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By Jack Godbey

Columnist

People can be strange for sure. In fact, I often wonder why the dogs and cats of the world want to be around us. If I were them, I believe I’d take my changes living in the woods rather than put up with weird humans.

I was sitting in my vehicle recently in a shopping center parking lot and watching people come and go while I waited for my wife to buy curtains. In her defense, she asked me what kind of curtains I wanted. When I suggested we use our old bed sheets, I was banished to the truck while she purchased what we needed. While I sat there, I saw a man pull on the door to a store that was closed. Once he saw the door was locked, he pressed his face up against the glass to look in. Did he think the workers were inside laughing at him? Not sure why it matters what’s inside. If they’re closed, then they’re closed.

I find it strange when I’m sitting in a restaurant and a waitress drops a glass and the entire restaurant turns in unison to see what’s going on. I’m sorry, but when I’m at a buffet restaurant, I have serious work to do. I must stuff as much meatloaf inside my body as humanly possible. I don’t have time to worry about broken glass. I didn’t drop the glass, and I’m not cleaning it up, so why would I care.

Anytime I go out in public, I try to hold the door for someone, or do something that will bring some happiness unless it’s Black Friday, then it’s every man for himself. However, for the most part, showing kindness and consideration for someone else is one of the most important things we can do. It shouldn’t matter if someone has a different religious view, a different sexual orientation, or a different shade of skin color than you. The old saying, “Live and let live” is old for a reason.

Few things irritate me more than selfish behavior. You know the guy that tosses his trash out the car window or the guy that leaves his shopping cart sitting in the middle of the parking lot for someone else to worry about. Then we have the guy that uses a public toilet, and it looks like a poop bomb went off. I don’t know what he had for lunch, but it certainly didn’t agree with him.

I went through McDonald’s drive through recently to quench a craving for an apple pie. When I got to the window, the cashier stated that the car in front of me had paid my bill. If I had known that I would have gotten a Big Mac. Still, that act of kindness caught me by surprise and renewed my faith in humans.

My mind drifted and I thought about growing up on our small farm that included a rooster that kept running headfirst into the side of the barn. I originally thought he had gotten into the liquor cabinet, or spent the day with Snoop Dog, but after we chased him down, we discovered that the head feathers had grown down and had completely covered his eyes making him blind. If you’ve ever tried to restrain a rooster, then you know how hard it is but I did just that as my mother clipped his feathers restoring his sight. I never saw a rooster so happy in my life. That simple act of kindness gave a new life to the rooster. My mission in life is to clip as many feathers in life as possible. I hope you will join me.