Day 5 – Rocketfeller, The Kind Umbrella – Kindness Works When Used & Needed
This one for Day 5 is a bit quirky. It’s true though, that if you don’t use kindness. If you don’t use kindness in your life, it’s unlikely you’ll receive it, or recognise it when you do. Like an unused Umbrella.
We may not think much of them.
There are fancy ones and plain ones, coloured
and beautifully, simple, black ones.
Some are pretentiously long expressing
the importance of the Umbrellee (you and me),
Some are short Rocketfellers of magic.
Keep them in the glovebox, a handbag,
a brief case or a drawer.
Like all Umbrellas of various designs and kinds,
unused, they could be thought as useless, but not so.
So,
press a button on the short kind and “hey drizzle-drizzle”,
an umbrella magically appears from what before
had been a-nothing-much-at-all.
Button pressed, you watch the thing do its wizardry and morph
into something weird and useful,
“protection from the skies”.
(If only Chicken Little / Henny Penny had one she wouldn’t
have run around like a mad thing crying “The Sky is Falling”.)
Now, Jim’s personal Umbrella was not a short-in-your-pocket style.
It was called Rocketfeller, the Kind Umbrella.
Long, black skirted with a silver dart on the end
that could easily have stabbed an eye or a sausage
if flicked the wrong way.
You have to be careful.
It’s handle was not of old ivory, (thankfully said the Elephant),
but old hardwood.
Jim’s father made the handle himself.
Carved from a bit of a fallen tree.
He gave it eyes and a smile that was meant to be sweetly serene.
It wasn’t.
Like an ancient gargoyle it scared children
who wouldn’t go near it,
not even for a tub of ice cream.
Jim had no idea where dad got it from or when,
but he told his family it was, like him,
“perfect in form, age and beauty” and
never once graced the face of a cloud.
You see, Rocketfeller according to Jim and his dad,
had never seen rain, hail or sunshine.
It had never been used.
And so Rocketfeller travelled in the boot of Jim’s car.
Wherever he went, he was there.
(Same went for Jim).
He remained cherished, unused and not even bruised,
until after a long drive to Darwin, way up north
of Australia.
They went there in the rainy season.
Local people wondered “why”?
For, in Darwin, as Jim and Rocketfeller learned too
quickly, what happens when the rains come is,
they come, and they come and they really come.
They really, really do.
Jim had never been there before,
and neither to his knowledge had Rocketfeller,
but that was far as he could tell,
because he didn’t know everywhere his father
and Rocketfeller had gone.
And didn’t want to know.
So, for what may have been the first time in Rocketfeller’s life,
and certainly in Jim’s those two were inseparable.
Not just in the boot of the car, but every day wherever Jim went,
Rocketfeller went and not just as a silent companion.
Whenever it rained, and it hardly stopped, Rocketfeller just did his bit
in keeping Jim and sometimes another,
dry or as close to it
as possible.
You see, whilst Rocketfeller had been unused and perhaps useless, prior to this,
suddenly he was essential.
Like kindness kept in the freezer of your heart, it can’t grow.
Use it and you realise just how much you need it.
Being used, Jim noticed the gargoyle on the handle seemed to look
a little less gruff, he thought, and not so scary to children.
Perhaps,
with kindness,
even things can be kind.
Ice cream anyone?
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