This lovely lady represents so much that’s good about humanity: unconditional love, joy, compassion.
I ran into to her at the post office. Well. Let me rephrase that; she annoyed her way into my heart while I was standing impatiently in line at the post office.
She kept engaging the postal clerk in a prolonged conversation, asking after everybody in the clerk’s family, her co-workers, and some other mundane and totally-uninteresting-to-me details. In short, she was holding me up. I didn’t even have anywhere to be at the time, but I can say that my day had been fairly ruined with some bad news, and that wasn’t helping my mood.
By the time my turn came up and I was finished and on the way out, she was still moving at her elderly pace to get to the door. I gave in to the moment. I just wasn’t going to get past her so I thought I might as well be nice.
That was the opening she was looking for — perhaps a change in my demeanor had been her motive all along.
She engaged me in conversation, and the more I spoke with her, the more my mood lifted, and the more she became human to me. I had characterized her as the worst kind of stereotype of the elderly. She was anything but.