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Small Gestures

Katharine Hepburn said “I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.”

I clipped out part of an article several years ago that struck home and backs up Hepburn’s idea. All I have is the clipping, the magazine and it’s author are lost in my marshy memory, sorry. The back story was about a writing program for older people. The program seemed to help them to better deal with aging. Participants ranged from violinists to bricklayers and from cowboys to doctors. The author said what struck her is what older people chose to write about.

“No one regardless of what they did for a living, ever writes about their jobs, or their weddings, or the birth of their children, or the war, things that many people would assume most older folks would write about.” She said “they write about the relationships and the very small gestures that have made them human.”

I guess this rang true to me at the time as well as now. It was just something I’d noticed and suspected was true and it was reassuring to hear it from someone with experience with a large pool of people.

About fifteen years ago I was driving across France. I didn’t speak much French and was traveling alone. I had some camping gear with me and pulled off at a nondescript rest spot to cook dinner. A French tour bus pulled in to let the passengers stretch their legs. I was cooking away on a small stove atop a picnic table.

Some of the passengers had brought along snacks for their journey. As I was cooking, a middle-aged woman walked over to my picnic table. I thought she was going to ask if she and her traveling buddies could share the picnic table since I was obviously solo. Instead she offered me a slice of the lemon tart she’d made for the trip. With my hand gestures and toddler French I accepted. She gave me a slice and I thanked her.

A few minutes passed and the break was over. Everyone reboarded their bus and motored away to where I don’t know. But that was a damn good lemon tart and a lasting memory of a small gesture.