Poosey Digest: A little more love

Greetings from Poosey.

She was beautiful, perhaps one of the loveliest young girls I’d ever seen… well over six feet tall, slender, dressed modestly in jeans, a sweater and pointed stocking hat. She was shopping at our local food mart with a lady who I assumed was her mother. As the two cruised the aisles communicating with each other via simple nods and smiles, I couldn’t help but notice the young girl’s grace. She didn’t so much walk as float.

It’s not unusual for an overly-tall young lady to hunch over a bit to disguise her remarkable height, but this girl seemed at peace with herself and the world she inhabited there between the frozen foods section and the Saran Wrap. I wanted to do nothing more than simply walk over to her and say, “Young lady, you are a thing of beauty and poise. I just wanted you to know that.” But I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was 2017, not 1955.

I dearly miss the days when we could lead with our emotions with no thought to being misunderstood and thought strange or dangerous.

I have a friend who taught 3^rd grade for nearly four decades and she told me of a teachers’ opening day workshop where the school’s legal expert began the meeting by saying, “No more hugging.” She thought she’d misunderstood the legal eagle. “We can’t open ourselves up to that sort of liability any more.”

My friend said there was absolutely no discussion of how to help little Jennifer when her lunch got crunched on the bus or what to do when Billy is frightened by the thunderstorm during reading class. I asked my veteran of the classroom what she did to change her lifelong habit of hugging children. She said, “I waited until the lawyer left the building then went back to what I knew was right.” Sometimes the still, small voice inside our heads offer better guidance than those who use their heads to steer clear of litigation.

I can remember it like yesterday. Our youth choir was singing in a neighboring church and being teenagers there were a couple hundred other places we’d rather have been on that summer afternoon. A little old man was sitting in the last pew of the church who seemed to vaguely know what was going on and as the concert ended and the congregation streamed up the aisle he worked his walker against the tide, inch by inching his way to the front of the church.

We were hauling out our equipment by the time the elderly gentleman had made his way to the pulpit area and that’s where he grabbed me by the arm. The other kids stopped to see what was happening since the church now was nearly empty except for the old man and us. He said, “I want to thank you kids. Those were the songs my wife and I used to sing.” Then he turned and painfully stepped his way to the rear of the church and out the door.

Mark Twain said, “I can live two months on a good compliment,” and in the case of that little fellow, who’d simply put forth the effort to do what he felt, the effect has lasted decades in my memory.

I wonder if in an effort to be too careful, to not intrude, to avoid risk of being thought odd or dangerous, we don’t often miss out on the best parts of life. Too often we drive home from an event telling ourselves that we wish we’d have thanked someone, encouraged someone, given someone a boost. Okay, maybe a fraction of one percent of us are a bit creepy. But that’s not a big enough proportion of our populace to cause the rest of us from showing others how we appreciate them.

My friend Helen has been in a nursing home for the past 15 years and she keeps the postman busy sending out daily words of encouragement to her friends. She’s now blind so the words tend to lope across the page in a strange fashion. But when her caregiver addresses each envelope and Helen’s missive ends up in our mailbox, it’s the first letter we open. A bank in our area hires a lady to clip items from newspapers and she spend her day sending them out with congratulatory notes on ballgames, births, marriages, awards, and whatever else might brighten up someone’s day.

When I’d scrape my hand jumping out of Grandma’s mulberry tree then create my own trail of tears en route to her kitchen/infirmary, I got a hug before the iodine. Enough hugs and I needed no medication. Given the current mood of our nation we’re in dire need of a little encouragement, a few more compliments, and dare I say it in a world rife with litigation and accusations? …a little more love.

You ever ’round Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.