Gratitude 8

It's funny how, when you start trying to cultivate an attitude of gratitude (cute rhyme), you start to notice how lucky you really are.  Today was one of those days and I found myself having trouble deciding which good thing to share here so I am going to share a couple.

Today, we (dh, Pk and I) went to the beach for a picnic along with my parents.  Dh is starting to improve although this morning, the depression was bad and I wasn't sure I was going to get him out of the house.  He gets really slow and distracted and hard to get moving.  We were supposed to leave at 8:30 but when he was only starting to get in the shower at 8:37, I knew I was going to have to do the packing.  I desperately tried to include everything I could think of that we might need.

The idea was that we were going to try to do a beach picnic of the kind that we used to do when we were kids.  I remembered the food and the blanket and and sandtoys.  The only thing that I had thought about last night and totally forgot was the stale bread for feeding the ducks.

We got there, played in the park, had a nice lunch and then we decided to take a walk out the point a bit to see the boats.  We had a lot of gear and I decided that we were going to just leave it and go (parking was a nightmare and I was parked about 15 minutes away, it would have been awful to get packed up first).  Dad wondered whether we were taking a risk but I couldn't see what we had that would be worth anyone stealing.

We walked out the point and saw a family feeding ducks.  That was when I remembered that I hadn't brought anything to feed them.  We went closer to watch the family, I thought that Pk would be thrilled just to get that close.  Before we had been there a minute, the father of the family came over and offered Pk a bag of stale croissants, politely asking if she might want to feed some to the ducks herself instead of just watching.  Of course, she was thrilled and the parents just kept supplying Pk with more to feed (they must have a lot of stale bread in their house!).  It wasn't a big thing but it was just so thoughtful.  We thanked them and went back to our stuff.  Of course, nothing had been touched.

I find it funny, there is this misconception that people in the city are somehow different from people in smaller places.  That hasn't been my experience at all.  Yes, there are some people who are self-involved and selfish but that is the same everywhere.  It was just a little reminder to me to be aware of the people around me.  Just a little thing like giving someone some stale bread can really make someone's day!