Day 3: Do Not Leave Your Books Unattended

For those of you just joining us, welcome, here is your homework: Day 1 and Day 2.  Now that we are all on the same page, there is something you should probably know... especially if you are planning to join in on all the kindness.  Here it is: kindness scares people.  Now, I'm not saying people don't appreciate acts of kindness, and I would certainly never discourage the kindness!  I am simply stating a fact.  And the fact is that people are very skeptical of random kindnesses.  Last year, I had a whole group of people waiting for a bus reject my donut holes (which were still sealed in a store bought package, mind you, so the rejection was not a sanitary decision which I could have understood and appreciated).  They looked at me like I was trying to give them donut holes laced with meth.  Or hair.

Anyways, people do not trust a gal just handing out perfectly sanitary breakfast pastries, it's just something we all need to accept.  It makes it awkward, sure, but it also makes it even better when someone is blessed by somebody with no strings attached, and slowly they realize that it is not a hidden camera show, or a trap of some sort, but it is, in fact... kindness.

That being said, today's act of kindness was a little on the awkward side.  Now, you newer readers may not know this but my husband was laid off about 3 months ago, and I make almost zero dollars a year, and we have five children, so it goes without saying that we have had to tighten our belt a little.  And by a little, I mean we ate our belt for dinner because we are so poor.  Okay, that was maybe a touch dramatic.  In reality, we are fine.  We're being very frugal and wise and we are learning to go without everything but the necessities, and that is really hard, but very good.  However, I am going to need you to keep all this in mind this month because my acts of service need to cost little to NO money.  I already blew my budget on sugar-free candies for the boys, so it's gotta be Random Acts of Cheapness from here on out.  Enter Day 3.

I love to read, and obviously, I love to write.  I still remember my brother giving me To Kill a Mockingbird, which remains to this day, my favorite book of all time.  Adam was also a voracious reader, and an excellent writer.  He received an award for an essay he wrote on tolerance, and he was the editor-in-chief of an award-winning school newspaper, and if I remember correctly... he had a brief stint in high school being pen-pals with famous author, Ken Follett.

A love for reading and writing is one of my favorite ways that I feel similar to Adam.  So, it seemed fitting (and free) to take some books from my own collection and give them away.  I decided to leave them around, on park benches, at playgrounds, on the gas pump.  I left little notes, like these, so that people knew that someone hadn't just left it behind on accident.

Here's how it got awkward.  If you walk up to a playground, without any children, you already seem like there is at least a chance that you are a registered sex offender.  And with that little cloud of suspicion already around you, one might think it unwise to put an item on a park bench and then slowly leave without saying anything.  Seriously, in hindsight, it was a very terroristy thing to do.  If I was pushing my kid on the swings and I saw that happen, I would definitely think that the book was a small bomb that had been marinating in anthrax.

Fortunately nobody called the bio-terrorist unit, and that's good enough for me.  I am just happy that I could share with some strangers the love of books, and hopefully it will bring a little joy into someone's day and make them fall in love with reading the way Adam and I did.  And if that dream is a little too lofty, at least nobody got anthrax, which is a win for everyone.