Post title is a quote from Madonna, as Susan, in the film Desperately Seeking Susan, a movie I still enjoy and watched again as recently as some point during the pandemic. This post that showed up on Instagram is what made me think of it, and I have a similar story to share.
It was likely early in 2008 when I made a small shopping list and went to Kroger. This was at the point when I was having such severe back pain (later diagnosed as caused by swollen disks and hairline vertebral fractures) that I wasn’t able to do much. It was also during the last few months of my mother’s life, when she was getting hospice visits in her residential care home, was admitted to hospice for a short period to provide respite care to me, and then was admitted permanently to hospice before she died in June.
I was also under deadline to turn in my second Coventry novel, which my editor blessedly extended to take some of the pressure off of me.
Clearly, I was under a lot of stress while dealing with physical pain. One of the things on my shopping list that evening was Velveeta (TexMex queso night!). Though I had a few of my items in my cart, I couldn’t find this on any shelves or in any dairy case, and I was leaning on my cart, taking as much pressure off my back as I could, until I froze in the way pain can have of making a body lock. Tears of frustration and pain streamed down my face, and a Kroger employee who’d come from one of the back rooms to restock something saw me. He immediately came to me and helped me to a patio table display so that I could sit down. I knew I sounded stupid when I said, “I can’t find the Velveeta.”
“I know where it is; what size do you need?” he asked.
Then he took my shopping list from my hand, handed me my purse from the cart, and took the cart and the list through the store to find everything remaining on my list. When he came back, he helped me up, pushed my cart to check-out, and grabbed a bagger to make sure I had help out to my car.
Of course I thanked him profusely, still crying as I can do when someone’s kind when I’m already in melt-down mode, and thanked the cashier and bagger, too, for their help.
His actions that day are often the reason I notice other people showing patience and kindness in similar situations. There may be no videos of those moments on social media, and if anyone even shares a story (as I’ve just shared mine), there’ll most often be cynical and jaded comments along the line of, “Things that never happened!” as if people are never kind to strangers. I think even believing in kindness makes us more likely to see it and show it.
Kindness should be shared abundantly
Yes!