Simple Acts of Kindness
“Kindness is a language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
~ Mark Twain ~
If you were fortunate, as I was, in your young life, someone probably taught you to always be kind to others. “If you can’t do anything else, you can always at least be nice.” That’s what I was taught – to be nice, to be kind, to greet everyone with a friendly smile and be “neighborly.”
When I was just a kid growing up I was the oldest of three boys in my family. Mr. Bragg, our next door neighbor, used that expression pretty often, the one about being neighborly, and I guess he was about as neighborly as a man could be. He and his wife lived on the corner lot in our neighborhood and had a pretty big back yard that made for a great shortcut to just about everywhere we neighborhood kids needed to go.
We would gather in the yard at my house to play ball, or whatever, and then if we were going to ride our bikes down to the Bell Street Market, or to the Training School playground (that’s the Campus School as it’s known now), or to the homes of most of my friends, the quick route was to cut right through the Bragg’s back yard. I mean, why take the driveway out onto Eaton Street, turn left down to Fairview, and then turn left again and down the hill to Ewing Boulevard and the great, big world beyond, if you can just cut right through the neighbor’s back yard – right?
Mr. Bragg had the coolest workshop at the back of his garage you’ve ever seen. It was like one of these AI pictures on Pinterest, full of tools hanging on all the walls, old-timey pictures and stuff, and all the supplies for any DIY (that’s Do-It-Yourself, in case you didn’t know) project you could dream of. Mr. Bragg was always letting me hang out with him in there, and even taught me how to use tools the right way and such as that.
Well one day, while he was working in his shop and my buddies and I jumped on our bikes and took off across his back yard – I know this wasn’t the first time we’d done it, but I believe it must’ve been the first time he was actually there to catch us – he came out of his garage and stopped us. He was holding some sort of plumbing thing I think, I don’t really remember, but he showed it to us and explained what he was fixing in the house. It was like he wanted us to learn something from it, but looking back now I know that he had a much more important message for us boys. It stuck with me and I’m pretty sure it hit home with my friends, too.
He cautioned us to be careful on our bikes, as though we hadn’t already been told that by our parents a thousand times, but he said, you know, Mrs. Bragg could be coming out of her garage carrying groceries, or he might step out of the workshop without looking, and we might run right into them with our bikes if we weren’t careful. He sort of went on from there and made us understand that cutting through his back yard the way we did was not something we should be doing without his permission, and that instead of a right it was a privilege, and even explained the difference to us. And he wasn’t angry at all; in fact, he was really nice about it.
When we rode off and got down to the store, and we were sitting around with our six-cent cokes and nickel candy bars, we talked about Mr. Bragg and how cool he was. And at the time, I’m sure we didn’t realize how important his little talk with us was. We mostly just agreed how we were glad it wasn’t Mister Scarbrough or Doctor Hay, who would have chewed us out real good and probably called our parents, and the whippings we likely would have gotten when we got home.
Instead, we learned an important lesson about responsibility and consideration for others. But above all, what stuck with us from that day on, was the kindness that Mr. Bragg showed to us. I think I want to be like Mr. Bragg when I grow up.
Kirkland A. Mason, CEO
