At my MiL’s house (TEMPORARILY) and she just interrupted my lunch break for a lengthy story about how a neighbor lady (Alice) swept the leaves off another neighbor’s (Bob’s) lawn and into the street and how she, my MiL (Carol) reacted.
Alice noticed that Bob - who is in his late 80s - had a lot of leaves on his lawn that had suddenly fallen off of his trees so she went out and used a small dustpan and dustbroom to sweep up leaves and ended up dumping them in the street.
Carol saw this and got incensed - the street sweeper was coming tomorrow and would never be able to pick up that many leaves (it totally would have) so Carol waited until Alice went home to go sweep Bob’s leaves out of the street into her trash bins.
Bob came out and saw Carol sweeping and said “Aren’t you sweet,” and tried to thank her. Carol emphasized that she wasn’t doing this for Bob, that Alice had swept the leaves into the street and that’s city property and it was irresponsible for her to do so. Carol really wasn’t doing this for Bob, she was doing this because people walk around the neighborhood and the street sweeper wouldn’t be able to pick it up and she didn’t want the leaves to blow into her own yard.
Bob insisted on thinking this was nice of her, invited her in for tea, which she very reasonably refused because Bob wasn’t wearing a mask and wasn’t doing a great job of keeping social distancing. Carol went home, forgot the matter, and the next day Bob rang the doorbell at 8am with a thank-you pie, so Carol is now trying to figure out how to lock the gate so that she can still get amazon and mail deliveries but not have to interact with neighbors.
She is furious because now she can’t walk her dog on that street in case Alice or Bob see her.
As someone who has worked really hard to befriend my new neighbors I am *amazed* at the effort this lady put into UNDOING community support for an isolated elderly man.
Carol was raised in a REMARKABLY shitty and abusive home, had a tremendously unhappy and unhealthy marriage, and has essentially no friends. I strongly suspect that she also has undiagnosed ADHD.
The other night she was watching marble-making videos with me and Large Bastard and kept saying “I thought about taking a class on glass blowing but then you have to take a long time to become any good so I decided not to” and “I see all these people on youtube doing these tutorials but I know I’d need years to get good at it so I don’t even bother” or “I like these instruments but so many beginners sound terrible playing them so I’d never try to learn to play” and when I talk about how depression involves inescapable cycles of negativity this is what I’m talking about.
I’m really sympathetic to the fact that Carol has had a shit life and has really complicated relationships with her family and had a bad marriage and just when she was supposed to be able to travel with her retired husband she hated her husband died and her son got sick. I understand that, no, she really doesn’t have a lot going for her. And that really really fucking sucks.
But she’s also got a piano in the house that she never plays because she doesn’t think it would go anywhere. She has paintings from her art classes in high school that she hides away because they’re not good enough for people to see so she stopped painting. She eats poached unseasoned chicken and canned green beans and instant mashed potatoes for three dinners out of five because “it always seemed like too much effort to learn to cook and what if you ruin a meal?”
And sometimes I look at young people on tumblr who sneer at “any amount of practice is a good amount of practice to improve your skills” and who say “yeah but that only works if you have TIME and MONEY to practice and I don’t so I might as well not start” and I see this bitter, angry, seventy-year-old lady who never learned how to make friends, who never learned to be okay with failure, who has no hobbies to speak of to fill up her long, miserable days.
I’m a pretty negative person at baseline. I get it, I get the initial reflex to discount your skills or to say “I can’t do it” or to look at a project like making a blanket or building a co-op or going to city council meetings to sway a vote and saying “that’s too hard, I can’t do it.”
And I am telling you right now that one of the single healthiest things that you can do is to learn to question that initial reflexive negative and say “okay well what if I did a little?”
I don’t play guitar well but I play better than I did two years ago. I don’t practice daily like you’re supposed to, or even weekly, sometimes, but I practice a little.
I don’t draw a lot, but I draw better and faster now than I did five years ago.
I don’t have a co-op, but I know which of my neighbors I can call for an emergency dogsit and who in the neighborhood might need help with groceries and whether the folks on my street need to borrow a blower after a windstorm.
Just do a little. Just a little.
And for the love of fuck don’t try to undo the nice things that other people have done or reject it when someone appreciates something that you’ve done for them.
