailbox’s back door they were probably laughing they butts off. By the time I realized it wasn’t a wasp nest, I picked up that rock with its rainbow painted on its face and I was smiling from ear to ear. No one in my neighborhood could possibility know how much I like stones and rocks. I have jars full and an antique trencher from the seventeen hundreds that I keep special rocks in. My trencher-worthy stones don’t necessarily have to be pretty stones I’ve bought along life’s journey. Some are just rocks I’ve picked up on a day when I was having fun. (I need to look up the words ‘stone’ and ‘rock’. Can I correctly use them interchangeably? There's always something new to learn, isn't there.)

There are ten houses on my cul-de-sac and countless little kids and I don’t know any of them by name. Most of them want to pet Levi when I take him for walks. He’s been taught to sit when little kids approach him and to stay seated while they pet him which has earned praise from my chocolate receiving neighbor who is also a veterinary. The rocks in the mailbox got me to thinking about neighbors and how much we judge them by the way they treat their dogs and kids. Two little girls who live two doors down are not allowed to go past my driveway and two little boys who live down the block on the other side of me are not allowed to go past my neighbor’s driveway which means the boys and girls never get closer than 170 feet apart. One day that will change and that 170 foot kid-free zone will no longer exist. My romance reading soul has me seeing them in the future playing kissy-face in front of my house. If it was the 1950s their parents would then get phone calls tattling on them before they even got back home. They say it takes a village to raise kids and it took me years to figure out why I couldn’t get away with any boy-girl shenanigans as I walked home from school. My neighborhood was apparently filled with spies, busybodies and concerned mothers. Yes, it does take a village so I suppose I should have reported that Levi licked one little girl's face. She then sat right down in front of him and kissed him back. On the lips. Mouth kissing puppy dogs is yucky in some circles, but Levi didn't mind.

I did laundry yesterday. It might not sound like a big deal but I went a total of fourteen days without doing laundry when in pre-pandemic times I did it every Sunday. How do I know it was fourteen days and not thirteen or twelve? I didn’t until I ran out of underpants and I was giving them the Marie Kondo folds when they came out of the dryer. But my first clue that I needed clean clothes came when I had nothing left in my undies drawer but a pair I set aside to wear to doctor appointments and trips to Urgent Care. (You do that too, fess up.) With the pandemic stay-at-home orders in effect underpants are the only garments I’ve consistently change every single day. I quit wearing bras in the second week and I was reminded recently that I need to start wearing them again. The weather warmed up enough to walk the dog without me wearing a winter coat and I got half way down the sidewalk then promptly made a U-turn back into the house. Levi thought we took the shortest walk in canine history but I just needed to get my boobs in a hammock. No one wants see 'old girls' hanging free. And in case you ever need to take a pop quiz on my life, this paragraph contains the answer to the extra credit question.  ©

From Doctor’s Bills to Elephant Bells

I got a bill from the doctor’s office for the first time I saw his nurse practitioner about at my Popeye’s Elbow. $39.00 for the clinic visit and after the “Medicare Insurance Adjustment” the grand total came to $107.43. What the heck? Insurance adjustments are supposed to lower your bill, not raise them by $68.43. I called their billing service and was told that Medicare likes to help you get to your deductible faster. “By making me pay for services I’m not getting? That makes no sense what so ever!” I told her. “I know,” she replied. “You’ll have to call Medicare for a more comprehensive explanation. We can't do anything about it.” Medicare takes forever and a day to send out their Summary Notices but when it gets here you can bet your grocery money that I’ll be calling about that $68.43 “adjustment.” In the meantime I was told I should pay the bill in full. It’s been years since I’ve racked up enough doctor appointments in a calendar year to satisfy my Medicare deductible before November. And I like it that way because that means I haven’t been sick. What a crazy, stupid change in Medicare if it pans out not to be a mistake. What if I didn’t have an extra seventy bucks to throw around on something I didn’t get?

The next day I got another bill from the doctor’s office, this time for $52.00 and after the “Medicare Insurance Adjustment” it was reduced down to $43.39. I called again. I was told the first bill was for the use of the clinic room, the second was for the services of the nurse practitioner. I used the bathroom while I was there so I'm surprised I didn't get billed for a toilet paper and flushing fee! 

Service people saw the surly side of me this week. My irrigation company called two weeks ago and wanted to come out this week Wednesday to turn my system on and fix any heads that winter may have damaged. Great, I could be home then but the scheduler couldn’t give me a window of time they’d be here. “I’ll let you know later,” he promised. He didn't. Tuesday morning I called him and asked if he could give me a window for the next day. “I’ll call you after six when I have the route set,” he said. I replied---and not too nicely, I might add---that I liked their old system better. “What was the old system?” he asked and I told him that the guy who did his job for years before he took it over always gave us a window of three hours in the same phone call when he’d set the date. “I can do that when I call tonight.” “A lot of good that does,” I snapped, “when I’ve had to keep the entire day open for two weeks waiting for you to call with a time!” Fortunately, the young guy who showed up to do the work was a sweetie pie and I didn’t give him a lick of surly or sass. 

