RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS - Paying it Forward

Years ago I started thinking about the Lenten season, and what it’s supposed to mean for those few days before Easter. Traditionally, we will give up a thing, or some pleasure that we take for granted every day. This was all fine and good. We spend the next 40 days doing without chocolate, sugar, or peanut butter; or going out with the gang on Friday nights. Some of us even vow that we will quit using elevators and escalators and start taking a parking spot in the farthest corner, making us have to walk a distance to the office building or the grocery store. We might make the supreme sacrifice by stopping by the gym to work out every evening. All of this is supposed to be sacrifice for a mere 40 days.

Here’s my take on those sacrifices. Usually, when we give up favorite foods, such as sugar, chocolate, butter or ice cream, we have in mind losing a few pounds. When we give up going out on Friday nights, we have in mind saving a few dollars. When we park in the farthest corners of parking lots and take stairs instead of elevators or escalators, a person usually has in mind in toning up some muscles…..getting into better shape, or that favorite old pair of jeans. In others words, it’s a selfish endeavor. We’re getting some personal gain out of these sacrifices. That’s right! I said it! It’s a selfish endeavor. Don’t get me wrong, though. Those are all good things to do, but it’s not exactly what a sacrifice is supposed to be…selfish.

I was inspired the movie Pay it Forward. The all star cast is Kevin Spacy, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment. A student takes an assignment from his social studies teacher; Think of an idea to change the world for the better and put it into action. He decides to take the challenge by helping three people, who will, in turn, each help three more people, and so on and so on. It boiled down to random acts of kindness. What a wonderful movie!

Do you know just how incredibly difficult it is to just do a kindness or just help someone just because you want to do it? Here’s even more of a challenge. Let’s say you actually complete a random act of act of kindness, and now you have to keep it to yourself. You cannot tell anyone. You may not toot your own horn AT ALL! You just do it for the sake of doing it, just to help someone else because you want to. If that person says they must repay you somehow, you must tell them, “No, but you must pass a kindness on to someone else.”

Here’s where I would have a hard time. Say, if I bought a Big Mac and took it down to the corner and gave it to a homeless person; I’d nearly burst before my husband came home, and noticing that the house was a mess, and would ask, “Soooo, what’d you do today?”…. and I’d blurt out, “I went to MacDonalds and bought a Big Mac and gave it to the homeless person that stands on the corner of Jones and Red Bluff!” Then I’d await my accolades and pats on the back. What a good girl am I! Again, that’s not how it works. It should be enough of a reward just to help another person. It should be, but I would have to ask myself “Just how do I get to that point?” And my answer would be the obvious; “Well, it just takes practice. You get used to it.” What? It doesn’t come naturally? No, what comes naturally to humans is survival, propagation, success, one-upmanship, compete, compete and compete to name a few natural human instincts.

Here’s another pitfall. It’s never a bad thing to do something good to help someone else. However, if you do a good thing, and say, you were even able to keep it to your self, not telling a soul. And then you turn around and say something unkind about someone, or do something hurtful or to slight someone else in some way. Well, there you go! You’ve just wiped out all of your private Atta-Girls. See? I know about this, because alas, I have experience in it. I’ve choked on my feet with the cattiest of cats. Mea Culpa!

It’s simple to do an act of kindness or to pay it forward, but it just isn’t easy. Sometimes just a smile offered to someone who needs to see one is enough; a phone call to someone who is down in the dumps, or a card to someone, just because you were thinking of them. Put your arm around someone who needs a little comfort. Sometimes, it means extending an olive branch to someone you’ve hurt or been hurt by. It’s still an act of kindness. You don’t have to wait for a crisis of any kind. There doesn’t have to be a personal tragedy, hurricane or a fire. I could simply start by trying to do one small kindness a day, for no particular reason at all.

