More on kindness

I find myself inspired this evening sitting at the kitchen table of the J. Marc Taylor family in Andover, Ks. My family is on the frontside of a last week of summer "stay cation" and although we are over 150 miles from home, we are visiting family, the kids are sleeping on the floor, and we're pretty much just hunkered down enjoying each other's company... so this still qualifies as a stay cation. The reason for my inspiration is that I just finished catching up on reading the spirit of Maxine blog -- Jan's most recent 3 postings. I wanted to say that I am honored to be mentioned 3 times in Jan's posts.

Just a bit of background, my kindness offer to a friend was to a lady I work with who's dad was suddenly ill and hospitalized. I actually know her dad as I used to work in an office at Tinker adjacent to his -- and he was always a very kind person and a true servant for the people.

In reading Jan's posting about kindness I am reminded about a trip to Fort Supply Oklahoma in our '63 Ford Fairlane (white with a green roof - another very interesting story involving my dad, a shotgun, and the most probable cause for my poor hearing). I remember how excited we were to be on the road with dad as he had hurried home from work that day, packed us and our things into the car and headed down the road west. It was the Friday before Christmas of 1966 and we (my dad, me, and my two brothers) were on our way to see my mom, at Western State (mental) Hospital. A set of circumstances that makes this story just that much more poignant. Anyway, we had car trouble -- I think it was a water pump or maybe just a belt, but whatever it was pegged the engine temperature gage and stopped us in our tracks. Luckily, or maybe by design, my dad stopped at a spot on the side of the road a hundred feet from the only farmhouse within 20 miles in either direction along our route. I remember it was early in the evening and starting to get very cold when my dad went up and knocked on the door to ask to borrow their phone. I'm sure he was relieved to find the home's inhabitants to be kind people. Indeed, they were so very kind that they insisted on corralling my two brothers and me into their living room where we laid on the floor in front of their TV eating cookies, drinking hot cocoa, and watching, for the first time, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Eventually, my grandpa arrived with the necessary replacement parts and he and my dad repaired the car and got us on the road again. To this day, I cannot watch that Christmas season program without thinking about the kindness of those people and how they freely opened their home to us.

OK, I promise to post at least two more times here this week while I'm off. And thank you to my wonderful aunt Jan, for the inspiration!