Daily Archives: September 10, 2007

THINGS THAT MAKE ME GO MMMRUH!

Help!

by

Geralyn Ruane

In High School Musical 2, (mmmruh!) blonde teen queen Sharpay tells Troy, “We can all hold hands around the campfire later! Right now we have a show to do!” But Troy chooses decency to his friends over fame and fortune with her.

Gosh, I wish everyone were like Troy Bolton!

Because I don’t think we can wait until later to be nice. The world is going to hell in a friggin’ huge shopping cart NOW. Know what I mean? Can you feel it? A bloody quest for nothing noble. An election with no hero on the horizon. A bridge that collapsed because nobody bothered. Sports records broken by cheaters. Animal cruelty defended as status quo. Another year another size. That rejection letter in the mailbox. Everything is so messed up, and I can’t fix it all! Neither can you.

But I can help. And so can you.

All we have to do is be nice. Seriously. Just because living history throbs with the cadence of “Screw or be screwed, screw or be screwed,” doesn’t mean I have to march to it. And neither do you.

Help whenever you can. However you can. Some people look at the big picture and drive hybrid cars or picket on behalf of neglected Katrina survivors. But it doesn’t even take that much energy. Be friendly to the waiter even after he forgets the garlic bread AND the ketchup. Let the over-processed diva who thinks the world revolves around her go before you in the checkout line just so she doesn’t bite off the cashier’s head. Get out of the handicapped stall right quick when somebody disabled comes into the restroom. Don’t flip off the jerk who nearly side-swipes you. Give the one-armed guy offering to wash your windshield a buck or two. After all, how can he shoot heroin with only one arm?

A homeless guy I met last February refused the soup and sandwiches I’d brought him saying he had food already. He told me to go to the park and give the food to the homeless folks there. Gotta say, there’s a wrenching kind of clarity in a man with no shoes telling me to go help others.

A few weeks ago, as my guy and I were changing the tire to our twenty year-old tank of a car, the jack slipped.

Rrrrrr!

A truck screeched to a halt, two men jumped out to help us catch the car. Thanks to them, the whole shebang didn’t crash to the ground in a tireless crunch of sparking metal.

Mmmruh! They saved us! For no other reason than that they were THERE and they COULD! Do I think these two guys helping us was some sort of karmic payback for the blankets we’ve given homeless people or for stray cats we’ve fed? Does what goes around, come around?

Doubt it. I don’t think the cosmos is that fair. But at least each one of us can make the world GO around. Even if it never swings back our way, at least we can tilt it in the direction we want.

So go ahead. Give it a push.

Geralyn Ruane’s favorite Hardy Boy is whichever one Parker Stevenson played, and these days she writes romance, chick lit and women’s fiction. Last year her short story “Jane Austen Meets the New York Giants” was published in the New York Times Bestselling anthology The Right Words at the Right Time Volume 2.