My Peggy...

This past Easter weekend, I recalled a scene from, The Velveteen Rabbit, I hope the lessons from this book moved my children as it had with me many years ago…The scene I am referring to is which two stuffed animals discuss authenticity… “ ‘You BECOME,’ the horse said to the rabbit. ‘It doesn’t happen all at once. It takes a very long time. Generally by the time you are REAL most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But those things don’t matter, because once you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’”

Recent events and conversations with loved ones this past weekend, filled my thoughts of a remarkable woman who I knew in Arizona, she taught me how to find compassion when I felt no hope and considered myself a complete failure as a mother, in my marriage, and in my life's choices.

I owe much of who I am today to this remarkable woman, and I thank God often, that she was the fork in my road to better understanding life’s situations. I met Peggy on the first day we moved into our new home and knew there was something special about her. Perceptive as she was, she must have sensed something about me and told me she was determined to crack my hardened shell with daily doses of hugs and verbal encouragement. A day didn’t go by for two and a half years that my mornings didn’t start with a knock at the door and her open arms, sometimes more, but nothing less. She taught me to find forgiveness and bring love back into my heart.

Peggy was a retired schoolteacher from Missouri with gusto for life. She was also a piano teacher and a part-time librarian; she had a passion for every living thing and was dedicated to her Alzheimer’s inflicted husband of sixty-seven years. She asked me once if I ever did any playacting as a child, and if it was easy to be someone I was not. When I asked her why, she explained to me something that I have not forgotten; something she observed in her many years of teaching was that “most compassionate people in real life are those who did a lot of playacting as children.” She said, "that you’re required to understand the motivation behind another’s actions, and to have sympathy for their plight, then along the way an enormous compassion for others develops.”

I hope one day I am fortunate enough to make a difference in one unsuspecting person’s life like Peggy did for me; it would be extraordinary to pay her gift forward.
I believe all of us have crossed paths with our Peggy’s, some of us were lucky enough to have acknowledged them while others ignored that knock on the door…