Ordinary kindness

Last week Pico Iyer, a British-born American essayist and novelist living in Japan, published an essay in the New York Times entitled: “The Beauty of the Ordinary.” (The New York Times Review, Sunday, Sept. 22). The image next to the text is a single red Japanese maple leaf floating on a yellow background.

The essay is a beautifully written reflection on the possibility of “discovery” within the “routine.” Iyer writes that his first book about Japan, the celebration of a springtime love, was published in the autumn. Now, “I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever.”

Autumn is a time of reflection in recognition that the year will soon be coming to an end. A season, at least in the northern hemisphere, when the landscape is completely transformed and the weather shifts.

Growing up in New Hampshire, one is aware of the seasons and particularly of the autumn, when the hills and mountains are spectacular in their beauty.

Donald Hall, in his poem “Kicking the Leaves,” writes:

Kicking the leaves, October, as we walk home together …

…I kick at the leaves of maples,

reds of seventy different shades, yellow

like old paper, and poplar leaves, fragile and pale;

and elm leaves, flags of a doomed race.

I kick at the leaves, making a sound I remember

As the leaves swirl upward from my boot,

And flutter: …

(Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Selected Poems 1946–2006, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2006)

A few years ago I traveled to Kyoto, Japan with the late Diana Balmori, a landscape architect who worked in Japan and Korea and was influenced by the Japanese. We were there just as the Japanese maple leaves were changing color. There is nothing quite as exquisite as a temple surrounded by this natural beauty and color. It’s an image I keep within me and draw upon when I’m standing on a subway platform as a diversion from the noise, clutter, odors wafting through the air and often the general chaos surrounding the gathering crowd.

In reflecting about nature, beauty and the ordinary, one also thinks about kindness. The kindness among people, one to another.

Last week, arriving at my train stop at the end of an exhausting day, followed by a performance in the evening, I trudged up steep subway stairs and walked into the fruit and vegetable store that is just at the corner of 96th Street. I stood in line with a piece of fruit and a small bag of almonds behind three young women who were fumbling with their wallets (and phones) and still making decisions when the manager glanced over at me and in a gentle voice said: “You can pay next time.”

An act of kindness. Within the ordinary.

Elizabeth Howard is an author and journalist. Her books include: Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back, a book she edited (Easton Studio Press, 2016), A Day with Bonefish Joe (David R. Godine, 2015), Queen Anne’s Lace and Wild Blackberry Pie, (Thornwillow Press, 2011). She lives in New York City and has a home in Laconia. You can send her a note at: Elizabeth@laconiadailysun.com