Have you noticed?
What? I cannot hear you saying that, but I bet you know what.
Why is it that when a person today offers to help us it is not quite the same response- wise from us as it might have been decades ago?
Most of us are wary if a stranger offers more than just opening a door for us.
Radar seems to go up and we wonder, what’s their ulterior motive, hmm?
And if we don’t question this act of unsolicited kindness and accept it for what we believe it to be, just that an act of unadulterated giving, than that seems to be the day that something awful happens to us!
Some might say a double edged sword; and you feel damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Too many chances for the bad to happen in life and heaven knows the nightly news is full of stories of them.
Our neighborhood, I think that I have mentioned it before it is so transient with people moving in and out so often. Just for an example we counted families that lived in the home next door to ours in the nearly thirteen years that we have been living here in this particular house we have had thirteen neighbors in that house to our right, and the house on our other side was destroyed by the hurricane in 2004 and so it is just an empty lot and the new owners live in Germany and won’t be building until they retire years from now, crazy!
So it is at times quite lonely here.
And you get jaded to meet the part timers who move in and usually move on…
The reason I brought up the act of kindness thing it appears that someone renting a home on the other side of the empty lot has been offering to mow lawns for some of the other neighbors. Now that seemed like a very generous offer and Hubby used to be one of those who did that for no other reason than to help out someone who may have needed help like when we lived in a neighborhood in Punta Gorda with mostly all seniors. And at the time we were still in our forties and although Hubby was working fulltime when the mower was out he would offer to mow our adjacent neighbors lawns while they were here or even when they went back up north for the summer.
It was for free of course.
Just doing the neighborly thing and those yards were tiny anyway and so it was no big deal to Hubby and it kept our area neatly manicured a benefit to all.
This fellow has approached us before the night we were going to the hospital back in May when Hubby’s blood pressure went sky high and we went to have it checked.
The man started talking to us and we said we were in a bit of a hurry to get over to the hospital and he offered to follow us over in his car. Mind you we never met him before and to this day we still don’t know even his first name, but he offered that and to us being out of practice with such things and in a precarious situation at the time thought it was rather an odd offer. He appears to be harmless but so did Ted Bundy, hmm? I know a bit farfetched, huh? But one never knows does one?
Any-who, we saw him again today driving a lawn mower around the neighborhood mowing lawns, but he never finished the one across the street and with all the rain it is quite long and now looks rather hacked. I thought perhaps his lawn tractor broke down, but Hubby said he drove it home, who knows...
With Hubby’s ills doing what used to be simple like our own lawn is a bigger project especially with the hot, hot, hot factor added in and so he hasn’t offered his overly generous services in many years.
Hubby’s nickname used to be the Lone Ranger, because when we lived on the other coast in Ormond Beach across from the Atlantic Ocean and tourists would drive on the beach there and some would drive foolishly in the soft sand, Hubby used to tow them out for FREE with his black Jeep Wrangler in those days. People did try to pay but he would say basically that new idea of paying it forward, yep he would say help someone else…and they would just say thanks then. That’s why I love him, before being a paid deputy for nearly twelve years starting at age 45 (he went to the academy at the age of 44), he had been a volunteer fireman for twelve years which included his last several as Chief and that is while in college and when he worked in the corporate world and also had our own businesses back up in New Jersey. (Trivia fact, did you know that 70% of all firemen and women are volunteers in the USA, yep it was on the national news just recently!)
On that more thoughtful wonderings let me be the first to wish you all a very happy good night and to ask you kindly to count your blessings and ask you to share those overages and we will too!
And next time please be here or be square, ya hear?
Speaking My Mind is about: Tobi, who is a middle aged, no, oh all right a slightly over the hill woman with all the imperfections that go with that, and this concerns her daily life's perceptions and experiences.
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