School Lunches Then Vs. Now

The first generation of my siblings (the first four or five of us) will remember what school lunches were like growing up in the 50’s and 60’s. Everything was homemade. The cafeteria ladies wore white uniforms, hairnets and white aprons and NO plastic gloves. They got there at the crack of dawn, put on their hairnets, washed their hands and cooked our school lunch every day. Everything was fresh and homemade.

There were fresh green beans, real mashed potatoes with lumps, homemade gravy, greens, corn, steamed carrots, peas, roast, chicken, meatloaf, smothered steak, and sometimes liver and onions; just to name a few items. The desserts were absolutely divine; pies with meringue 6” deep, real brownies, cherry cobbler and yellow cake with fudge icing. You could get white vitamin D whole milk, chocolate milk, or iced tea (mostly for the teachers). Real pottery plates (divided) and real stainless steel eating utensils were provided to put on metal trays warm from the big dishwasher. If we were lucky, we’d get to buy a school lunch for about 25 cents.

A dear friend reminded me that the junior high school menu was about the same. He said that high school actually had a little more variety. Ahhhh, yes….. Cokes were available as well as other orange sodas, Grape Nehi and hamburgers on some days of the week. Grilled chicken also hit the menu in high school, and again, always fish on Fridays. If you could imagine Luby’s for school lunch at 25 cents, that’s the way it was; more like eating at Luby’s. Actually, I think the cost went up a little in junior high and high school…but not by much.

Most of the time, we made our lunches, and I really, really, really wanted to buy my lunch. But, alas …… I remember my red plaid lunch box with a thermos that invariably broke after the first week of school. We’d pack a sandwich, milk, fruit and cookies. By the time lunch came around the lunch box usually smelled a little funky, and my orange or apple had smashed my sandwich, which was wrapped in waxed paper. If I was lucky enough to have peanut butter instead of bologna or tuna, I’d usually eat the whole sandwich whether it was smashed or not. Then I’d eat the fruit and crumbled cookies, and maybe drink the milk, which didn’t stay very cold.

After the second or third grade, we just used brown paper bags. We’d trade around a bit, but I usually just ate my own lunch. The real trading didn’t start until we got in to junior high school. By then, we noticed that other kids got stuff that was way cooler than ours. I know we weren’t the only kids that had to take a lunch to school. One girl in my class took a tuna sandwich every single day. We only took tuna on Fridays, and then, when we’d get home we had fish sticks for dinner. In a small nutshell, Catholics refrained from eating meat on Fridays, as a sacrifice in order to make reparation for their / our sins. Apparently, according to the Catholic Church, if you ate meat on Friday, you were going straight to hell. It isn’t so these days, with the exception of Lent….I’ve heard. And even then you can get special dispensation to have whatever you want … in a pinch.

Anyway, school steam table lunches in the 50’s and 60’s were definitely above most school lunch standards of present day. As time slipped by, they seemed to go down hill. I would occasionally go to school to have lunch with my daughters. This was in the mid 70’s and mid 80’s. It had totally changed. They got a plastic partition molded tray. It was served by cafeteria workers wearing baggie gloves. They also wore hair nets. I happened upon Mexican Food day a couple of times. This consisted of a large ice cream scoop of sticky rice in a mound in one of the partitions. A ladle full of canned chili was poured over the rice. On top of that, a hand full of Fritos was sprinkled. A salad of lettuce and a few shaved carrot pieces was added, and half a peach in heavy syrup was spooned into the remaining partition. There was a space for a small carton of milk. This made me more insistent than ever that my kids take their lunches, which they invariably forgot.

I have it on good authority from a friend that goes to lunch with her granddaughter; that school lunches have improved since we (she and I) went to lunch with our own kids. Maybe the schools wised up about putting nutrition before budget. I think that some of the schools have taken the Coke machines out of the cafeterias. It still could never beat the lunches we had when we were growing up in the 60’s. It was a great deal more nutritious, if not just down right wholesome and yummy! Our kids and grandchildren will just never really know what they missed.