Yesterday I took the nine apples remaining on my tree up to the local school. ‘May I contribute a few apples to the school kitchen?’ I asked the comely young woman – a teacher, I presume – who opened the door. She took them from me and said ‘How very kind. Thank you.’
Well, herein lies the problem: my donation wasn’t really driven by kindness. The fact is that I’m not terribly keen on apples but I hate anything going to waste, so the school kitchen seemed the simplest way of putting them to good use.
This morning I saw a sheet of blue paper in my mailbox. On one side was a simple child’s drawing of some flowers; on the other was written in a child’s hand:
Dear Jeff
thank you for giving garding club very nice stuff We are so gaful
Love from garding club
Arria
And below that was written, in a mature adult hand:
Could I imagine anything more efficacious in brightening a dark, dismal, damp day than a hand-written letter of thanks from two little girls? A few maybe, but not many. This is the stuff to stir the emotional faculty simmering beneath the distant exterior. It’s definitely on a par with music and acts of kindness, notwithstanding what I said in a previous post.
But there’s that word ‘kindness’ again. Since my act was not driven by kindness, would it be fraudulent to put it in the box? I suppose it probably would, but the letter is far too precious to be thrown away so in the box it goes.
(And there are a couple of minor mysteries involved. The apples were explicitly offered to the kitchen, so how did the Norbury Primary School Nature Garden Rangers get in on the act? And secondly, how did they know my name? I don’t know anybody at the school, and none of them know me. But I have remarked on the blog before that I never cease to be surprised by the number of people in this area who know my name, even though I’ve never told them what it is. It suggests that I get discussed.)
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