Patience

” No, mom. We will get your dentures on Tuesday”.

I heard this about four times within fifteen minutes as I sat outside of Sunterra’s ‘Second Cup’.  I couldn’t progress past the 23rd page of a Nicholas Sparks novel. The reality in front of me was something Sparks himself would or could write in the autumn colors of the Northern Carolina sun. 

I didn’t look up from my book, though I listened and  heard the voice of an old woman. I could hear her picking at a paper bag. I heard another woman, her daughter, suggesting she stop picking at the bag and try her frozen smoothie: “Careful, mom, if you drink it too fast it will give you a headache”. I heard her mom slurp and say, almost on time, that she couldn’t drink it too fast or her head would hurt.  I initially found this funny, though once she was told three or four times that she had to be careful while drinking her frozen smoothie, I caught on to the reality that this person had no short term memory. She was forgetting things, though trivial, and I was certain that other not-so-trivial things had already progressed to be irretrievable.  I have never seen patience like I did that day. Never. The aged woman asked about her dentures probably six or seven times and to which her daughter would say: “We’re going to pick them up from the dentist on Tuesday, okay mom?” She said this with such grace and patience and optimism. Not a trace of impatience or bother.  Like she was saying it for the first time, every time. 

 ”Oh, okay” her mother would say.  She continued to shred the paper bag in her lap or pick at a flower on the balcony of the cafe as I could see in my periphery. At random her daughter would ask her what year she was born: “Hey mom, what year were you born?”

I can’t recall this woman’s birthday but she answered this easily and with spontaniety, like it was a ridiculous question. I’m sure it inspired hope. Even if it was something so simple as a birthday. It meant she wasn’t lost, just yet, I felt, anyhow.  In reluctant conversation the older woman asked if they (she and her daughter) could visit Gina on the way home. “No, mom, Gina is in B.C, remember?”  her daughter would answer. She said this in various ways probably half a dozen times. “Oh, right, so she’s home now?” her mom asked one last time.  “No, mom, she’s not home”.

I thought, then, of a fragment from Corinthians 13:4:  ”love is patient, love is kind…”. When I did look up from my book, the one I hadn’t read much of, I met the eyes of the daughter.  I tried for a smile and she lent me one easily. I think she noticed I never turned a page of my book.  If I had seen this woman anywhere else I wouldn’t judge her, though I’d suspect she just returned from a cruise. She had the disposition of the Becel woman in the commerical from the 90s, the “young at heart” commercial.   She probably had been on a sailboat, her shampood pooch, too. And she may or may not have been on a cruise recently, but it was then that I found that things are much more complicated than we suspect. We don’t know how people love. We don’t know their story. We really don’t know where they’ve been or what has happened to them in their lifetime or that which has brought them to our visual sense. I wondered what that mother had done, as a young woman, that earned her the (rare) patience of her daughter.  Personally, I remember as a little girl falling off my bike and having a pebble stuck in my arm. When I walked home with a bent bike and my arm bleeding my mom took me in and propped me up by the laundry room sink. She washed it and in her frenzy said “what if you chipped your bone?”. I told her that I hadn’t even though I was crying. I knew it was a pebble. She washed me up and removed it (by accident) and bandaged me up.   I remember that very well. Just as I remember her curling my hair for a wedding or driving me to choir or giving me (burnt) toast with forgotten cheese for lunch on days she hardly had time to make herself something to eat. She still leaves me a card on my bed every Valentines Day. And she has ever since I could read or knew how to spell my middle name.

I know for giving me life and teaching it to me, I would try, with patience, to tell her over a dozen times that we would pick up her dentures on Tuesday or visit Gina when she returns from vacation. I think sometimes we forget, almost entirely, about patience and why it’s important, and why people deserve to be treated with it.

I think if that aged, older woman could have seen, before her daughter was even born, that moment I witnessed outside the cafe, she would cry out of the very realization of love. Love is patient, love is kind. And love, inevitably, takes time to prove.

Love is being patient enough and kind enough to find new ways to show your child how eating broccoli is actually okay. It’s being patient with time to recognize that your child may not want to wear the clothes you buy them anymore. It’s being patient enough to encourage them to follow a dream, even if it’s not the one you dreamt for them. It is being kind enough to break it to them like it is. Love is having to repeat yourself, with patience. And you have an entire lifetime to be patient, to love, and to repeat yourself until you no longer can prove your unconditional love and gratitude to life and those who have revealed it to you.

I believe that we forget, sometimes, how precious the people in our lives are and how they deserve, completely, to be honored and treated with patience. These people in our lives don’t necessarily have to be our superiors but rather, those who inspire us to be superior( in a humble context of course.) Inspiration, like love, can take time to illustrate.  Time and patience. I am beyond thankful for these personifications, to my personal superiors; to my family- my mother, and friends. If you’re reading, thank you.