My Kind Girl

My last two entries were not intended to be about family, but they ended up that way. I really thought I was writing about my absent mindedness (Feb. 28) and my cat (March 3). Who knew they’d end up being about my father and then my mother? That is half the delight in writing – you can surprise yourself with where your mind is going. You find out you’re really only a backseat driver to yourself.   I'm writing today's post about my daughter.  Let’s see if it ends up that way.

A friend of my both daughter’s and mine received a (probably unintentionally) unkind remark posted on her Face Book page. Her Face Book page! Whatever was this person thinking? It was mean, and it cut. My daughter saw the remark and immediately refuted it in an insightful and funny way and also wrote my friend a comforting e-mail. To top it off, she wrote me a sweet note about both the friend and myself. I wasn’t surprised.

When she was in the fourth grade, my girl won the classroom prize for Most Improved Reader. The prize was a packet of stickers. This was back in the day when stickers first made it big. And were not just pictures of commercially successful products; they were the desired products themselves. They came in all sizes and shapes and subjects. Little kids had special sticker books where they collected their stickers.

Here was my girl with a big packet with a wide variety of stickers in recognition of her improvement. (And truthfully, like many children, the reading bug struck her in the fourth grade.) She opened the packet and kept half the stickers. Then she went around the class and gave away the other half away to the children who had not received any awards. I knew then I had a keeper! ;)

What’s most valuable in this world? If you had to share a desk, a room, a baby-sitting co-op with someone, what’s a prime attribute you’d wish for them to have? Intelligence? Sure. Organizational skills? Yes, but wouldn’t a kind heart be more important than those? Who among us doesn’t wish to be treated with kindness? Who among us remembers to act the same way towards others?

My hat’s off to you, Pazoo Girl, and I blow you a kiss. Your acts of kindness are not random at all; they are conscious and continuous. You make me proud.