Maybe her toe hurt...

Whenever I am asked the question "What one person, alive or dead, would you want to have dinner with if given the opportunity?" I always give the same answer - Papa T.. I didn't know my dad's dad and from the stories that people tell me (mostly my mom), he was a lovely man with quiet wisdom and kindness aplenty. I knew many of his siblings (who could also be described that way) but he passed away about five years before I was born.

My mom has told me the story many times of my grandfather pumping gas for a woman at his service station - the woman was exceptionally rude and demanding but he tolerated it and did as she asked. After she left, my mother asked him why he put up with her bad behavior. "Maybe her toe hurt" he responded. And maybe it did. It doesn't, OF COURSE, excuse bad behavior but sometimes you do have to try to remember that everyone is struggling with something. Maybe it's a current issue or maybe it's a past hurt that they just can't get over. Maybe it's big, maybe it's little.. but everyone is struggling with something.

Occasionally I am smacked in the back of the head with my grandfather's simple reminder when I've tired of someone's poor behavior and have gotten angry or frustrated with them. Recently I was getting frequent phone calls from one employee who was rearranging her schedule constantly or calling late at night to find out what her schedule was for the next day. I was getting irritated because she should have taken care of this during the day or she should have held on to the paperwork given to her at the beginning of the week. I let her supervisor know that I was getting these frequent calls and figured that would put an end to it. Later that afternoon I was in the office and overheard how this woman's "toe hurt". She had been raising her daughter's two small children for the past several years because her daughter was on active duty in the military. The children's father had disappeared after doing some time in the brig after an incident while in the military. While the children's mother was deployed in Afghanistan, the father showed up and took the children to the mid-west - far from everyone and everything familiar to them. The kids don't know him (they are ~3 and ~5 years old and he had been gone for years) so the sudden change for them was very traumatic not to mention stressful for all involved. Unfortunately there was nothing that the grandparents could do as the daughter had not done anything officially before her deployment to block the father from taking the children. She assumed that he was long gone and never coming back.

I sat at the desk printing my reports with the echo of "Maybe her toe hurt" resounding through my mind. I had gotten very frustrated with this woman for her lack of organization and forgetfulness all week long... but now that I knew what she had been struggling with at home, I felt awful.

This isn't the only time that this has happened to me. Occasionally I forget Papa's words and let people's actions frustrate or irritate me... and often I get the reminder that I need that everyone is struggling with something.