I Will Buy You Butterflies

by Carole Marie Smith Carey

Happy News Citizen Journalist

Smiling is something I've always felt is God's radiant light spilling out of each of us. It blazes out from our eyes, seeps through our teeth and mouth like the sunlight shining through an old barn door with big spaces between its aged wooden planks. It softly filters out the very pores of our skin. Is this the aura, God's light, that perceptive people can see surrounding we other beings?

Some people are too angry at the world to give God's radiance any space in their head. They are convinced He is nothing but a fairy tale. What a loss! We dreamers who see things in a positive light, can't keep it contained. His light is too bright to be bottled up by one human being, so by smiling, you release it -- His awesome power -- to others.

I am often accused of being the eternal optimist; of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. An incident at Wal-Mart the other day that supports my view of the world: that people are basically good and decent. I had to go to the pharmacy to pick up the expensive drugs I have to take for Parkinson's Disease. I had stopped by the bank to withdraw the amount of cash needed to purchase my medications plus a little more to cover a few needed household items.

While shopping, I thought of how we could finally give my nephew a birthday gift I had been lugging around in the car for 6 months. We were going out of town in a little while to visit family that included my sister-in-law, niece and her two little kids from Texas. It suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't very well show up with just one birthday gift. I picked out some nice gifts for my other two little angels. I had also picked up a get-well card for my only uncle and a couple of sheets of butterfly stickers.

A few extra items not on the shopping list, but I honestly thought I had enough cash to cover everything. When I got to the checkout line and the bill was totaled, I was short by $2.00. I'd left my checkbook in the car so I started hunting for spare change. My change purse contained only 4 quarters. So I had the checker deduct one of the packs of butterfly stickers.

Even with that, I was scrambling for the last forty cents. I could sense the line was growing behind me as I dug deeply into my billfold for the last few cents. I heard a voice behind me ask the checker, "How much does she need?" I murmured that I was going to have it, and I did, down to the penny!

I picked my things up to hurry out of the way and the voice said, "How much were those butterflies? I'll buy those butterflies for you." I finally stopped hurrying, turned around, and there was the kindly face of an older man that reminded me of a short version of Buddy Ebsen, the actor who played the Beverly Hillbillies millionaire, Jed Clampett.

I got a big grin on my face, and just thanked him for the ever so kind offer, but that I still had one packet of butterflies left, which was fine enough, and then I just stood there smiling at him for a moment. He smiled back, a crooked little grin, just like Buddy's!

I had felt God's awesome power at that very moment, in a smile exchanged between two strangers. In today's world, there are still reminders that people are basically good and worthy of being smiled upon by all of us. Just open your eyes and take them off yourself for a minute. Look around. This is how I saw that man. He wasn't just some impatient customer, trying to get this lady on her way: he was genuinely going to help me out.

Maybe he was an angel, sent here to test how I would respond to a random act of kindness from a stranger. Or maybe he was just an angel here to help me out of a jam. A nice older gentleman, a generous person, is what he really was. He had said to me, "I will buy you butterflies." What he gave me instead was a smile.

Carole Carey is a 52 year old retired high school teacher who contracted Parkinson's Disease (PD) at age 30 soon after the birth of her second child. She is an Activa Ambassador to Medtronics and shares her experience in having had Deep Brain Surgery in 1999 to have devices buried deep in her skull and chest. These devices make all the difference in if she has a fairly normal day or otherwise be confined to a wheel chair, muscles locked and frozen or had tremors from head to toe or pitching and weaving from the uncontrollable movements of Dyskinesia. This was not a cure for PD, she is still standing and looking for stem cells. She writes a weekly blog at www.blogtext.org/ccwriter71.

This story was produced by a Happynews Citizen Journalist.

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