Halloween night and I am back-tracking with a tutu’d black cat and my super bright flashlight app, of which I believe can be seen from outer space. According to my husband, this is not true and has told me on several occasions that all phone flashlights are created equal due to the fact that there is a certain level of brightness all LED screens can achieve. It is apparently silly for me to think my app is special or better because it is not, yet I am not convinced. In this situation, I have faith that a certain phone which has been dropped by my black cat companion will soon reveal itself due to the illumination of the brightest flashlight app on the planet.
“You, know,” says Black kitty, “I am starting to think it was a mistake for Mom to give me her phone. Or perhaps I should have left it at your house.” Black kitty is looking very concerned. We have retraced our steps for more than a block and a half with no luck.
At about this moment, a very friendly and observant witch looks at me, “Hmmm, you wouldn’t be looking for a phone would you? You have that look.” I picture myself, the human equivalent of a helicopter scanning the night for an elusive fugitive. “Why yes,” I say, “I am.”
The lovely witch directs us back to a house with a giant pan, the kind that folks who don’t want to answer the door put on their front porch. It’s filled with candy hoping children will have the good manners to grab 1 or 3 pieces and leave an abundance for the 900 kids who appear like ants from 6-8pm in our neighborhood. We arrive at the pan, empty.
To add to the disappointment, there is no phone in front of the pan as described by the witch. Next door a man yells to us. “Ya looking for something?” “Yeah,” I say, “a phone.” “yep, I got it right here,” he says. “THANK GOD!!” Yells Black Kitty who breaks from character to be an elated 12 year old girl for just a moment.
I walk over to the man, who happens to be the husband of one of the ladies I am out chaperoning children with. He had given all us Moms tiny little bottles of flavored vodka earlier. He knows exactly what treats chaperoning parents want. In fact, after fearing a phone had gone missing under my watch, I could actually use another. Instead, I leave him at his candy post and hurry back to join our crew a few streets over.
After all, Black kitty has missed valuable time gathering candy.
The other Moms are pleasantly surprised the phone was found. I mean this is a night for Tom Foolery and no one Tom Fooled with it. We live in a neighborhood that really gets into Halloween. There are several houses that decorate at Griswold levels but with creepy graveyards and leaping spiders.
What this means is that kids are dumped off by the car-full into our neighborhood. Five or six bags of candy – the big ones – are not going to be enough. That is why most every one turns off their lights at 8pm. We aren’t 85 with an early bedtime, we are out of candy! All of this to say, even with hoards of people grabbing candy like mad, a $600 phone left in plain view, on a well lit sidewalk, in front of someone’s house who obviously was not there, did not get taken. It was certainly noticed.
This is one of those little moments in life I pick and add to my bouquet of hope.
Seriously, in a time where there is a lot of fear going around, I love tying a lifetime of hope together into one huge bunch and sharing it. Here are a few stems from my bouquet.
One – In 49 years of interacting with the human race, the majority of people I have interacted with are good.
I figure this is the experience most people have.
You see the bottom dwellers splashed up on front page news but if you really think about it, there are not a whole lot of these characters. The bottom dwellers only seem more prevalent because we are shocked by their stories and tend to read them. No one wants their breaking news feed interrupting an episode of Stranger Things to tell them about a phone not being stolen on Halloween or someone changing a tire for an older lady in the Sprouts parking lot.
Most good flies under the radar.
The millions of times a day a child gets lost and someone takes a minute or an hour to make sure they are safely reunited with their family. There are millions who exercise once a year to support a walk or run they believe in. There is a reason Walmart asks if you would like to give $1, or $3 or $5 at check out to St. Jude’s hospital. It is because we want to give. We want to help. Even if it is only a $1 at a time.
People are good. We are not perfect, we make mistakes but by and large we are good. If this was not the case, why would so many keep trying to make the world a better place? The fact that collectively our hearts continue to break whenever bad, senseless things happen to complete strangers gives me hope.
Two – Diversity is happening.
When I went to elementary school in central Texas basically every single kid was white.
I remember the first black boy who went to our school. He was very dark and his skin looked like velvet. One day I got up the nerve to ask if I could touch his skin in the lunch room. I told him my hypothesis which he thought was funny. Apparently there were other people who thought his skin would feel different to. He actually let us form a line, each of us softly running our finger down the side of his cheek. We weren’t meaning to be rude, we were just curious.
This would never happen today, not because things are too PC but because every since preschool, my kids have had classrooms filled with kids whose families originated from all over the world. Without traveling the world, the world has come to them.
In our neighborhood friends from different cultures celebrate, Diwali, Ramadan, Chinese New Year and Hanukkah. They introduce us to delicious foods and spices. I eat almost as much Indian food now as Mexican. My children have friends who spend summers in Asia and the school year here.
Today’s kids are savvy knowing that friends can believe in different things, be from different places and still enjoy a hot September afternoon together playing in the sprinklers. This gives my hope for their future.
Three – Kindness.
The older I have become, the more I view kindness as almost a super power.
I have done soooo many stupid idiotic things in my life. Things where the last thing I deserved was kindness. And yet, when I least deserve it, there it is, a reminder of one of the better parts of being human.
Many a time I have been zoning out to talk radio, only to look up and notice the freeway is going down to one lane. I have failed to pay attention and am now in the group of last minute assholes. The ones I typically try my hardest to not allow in front of me, yet look at this nice man motioning me in….I totally did not deserve that. I wave like mad.
The policeman just doing his job who pulls me over for speeding. I am in the wrong, I shoot daggers from my eyes as I pull out my driver’s license. He gives me a warning and reminds me he is there for my safety.
These are the small things. The big things have been life changers.
I was assaulted in college and my best friend sent me a card every single day for the rest of the semester. She was majoring in computer science at Texas A&M, and had a beast of a schedule. Still, in an age before cell phones and social media, when a long distance call would have been half our semester spending budget, she found a way to reach out to me every single day to let me know I was loved.
Years later, my husband was out of town when I had my first child. She stayed all night with me in the hospital with this tiny little person. I was frightened to be alone with.
She had her own husband and daughter but met my new Mom panic with kindness.
So while some of the other Moms were surprised on Halloween that Black Kitty’s phone did not slip into the bloody pocket of a zombie, I was not. Bad, horrible things happen, but good wonderful things happen even more.
Why else would strangers open their doors to strangers one night a year, offering buckets of candy and assorted treats? It is because we believe in the good in one another, we depend on it, our lives, legends and futures are built on it.
About the Author: Jeanette McGurk
Jeanette McGurk is a Graphic Designer who entered the world of writing through advertising. She discovered writing a lot of truth with a little fluff is a lot more fun than the other way round. Now that she is no longer spending time making air conditioners, tile floors, IT and Botox sound sexy, she writes about the unglamorous yet wonderful moments of life for people like herself; in other words, anyone looking for interesting ways to put off cleaning and doing laundry.
She is a curmudgeon and doesn’t Twit or Instagram. She has heard the blog is dead but since she has finally figured out how to do it, that is the museum where you can locate her writings. http://jmcpb.blogspot.com/.