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Things Matter

I'm talking about little things, and you've all heard this before. Not just the little things spoken of by the greatest assortment of musical talent ever, nor the little things spoken of by the most accessibly human gangsters you've ever seen, or even the little things from the song by Bush. I'm talking about actual little things to do for people that make a difference to them.

See, it's very easy to make a comment to someone or to give a little something that reminded you of someone, and it's even easier to receive such things.

About a week ago, Jenna and I were out for a walk in the evening, conversing (as we do) in English. We passed an older man by himself who suddenly burst out in struggled-English with "Have a good....! Uhh! Aaahh! Happy Holidays!"

We laughed and thanked him and returned the well-wishes.

Our best guess is that this guy heard us speaking English and got excited because he knew a few things and how to say them, and amid his excitement he was unable to think of the right words to say "have a good night" or "have a good Christmas" or any number of other things, ultimately landing on "happy holidays!" This may not have been the case at all. He may have been speaking English his whole life, albeit with an accent, and was excited to hear someone else speaking the language (which is really exciting, and I'm not kidding) and then flustered himself.

No matter what his reasoning, it was the sweetest gesture we've had in some time, and we're still talking about it almost a week later. Furthermore, we'll continue to talk about this guy for a long time to come. He might never think of us ever again, and if we walked past him on the street tomorrow morning, I surely wouldn't recognize him.

But that one little moment meant something to us, and it's going to last.

On a similar note, a student's mother has cemented her place in my heart forever, thanks to our mutual love for chocolate. There have been a couple of times that I've mentioned chocolate and she's given chocolate and I've given chocolate and so on, and now for Christmas she presented the two of us with...you guessed it...a chocolate-fondue bowl-thing. You put the little candle in the bottom, put chocolate in the top, and voila, you have heaven. It was probably less than 10 euros and we will keep this thing for a *long* time, I suspect.

Small thing, big meaning. I knew this would be a learning experience in Europe, but it's sneaking up on me.

We'll talk Christmas soon.
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