Word power

Mum was standing outside the shop with the toddler in the pram, because prams cause quite a bit of congestion in a small shop. There was a metal post next to her, with space enough that pedestrians could easily go through. A woman in a mechanical wheelchair came along, and, of course, she couldn’t fit through. Mum was looking the other way. I was just exiting the shop, and I saw this. “Mum,” I said. She stopped daydreaming and turned to me, which was all wrong as the woman in the wheelchair was the other way. I was just about to tell her to move, when the woman’s able bodied daughter hurried past.

“Stand away,” she said in a really annoyed manner—she must have been my age or a little older, but she looked and sounded as if shopping in a crowded town with her mother in a wheelchair wasn’t her idea of fun and she wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. As mum was in the way, I won’t comment on this lack of politeness. Mum turned, saw the woman in the wheelchair—finally—and moved away, apologizing. At this point, I was sure that the woman would say something rude and be even more officious than her daughter, but she smiled instead and said something like, “That’s okay. They really should have a wider space here.”

As I was smarting inwardly from her daughter’s remark, this had a soothing effect on me, and I soon forgot about the harshness of the daughter. It’s because of the kindness of the mother that I’m repeating the story here. I think it’s too easy to forget the effect words have on people—I know that I forget this too often for my liking—and so it’s good to have their power shown in this kind of way, as a sort of reminder to be kind to people.

I read in Proverbs only yesterday that “Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.” (16:24) Strangely enough, when I was little I never ever cared about being pleasant to people: I was the kind of person who would say exactly what I thought when, and didn’t care at all about what others thought. I would hurry to add that there are times when this plain speaking is necessary, but (for example) when eating food that your brother has cooked, it’s probably better to be quiet than say something nasty. And this applies even if he’s left the tomatoes out of the spaghetti bolognese and presented something that looks like mince cooked in a saucepan with a little bit of carrot and onion chucked in. (I’m not commenting on this, but it is a recent real life example. However, the treacle tart he gave to us afterwards was lovely, and I even remembered to say something pleasant about it.)

Finally, I’m posting this using blogger’s secuduled posts feature. I’ve been meaning to try it out for ages, but have been far too lazy to bother until now.