a kindness remembered

Category: musings

these thoughts all came to me as i was doing my laundry.

Kindnesses done to us, especially when we are still very young, tend to be remembered, way until even the doer has forgotten his deed. it's a classic backgrounder for stories in mangas and even cartoons, they explain away why a certain character does what she does, or why the character loved another character so much, etc. i remember such an explanation on of those hey arnold! episodes. There was a flashback and they showed that at the first day of prep school, everybody was ridiculing Helga for her gigantic pink ribbon, it was only Arnold who stood up for her and said that he liked the ribbon and that the color pink suited her. apparently this act of kindness stuck with Helga and she feels grateful to him even now that they are fifth graders, she even thinks she is in love with him (although she makes a bang up job concealing it of course).

As for me, I was surprised to dig out a somewhat akin story from my own childhood. It was one afternoon during the fourth grade. one classmate, a girl, said in observation, some words to this effect "your family are probably poor, right? i mean you always wore dresses that your mother made, and right now i can even see some worn out parts were there are patches." I happened to be wearing a dress with one of my favorite patterns, it was dark violet with long pink sleeves, the middle portion had a drawing of a girl with like 10 or 15 dolls surrounding her. although i didnt ever aspire to have that many dolls, the print fascinated me, i was intrigued that there also different patterns in the dolls' dresses, each one unique. needless to say even if the dress had seen much wear i refused to give it up and had my mother sew patches on the holes and the worn out parts. of course at that time i was completely powerless to explain all those things in one breath to this girl who might even be right in assessing that i am poor. i didn't know where to start to defend myself so i just stood there frozen ogling her with confused eyes almost on the verge of tears. a classmate happened to hear the conversation and spoke up. He said, "well at least the patches are nicely done and the dress is clean, there's nothing wrong with it". I then made a rejoinder and said that it's still wearable anyway. and with that we were able to vanquish the enemy, so to speak. all throughout my gradeschool these two were my classmates. Somewhere in my brain i have tucked out this incident, but consciously forgot about it. I would sometimes wonder why i never became friends with that girl and somehow i knew there is something about her that i don't like but i've forgotten what. for the boy however, i had nothing but benevolent thoughts, although i never really became one of his close buddies, coed public schools being what they were at that time, I've always kept up that affable atmosphere with him. even now i think kindly of him although at the top of my head i can't really pinpoint why. only now did i remember. it was that single act of kindness, a defense on my behalf, that molded the way i interacted with both of them later on.