Summer nights having dinner at a restaurant overlooking the lake as a band plays? Sounds like a positive experience doesn’t it? Living in East Tennessee it's a night easily lived. Just add some lightning bugs, the chirp of frogs and crickets, and summer heat lightning in the distance for the kinda night I love.
The past couple of summers have put the comfort of those evenings on hold just a tad for me. The summer of 2010 I was undergoing chemo and wasn’t able to enjoy the outdoors. The summer of 2011 was spent recovering from the treatments physically and mentally.
I tried to stay as active as possible, or force myself to, the past couple of years. But it was hard, hard to be comfortable in public with so much different about myself physically.
One night Chris wanted to go eat at a local restaurant that had a band in the evenings. The restaurant was on the lake and we had been once on a Sunday afternoon for lunch. I really didn’t want to go but thought at the hour we went the crowd would be dwindling down. It wasn’t. And the restaurant was closed except for appetizers. But the band was playing and we were there. I sullenly walked with Chris through the people, young people, on the dock area to the inside food area which, luckily, was empty.
Chris could tell I wasn’t happy. I was crabby. He asked if everything was okay to which I snappily replied “no”. I was miserable and told him so. “Imagine what you would feel like walking into a crowd of young women with beautiful hair, clear and tan skin and perfect breasts. Add to that I’m 20 pounds heavier than I was a year ago and nothing fits right.” Chris looked like a kicked puppy dog. He knew how much I loved warm summer nights at the lake and had tried to give me back a taste of it. I was being pretty irrational about the whole situation and was sinking fast into self-pity.
Within seconds of saying that I got a text message. A girl I’m mostly text and Face Book buddies with asked “Where are You?”, to which I honestly replied and now ashamed of, “Hell”. I frantically started texting her about my, at the moment life ending experience, and just where it was happening. She didn’t text back. As I pouted around the inside of that restaurant with Chris, luckily again with no one in there, I looked over to the side door. In popped my texting friend. With a huge smile on her face waving her phone around.
My mood immediately lifted! She came over and gave me a big hug while telling me she had saw us come in. We laughed and joked and talked this lady and I. Someone I’d never really spoken to in person—other than a few words in passing. But someone who took the time to come in and sit with me for the rest of the night, away from the friends she had came with, to lend a smile and some jokes to lift the spirits of someone who was dreading trying to slink out past the beautiful-young-perfect women at the end of the night. Chris thanked her for saving him from a wrathful night and I am forever grateful to a moment from a texting buddy that forever will be in my mind. An effort from someone who barely knew me and could never understand the magnitude of what she did that evening.
You never know what someone is going through at any given moment. Nor do you know what an innocent, moments in your eye, act of kindness means to them.
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