Being kind: Now that’s a resolution

When my youngest daughter moved to a new school last September, I worried about her. That kind of transition can be tough. So, from time to time, I questioned her. How is it? I would ask. Are you OK?

Each time she gave me the same reply: She liked her teacher, she liked her school and she liked her new friends.

Then one day on the short ride home, a day I didn’t ask, she said, out of the blue, “The kids at my school are kind.”

I asked her what she meant and she just shrugged and looked out the window.

“I don’t know. They’re just kind. They share and they don’t tease people.”

“They don’t say mean things.”

I was struck by her words. Kindness matters. Nice is expected of you, but nice can be faked. Kindness is real.

She doesn’t remember it, of course, but she was with me when I realized just how much damage the lack of kindness can do.

I hadn’t seen him for years when he called. He was in town, visiting family, and wanted to get together.

We met at a favorite bookstore cafe. I brought my daughter along – she was only a toddler at the time – and we filled in the missing years.

He was a writer with a promising book deal. His wife was a well-paid executive. I learned that they had a little boy about my daughter’s age and my friend was a stay-at-home father.

Then he told me he was getting a divorce.

“We never really fought a lot,” he said by way of explanation. “So it wasn’t that kind of bad marriage.”

He reached over to where my daughter sat in a highchair and pulled her over to him. Absent- mindedly, he broke off a piece of his scone and offered it to her. She took it into her fist and played with it.

“It was just the unkindness that killed us,” he said softly. “Somewhere along the way we stopped pretending. We stopped being nice.”

He held my daughter in the crook of his arm, looking down at the top of her head, but I had the feeling he was seeing his own son.

I studied my friend as he played with the baby. I was surprised by his appearance. He was thin to the point of being gaunt. His dark curls were gone. His gray hair was cut close to his head. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years but he looked 20 years older. He looked like a prisoner of war. A war of sharp words, hard looks and cold shoulders.

He told me that his wife had come home one day and announced she was filing for divorce. Then she admitted that she’d already met someone else – a co-worker – and was starting a new life.

“That was the unkindest thing of all,” my friend said.

There it was. That word again.

It was almost another 10 years before I heard from him again. In our brief e-mail conversation last year he told me he was doing well and that he had remarried.

“She’s wonderful,” he wrote. “I have a wonderful son and a wonderful wife.”

I found a picture of the two of them online. In it my friend looks happy again and his wonderful wife looks very kind.

This is the first day of a new year. I’ve been thinking about what I want to get out of the next 12 months. And what I want to put into them.

I guess, ultimately, what I want to give and receive is what my daughter found so comforting and my friend found he couldn’t live without: Kindness.

Kindness, as my little girl – and the memory of my friend’s broken heart – reminded me, counts for a lot.

And if a sixth-grader can do it, so can I.