Perspective

Eons ago on a perfectly ordinary day, my fiancé and I made the perfectly ordinary trip to the next town up to visit my brother at his house. I always parked on the street, but first I temporarily parked in his driveway. My fiancé at the time was unable to stand or walk and getting him into his wheelchair on the even concrete of the driveway where he could easily be pushed onto the sidewalk then into the house just made a lot of sense. I had parked the car below the sidewalk leading to the front door so it would be a smooth transition from paved area to paved area, bypassing the lawn completely but leaving the vehicle out in the neighborhood sidewalk near the bottom of the driveway. I had just pulled out the folding wheelchair from the trunk and was setting it up when my brother's next door neighbor, a man well into his 50's and a scowling paranoid troll suspicious of everyone, approached from his lawn.

"Hey! Hey! Parking there makes the kids on the sidewalk have to go out into traffic. People just don't care!" I'm paraphrasing but you get the idea. I was bent over into the passenger side of the car as he continued to rant. When I stood up, settling my fiancé into his wheelchair and I looked over to tell him I'd be happy to move the car once I had taken care of this person's safety and comfort, the gentleman stopped short.

"Oh. Oh I... I didn't have all the information. I'm sorry." Again, paraphrasing. But what I took from the exchange was this: he admitted he didn't have all the facts and he was genuinely sorry. At the time, I may have given him an exasperated look and dismissive it's-no-big-deal shrug. Looking back, part of me appreciates that he probably was sick and tired of seeing kids put in harm's way, or even had dealt with a similar personal tragedy, and said something. Mostly though, I appreciate that this person, a man I cannot remember a single iota of detail about, reinforced a valuable lesson in perspective.

I was planning on writing about something else tonight. I haven't thought about this incident in years, but as I was putting my thoughts together, it jumped to the front of the line and demanded attention. As I sat here working on this post, I started going down tangents leading from the idea of perspective. Keeping a grip on perspective in the face of strong emotional responses. Feeling labeled by other people who lack perspective. But nothing gelled. I realized that for what it's worth, this memory in this post stands on its own.