Cold Honest Truth in a Parking Lot

It has been bitterly cold in my hometown. The temperature rarely reaching its fingers towards the norm. And with this sustained unusual freeze, behaviour has frayed. Common decency has declined, people are cutting corners.

The typically polite have become short-tempered, the usual joyous faces are strained. We are tired of bundling up just to cross a parking lot, and heaving ourselves and what we are carrying over the snow banks pushed towards the sidewalks. We are walking cautiously as ice lurks when we are not watching.

Appointments have been postponed. Running around errands still sit on people's lists.

But today the groceries had to be done.

As I started my usual hour-long ordeal I made my way across the parking lot to get a shopping cart. A mother and about ten-year-old son were finished their groceries and were retrieving their loonie as they pushed their cart into alignment to unlock the release. The young lad pushed with all his might and then stopped with delight as he saw the bag left behind in the lower shelf of the cart next to him.

Look Mom, he shrieked with glee. The bag that someone had forgotten in their haste held a big bag of potato chips, a couple of bottles of coke and several large chocolate bars.

We can't do that, his Mom shook her head. But they LEFT it, the young guy said. They won't come back! NO ONE will know. I LOVE those potato chips.

But those things are not ours, Mom said, as she looked seriously into her son's eyes. We might forget something one day and wouldn't it be nice if someone returned it to us. They might come back. And we will know.

I pushed my cart behind the Mom and son as they made their way back through the parking lot to return the bag of groceries to customer service.

And WHO would know?

I know. They know. And now you know too.

Simple cold honest truth in the parking lot. (Tweet This)

Life lesson on honesty from Mom to son in a parking lot. (Tweet This)


Now tell me, how will you pass on the life lesson on honesty?

The Things We Think We Know

Now, when you are looking around for characters, ones you know or those in your periphery, there is never a shortage of whom to draw from. We get used to the people around us. We overlook their oddities, their frailties, we don’t see their weirdness as time goes on.

The Things We Think We  Know - what do you see?

Have you ever introduced a friend to someone you have worked with for years.Then your friend says, “wow, what a big nose” or “good grief, is she ever insecure”. And you are surprised, shocked even maybe. Because you have gotten used to seeing this person as a flattened version of whom they are. You’ve picked which parts of them you need to or can deal with and ignored the rest. 


But someone new is meeting them for the first time, they are picking up an energy and an "introduction" that you’ve forgotten. So let your unconnected people meet and then listen for their reactions. It is such a good way to create a character whom you have forgotten. And I will leave it up to you, if you make them a hero or kill them off at the end of the page.

The man I am marrying next week was telling me about a time in his life about 30 years ago when the boys spent a great deal of time trying to meet girls. It seems they played a game of “guess what she does for a living”. An appalling excuse to scrutinize women, I say! But again valuable if you need to write a new character.

Now, of course, we’ve all made up stories of the people who cross our path. We love to think that the prim, pearl-wearing- necklace-person has a stripper pole in her bedroom, or that the big, mean-looking football player is counting down the days until the Christmas movies start on the women’s network.

We make up stories, all the time. We need them to make sense of our world. We need them to understand others, even if the things we think we know are totally wrong.  

We make up stories to make sense of our world. (Tweet This)

The things we think we know can be totally wrong, and they still make sense to us. (Tweet This)

Honest Lies

I found an old journal that I’d forgotten about the other day buried in a box, hidden out of sight. It held my words and the stories of  my life written about 10 years ago all wrapped up in brown textured floral.

If you scratched your finger slowly across its face, it felt like scratchy corduroy. And in it I told a lot of honest lies.

It spoke of the daily challenges and the bigger roadblocks that I was experiencing as we all do.  The biggest realization I had in reading my scribbles however was the dishonesty of the words. I wrote trying to preserve my hurt, my pain and often covered it with annoying optimism. (Tweet This)

Honest Lies

I look back on that period of my life, and know how difficult it was. How afraid I was. And yet my words did not convey that. I recognize that the smiling tone I chose, the shining of the light on the less stressful (more manageable) parts of my day were my strategy in coping. So if someone read these pages years after I'd died, they might think "oh, it was hard but she was just fine". Which really wasn't true.

We may read a lot of articles these days about emptying out our elderly parent’s homes. Finding this old journal of mine made me pause and think. That surely mixed in with our mother's crystal 3-section pickle dishes and our dad's way-too-small wine glasses we will find some of their written words. Post-cards and ledgers, love letters and journals.

Before we discard, let’s pause and read between the lines.

• Let’s think that when our mothers said that they pickled 50 jars worth of cucumbers, that their feet ached from standing on hard floors. That they wondered if the ration would last until the next summer. Or just that they would get sick and tired of pickles.

• When you read the post-cards between friends, one in the country and the other in town, let's remember that they knew they had to censure their words from prying eyes. But oh how they loved each other.

• That the ledgers with the beautiful handwriting (MacDonald, MacDougal, McDonnell) documented more than just the 25 cent bag of purchased sugar. That sugar was a privilege and that every pie was a masterpiece. That what each slice cost in money, they paid for by doing without something else.

If we hold each object that we are tempted to put quickly in the dumpster, what else will we learn?

Because written between the lines of my journal, were the feelings and heartbreak I protected. Glued together with hope, just like the love letters that took months to arrive from across the world, just like the hand-written recipe for Grandma's pie, just like the belief that all would be better, someday.

We sometimes protect ourself with honest lies. (Tweet This)