A Small Act of Kindness

It was long ago in the early months of 1978. I’d completed my bachelor’s degree the spring before and was struggling to find myself and my direction.  Lacking both confidence and friends, I was mostly a whiner. On that cloudy winter morning, I was walking toward the UWM campus with Jill, a singer who employed me as her regular piano accompanist.

Jill and I were more than acquaintances, but not quite friends. A gifted soprano, she was also beautiful and self-possessed, and very used to getting her way. She was loaded with all the confidence and polish I lacked and was destined for a career. Always the center of attention, she could be quite brusque with the hired help, which I most certainly was then.

I don’t remember what I had just said to her, but it made her stop abruptly right there on the corner of Prospect and Linnwood. I recollect thinking that I had really stepped into it and was about to get bawled out, but Jill’s expression read differently.

“Look, dear,” she said, looking directly into my face and touching my arm with her hand. “If I were to give you a piece of advice, would you promise me to think about it?”

I nodded assent and in less than a minute she laid it out for me. She made it clear that I had everything I needed to solve my problems, and then suggested a first step. Her advice was nothing profound but because it was spoken with seemingly “uncharacteristic” kindness, it carried abundant weight. I took it to heart and within a month had sorted out many of my issues and developed a plan.

I had the opportunity to pay that debt forward some years later. It was in the late 1980s and during the interim I’d moved to Seattle, gone to grad school, met and married my life partner (K), moved to Southern California, and started a family. I was working in arts management and a colleague was experiencing life difficulties. I took Monica out for a latte one morning and offered her the same advice that Jill had given me. “I can’t guarantee that any of this will work,” I told her, “But you may find something useful in it.”

I continued to encounter Monica now and again over the years because K and she both sang together in the LA Master Chorale. I had long since forgotten our coffee chat. It wasn’t until twenty years later that I was reminded. K and I had picked up stakes once more and abandoned Los Angeles for the paradise of Sequim. It was at dinner, one evening.

“I had a long chat with Monica on Facebook this afternoon,” K began.

“Oh? And how is Monica,” I replied.

“Oh, busy and thriving as always. You know that she credits you with turning her life around and getting her that first job, don’t you?”

I had neither known nor suspected. I hadn’t even remembered giving Monica advice. At best, I’m sure that all I did was remind her of her own capability and perspicacity, and perhaps suggested a first step or two for her to pursue. I guess we each remember things in our own way. Nevertheless, here was a moment of kindness, long forgotten, coming back upon the water. It was such a simple thing, too, but it made me think of Jill.

There’s an old expression, “No good deed goes unrewarded.”  More recently it’s been given a snarky rewrite: “No good deed goes unpunished.” I cannot begin to express how much I despise this new version. It’s tantamount to a justification for never performing any good deed. And yet, buried within it lies an unfortunate kernel of truth. No matter how we try, some acts of kindness will not end well.

We bought our first house right before the turn of the millennium. It was a fixer-upper with two houses on the lot. We lived in the front house and ran our respective businesses from the back house. Shortly after we moved in, a family friend fell upon hard times. She’d just gone through an acrimonious divorce and now was losing her living situation. We had a spare bedroom in the back house that we weren’t using, plus there was the bathroom and kitchen all but unused by us. It seemed a golden opportunity to help her get back on her feet again.

When we made her the offer, we made it clear that except for the bedroom, it was a shared arrangement. Within a month of moving in, however, tensions arose because of her “lack of privacy.” My working in the office in the morning before she had left for work was disruptive. Use of the bathroom by K’s singing students was invasive. My piano practice was intolerable. And worse than all that, she fully expected to be adopted as part of the family and to be included in every evening meal in the front house, along with all family social events. Emotions escalated quickly until there was a blow up and she moved out. It was ugly, and the fallout continued for more than a decade.

Were we wrong to initiate that act of kindness? No. Were we naïve? Most assuredly. Would we do it again? That’s difficult to answer. We’re older and perhaps a little wiser, so certainly we’d be considering more factors than we did before. The opportunity to help someone when they need it most is not presented to one every day and is not to be ignored. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand what the actual need is and whether one has the tools/skills necessary to meet that need. In the case above, the need was actually so much more than merely an inexpensive place to live, and the true act of kindness was not the direct or obvious thing at all. To be clear, though, we’ve offered a room to young trans people in need several times over the years without consequences.

The point is that we are given small opportunities to be kind many times a day, every day. While not close, I know Monica well enough to know that she has paid my kindness forward many times over. As I ruminate on this, I can’t help but think again of Jill. I’ll wager that she doesn’t remember her act of kindness to me on that cold Milwaukee street corner so many years ago, let alone thought about how many grains of sand on how many beaches that kindness has touched. We are both old now. I think perhaps it’s time that I remind her.

Have you encountered a similar small act of kindness in your life? How did it get paid forward?