Thursday the tide was about to change. When I came out of the grocery store I loaded my bounty into the car, hopped in the driver’s seat and hopped back out to take a sheet of notebook paper off my windshield. In block print, no punctuation or capitalization---a sure sign the writer was under thirty---were the words, “have a happy day” followed by a happy face drawing. I looked around and of course no one was around to see me smile. Then a cynical thought crossed my mind. Maybe someone scratched or dented my car and he/she left that note because someone saw it happen and the note writer was pretending to leave their contact information. I walked around the car, carefully eyeballing the gray metal and plastic. It was fine. I was truly the recipient of a random act of kindness. I kept the note and I’ll pass it on to another unsuspecting soul who will probably wear a silly smile all afternoon like I did---hopefully without my momentary cynical thought. 

Life was good again and it got better on Friday when I went to a lecture called, What Happens When You Tickle an Elephant's Toes? Crazy name but an interesting lecture about the Elephant Nature Park outside Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, which is a place where dozens of elephants live who’ve been abused and neglected. The woman giving the lecture took part in one of those volunteer programs where she paid to spend two weeks working at the sanctuary bathing, walking and feeding the elephants who live there. She’s a fascinating person. She works in a Search & Rescue K9 Unit and has been to over 40 countries. Her vacations are never your standard, hotel and tour bus kind of vacations. She finds these off the wall, ecotourism vacations that I’d never do but love hearing about. Why is it that some of us are doers and others, like me, are their cheerleaders? In my next life I want to be a doer who finds out firsthand that if you tickle an elephant’s toes they "laugh" just like we do and who learns that elephants are so smart they'll pack grass up inside the bells they wear around their necks to make them stop ringing when they play hide and seek with their Mahout. ©

NOTE: Ecotourism is defined as, “tourism directed toward exotic, often threatened, natural environments, especially to support conservation efforts and observe wildlife.” In other words you pay to work to make a difference for good causes.  Volunteer for Wildlife 

Photo at the top is of an elepant bell.

The Holiday Random Act of Kindness

Friday morning, the 3^rd of July, I went to the blood lab to get my thyroid re-checked but they were closed. Then I went to the township offices to pay my summer taxes. Closed. Third stop: a new real estate office, opened by the guy who walked us through the building process when we moved here in 2001. Closed. At the bank I tried to see the investment guy but he took the day off. I was batting zero. My bad. No scratch that phrase. I hate it. I should have known all the natives would be leaving town the day before Independence Day. Then I went to Lowe’s knowing nothing short of a hurricane, forest fire or flood would close their doors so close to a holiday known for backyard warrior projects among those of us left behind in the city. I scored some patio stones and half price geraniums. 

Then I took myself out to an early lunch at an actual sit-down and eat restaurant. No drive-through this time. I was in the mood to be a lady of leisure. I sat with my back to the wall doing my best imitation of Hemingway as I jotted notes about my fellow diners. Straight in front of me in my section was a table of four teens showing off the tiny charms in their Origami Owl necklaces. What a great way to lure guys to within kissing distance. I made a mental note to wear mine more often. To my right side was a sad looking guy with a big belly and a vacant stare, and next to him was an older couple who didn’t speak much. When the guy in the couple finally did I figured out why they weren’t conversing in public. He had one of those voice boxes that makes you sound like R2D2, the astromech droid from Star Wars. It was loud and caught everyone’s attention. On my left side was a young, dejected looking mother with two children under three who sat alone while her husband was outside talking on the phone. To his credit, just after they placed their order and before he left to use the phone he kissed her on the lips. A sweet, I-love-you-babe kind of kiss. Still, I felt sorry for her.

It’s the kind of restaurant that leaves the check on the table when they bring the food---my kind of service because waiting for bills churns up childhood feelings of being made to stay at the table until bedtime if I hadn’t cleaned my plate which happened on Thursday liver nights and when ever my mother cooked orange vegetables. When I finished eating at the restaurant I moved my plate to the side, on top of the check, and when I went to get it the dishes and the check were gone. I flagged down a waitress and I told her that whoever took my dishes away also took the check with them. Off she went to look for my bill. She couldn’t find it and by then another waitress got in the act to help her look. Finally, a third waitress came over and told the rest of us that my bill was paid by another customer. I was so shocked that all I could say was, “What? Why would anyone do that? Wow!” I might be articulate in print but in real-life situations, not so much. 

“Because,” the waitress replied, “There are some really nice people in the world.” And with that my lips puckered up and tears rolled down my cheeks. Jeez! The waitresses all took off like roaches under a light, fearing, I’m sure, that I'd start sobbing out loud. 

As I drove home I kicked myself for not telling the waitress to thank my benefactor if she sees him or her again. I hadn’t spoken to any of the other customers or even so much as exchanged eye contact or smiles. It was a mystery. I figured it wasn’t the table of teens who paid for my breakfast or the mother with the babies. R2S2 had his back to me so I eliminated him and his wife. That left the sad guy with the pot belly who caused me to cry. Or maybe it was someone from another section all together.

Those tears came completely by surprise and made me wonder if I wasn’t more lonely and alone than I would have guessed, had I thought about my state of mind earlier in the day. Long holiday weekends, after all, are hard on most widows. Regardless of what brought the tears on it was the second time this year I’ve been the recipient of a random act of kindness. That means one of two things: 1) I do, indeed live in a good neighborhood or 2) I look so pathetic out in public that others think I need cheering up. My money is on choice number one…though there is a third possibility that just occurred to me. Maybe one of my fellow diners actually thought I could be a budding Hemingway and he/she just wanted to give me something colorful to write about. ©