Last night while reading a journal from 2006, I came across this message from Phillip, my spirit guide: “In the small works, we do great works.” As I thought about this message, I thought about the importance of a smile, and I was reminded of a time many years ago when a smile changed the world for me.
It was the Christmas holidays. I was home from my first year at college. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for me. Having started school when I was five, I was younger than my college roommates, and looked even younger. I met new friends, but none were that close companion that comes from growing up together and sharing teenage girl secrets. My high school boyfriend and I had broken up. I felt alone and lonely. I was lost as to where I belonged and being in my mother’s home exacerbated rather than eased my loneliness.
Mother and I tried to bond. It wasn’t easy. We were so different. The love was there; the understanding of one another wasn’t. We both searched for that which we could do together that we’d both enjoy, those activities that allowed us to have fun together. One of those activities was to visit the Christmas windows of the downtown department store, Rike’s.
That’s what we were doing when a woman pushed her way through the crowd and stood next to me. She wasn’t dressed very well; her clothes were wrinkled. Mother noticed and tried to pull me away. I resisted.
Mother had always taught me to not smile at strangers. I didn’t listen. So, I smiled at this stranger in wrinkled clothes who stood beside me in front of a window full of animated elves and dolls smiling and singing. Not only did I smile, I turned to the woman and said something about the window display.
Tears wet her eyes. What have I done? I’ve upset her. I stood quiet, transfixed on her eyes as tears seeped forth.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
I can still hear the breath she took in as she looked up toward the heavens and then looked back at me. She explained that her daughter was in the hospital, which was where she had spent the last few days and nights. She was on her way home to change when she felt compelled to stop to look at the window display. “When my daughter was little, we always came here together,” she said.
She didn’t know why she stopped, she said, not until I smiled at her. “Then I knew. I knew when you smiled that my daughter is going to be okay.” She looked over at my mother and thanked her for raising a daughter who smiles at strangers. “She is an angel,” the stranger said.
I turned and looked at my mother. She smiled at me and in that smile we were no longer strangers who lived in the same house. We were mother and daughter.