A Small, Good Thing

I did something I haven't done in months: I flipped on a morning news show to catch the weather.

The Boy had staggered down the hall and plopped onto our bed. Only half-awake, he lay across the covers sucking two fingers, staring at the screen through a sleepy haze.

He's an auditory kid, recalling and reciting verbatim long dialogues from movies or radio after hearing them only once, so when the story started rolling about the school shooting in Bailey with words like "death," "dying," "gunman," "shot and killed," I quickly muted it and switched to PBS. The Boy needed to hear about Clifford the Big, Red Dog's troubles, not those of the drifter who assaulted young girls in a Colorado school.

But those words rattled around in my head all day.

Reverting to print sources, I read one story about the Bailey, Colorado, killing that quoted students, families and townspeople saying how random it was. The gunman didn't have a specific motive against a specific person. Apparently he just randomly chose those girls in that school from that classroom on that day at that hour.

Random. It could have been anyone, anywhere, anytime. He could have been in Colorado Springs, where my friends live. He could have driven to Kansas or Arizona. It could have happened in the south or the midwest. It could have happened around the corner. It could have been one of my girls.

The family of the slain girl asked people to do random acts of kindness in her memory.

Small acts of kindness and goodness in a world where violence and death can seem so random...where one breeds fear, the other offers hope.

In the words of Raymond Carver, it's a small, good thing.

In the words of the Bible, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

What one simple act of kindness can we do today?

For Emily Keyes.