There was never a time in my life that I met as many fascinating people as I did between 1996 and 2001, the five years I wrote a column three times a week for a California newspaper.
More than 20 years later, living on the other side of the country, I wonder what happened to some of them.
Some of them, like Sally Jenkins and S. Kay Murphy, are Facebook friends now.
There are others who just vanished from my mind.
I met Laura Distarce of San Dimas …
The same San Dimas as Bill and Ted?
That’s right.
Anyway, I met Distarce when she called to tell me about something she thought could make a real difference in the world.
Kindness.
Any, I had conversations with her over the next few years. She was at least a philosopher and maybe an angel.
Read the column I wrote about her in 1998 and then I’ll have more to tell you.
***
“Being kind to others, she’s kind to herself”
March 12, 1988
Some folks drift through their lives.
Others really inhabit their bodies.
Laura Distarce of San Dimas decided back in 1990 that she wanted to be part of the second group.
That was when she chose to practice random acts of kindness, figuring everything she accomplished did as much for her as it did for the people she helped.
“People respond to kindness,” she said. “My friends tell me I get taken, that people are pulling my leg, but even if that’s true, it’s so much more than that.
“What I do changes me.”
Distarce’s job as a sales rep takes her to downtown Los Angeles from time to time, venturing into areas some people are afraid to visit.
She’ll always remember one of those trips.
“There was a homeless man holding a sign,” she said. “All it said was, ‘Sometimes we all need a little help.’”
A fairly simple statement.
Sometimes we all need a little help.
We’re taught there is great virtue in self-sufficiency, that asking someone else – especially a stranger – to help us is a sign of tremendous weakness.
We live in a graceless age, a time in history when we justify abandoning the weakest among us in nicely spoken code words.
But we might as well be speaking of Final Solutions or Social Darwinism for all the compassion many of us practice.
“When I saw that sign, tears were streaming down my face,” Distarce said. “I don’t carry much money with me, but I took all the change I had and dump it in this man’s hands.”
His smile was all the reward she needed.
“There is a basic decency that every human being deserves,” she said. “We know life is not fair, that everyone doesn’t start from the same place with the same advantages. But if you peel away all the labels we put on people that tell us who we are, you get down to a very basic level where there’s only one label that says we are human beings and we deserve to be here.
“When you get down to that level with people, amazing things happen. Miracles happen.”
Distarce stopped watching television news seven years ago.
She got tired of hearing all about murders, scandals and disasters and seeing the good things in life either ignored or dismissed with a sentence or two.
“My sons got involved with DARE at school,” she said. “It was a brand-new program, and there were millions of kids across the country making a commitment to say no to drugs.
“There was not one thing about it on the news. That’s why I tell my friends the best thing they can do for their health is stop watching TV news.”
To Distarce, life is a series of opportunities. She works at her job, raises her two sons and takes care of her home.
There’s more, though.
A lot more.
“Opportunities come to you every day to practice kindness to people,” she said.
“It’s your choice whether to respond or not. My friends tell me I can’t change the world, that the task is too overwhelming. I tell them just to do what they can,” she said.
It sounds so simple.
There’s an old story about a rabbi and his students. The rabbi asked his students when they know darkness is over and daylight has come. They said it was when they could see the trees and the beasts in the field.
That wasn’t it, he told them.
Darkness is over, he said, when you can look into the eyes of another human being and know he or she is your brother or your sister.
“It’s very simple,” Distarce said. “When you start to practice kindness, you see it. Everybody needs a little help sometime.”
***
See what I mean?
Definitely a philosopher.
Maybe an angel.
I Googled her yesterday to see if maybe she was active in social media, and I discovered that she had a book published in 2017. I bought the Kindle edition immediately and started reading it.
“The Eyes of Our Children” is a wonderful book, and even though I haven’t seen Distarce in more than 20 years, I could almost hear her voice as I read it.
If you’re raising children, read this book.
If you’re not, read it anyway.
You will be better for the experience.