A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

It’s the first of May, a day associated with warm Spring air, trees sporting their baby-green leaves, and birds’ nests sheltering newborns, their gauzy precursors of wings, their tiny beaks constantly open.

If you’re in France today, particularly in Paris, you’re taking note of which streets will be impassable due to labor/political related demonstrations. Busloads of police officers girded in riot gear and armed with batons arrive wherever a crowd has gathered. (I once witnessed this. The Parisian riot patrols don’t play.)

What’s that? Some U.S. university campuses are embroiled in similar scenes? Violence has broken the peaceful spirit with which most of these demonstrations began. That was inevitable. Too many people speak and fail to listen. To paraphrase a high school friend of mine who posts on Facebook, too few people realize that it’s possible to understand both sides of an issue, even when the issue is as huge as the Israeli-Palestinian one.

Kindness is an issue that means a lot to me. The importance of kindness lifted its lovely head recently.

Last Saturday morning, as I pushed my market shopping cart away from my car, I noticed an elderly woman in my wake. She appeared to be feeble, old lady feeble. Bent from her waist, the upper part of her body was inclined over her empty cart. Her pace was slowed by her posture. I turned toward her and offered to return her cart to the “corral.”

“I was just about to make you the same offer,” she replied.

Stunned, yet somehow amused, I thanked her.

“Those flowers are so pretty.”

She’d noticed the bouquet of blooms I’d purchased at the request of my spouse. (Let’s call her Viv.)

“Thank you. Flowers really brighten up a room, don’t they?”

We deposited our carts and turned to walk toward our cars. “I hope you have a good weekend,” I said.

“Oh, I will. I’m having my birthday party this evening.”

“Happy birthday!” I said. “Mine was at the beginning of the month.”

“April Fool’s Day! Wonderful!” She gifted me with the loveliest smile.

I believe I smiled the entire drive home. That’s the power inherent in a kind verbal exchange with a stranger. It’s a reminder of the best we can offer each other in times such as these. It is perhaps our best way to overcome the fear and anger stoked by those who demand to control and shout, those who will not listen to others, those who will not offer a smile or a kind word or gesture, those who refuse to imagine all of the positive possibilities offered by the first day of May.

Renée Bess ©2024

Renée Bess writes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. In 2018, “OUR HAPPY HOURS, LGBT VOICES FROM THE GAY BARS,” won a Goldie Award which she shared with her co-story collector, Lee Lynch. In 2019 Renée won an Alice B. Readers Appreciation Award in recognition of her body of work. Renée’s next book, “HER LAST SECRET,” will see the light of day in October, 2024. Her publisher is Flashpoint Publications.