…with apologies to Shakespeare
January 27, 2017
While I was planning this blog, I struggled with what to call it. The obvious way to proceed was to ask, what’s it about? The answer: life. Yes, that’s just a bit broad. Zooming in, I thought about what happens to us as we go through life. We get hurt, and, if we’re lucky, someone comforts us. From childhood on, that’s the pattern. And if you start thinking about the earliest hurts in your life and how you were comforted, you’re naturally going to think about the bumps, scrapes and kisses you received. So—
Remember when you were a child and scraped your knee how your mother would kiss it and make it better? Wouldn’t it be great if it were that easy now?
Bumps, Scrapes and Kisses is about life, about the obstacles in the road that deter us, the thorns that bloody us and the helping hands that support us along the way. Through essays, I share with you my thoughts and observations. Because for me, writing creates order from chaos.
Life is filled with bumps and scrapes. They can be as mundane as the weariness that comes from a long day at work and as soul wrenching as the loss of a loved one. We struggle to pay bills, worry about our families, lose jobs and break up with lovers. Some of the bumps and scrapes are more serious than others, and some we take more seriously than we should.
But life is also filled with kisses, moments that give us hope. They come in the form of a friend who listens to our woes, the fellow driver who lets us cross into the right lane when we’re about to miss our exit, the family members who accept our quirks even when they’re annoying.
Of course, if we’re being honest, we have to admit that we’ve all caused a few bumps and scrapes in the lives of others. We are human. I guess we can only strive to make the comfort we offer outweigh the pain we cause.
Then there are those events in our lives we never fully recover from, and all the support in the world doesn’t make the pain go away. But the support does help, if only a bit.
After all, Mum’s kisses didn’t heal the cuts and bruises; they simply showed us we were loved.
A Christmas Kiss
Sometimes we receive kisses in response to a bump or scrape, and sometimes the kisses are just there on their own. Christmas morning I was driving to church when I saw a little girl, maybe age 3, crossing the street with her parents. She wore a flouncy red dress, and I swear she hopped the whole way. If she could float she would have. I presume her joy came from the wonders she’d found under the tree, but the real gift that morning was mine. She took me out of myself and put me right into the moment. I stopped thinking about the logistics of the day—packing up my contribution to Christmas Dinner, visiting an elderly aunt and navigating from there to my brother’s and sister-in-law’s house. Alone in my car, I laughed out loud. I was in the presence of joy personified.
Bumps, Scrapes and Kisses 