The Decent Thing to Do

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

My next-door neighbour is a Navy dentist who travels up North a few times a year to remote communities. On one trip, she saw puppies abandoned in a snowdrift—they’d freeze to death overnight, a traditional form of population control. She surprised her pilot by loading up his small plane for the ten-hour flight back south with tiny dogs. Two of them, big and genial now, live in her house beside us. Both are placid, except during certain times at night when they go out into the backyard to howl at the moon, like any Arctic dog should.

I love that sound.

It reminds me of what rescuing and a big heart can do.

I ran into that neighbour again this morning.

She was out in her pyjamas, unloading a dog carrier from her car. She’d just dropped off a puppy she’d brought down from the North, like she has done for dozens and dozens of times since she found her own two in a snowbank. This little dog, she named her Millie, was a stray, one of many in the remote community. Every time she went up there, Shelly, that’s my neighbour, would track Millie down and feed her, a wild dog, but in some ways not as wild, or determined as this dentist. Shelly wanted to get Millie out before the deep winter, and she did. I told her what a wonderful thing she was doing, but Shelly stood there in the driveway, hoodie over her pyjamas, pushed her glasses up her nose, and shrugged.

“Just seems like the right thing to do.”

I decided to come home and share this because there is so little good news around these days. Everywhere, instead is evidence of the loss of good intentions. Everywhere, evidence that yes, fish does rot from the head.

If we let it.

I have been thinking of manners, of decorum, of kindness a lot these days, and wondering where it’s gone. A few weeks ago, I was at the grocery store, a Tuesday morning, not busy. Some cheese caught my eye, and I went over to look at it. A minute later, not more, a woman tapped my shoulder. A nice-looking, well-dressed woman. I was sure, at first, I must have known her from somewhere.

“You left your cart blocking the aisle,” she said to me. “So I moved it to an aisle on the other side of the store. Go find it.”

Can you imagine?

The trouble that took? The effort expended to be that rude? Can you imagine how much bottled-up rage would have to be inside a person to be that easily triggered?

I apologized. She smiled. She’d won. A contest I had no intention of joining.

As I walked out of that store, I thought of my mother.

When we were little, we were not allowed to play with a certain family where the children had been heard to say shut up. “If you don’t have manners,” my mother told us, “you don’t have anything.”

I remember we used to ride by the house where those kids lived, on our tricycles, my sister and I, quickly in case bad manners were contagious, wondering how anyone who said shut up would ever turn out.

And now we know.

These days, some toddlers swear like sailors. Doctors’ waiting rooms have signs saying that theirs is a respectful workplace. Politicians call each other “stupid people,” and that’s on a good day.

And the rest of us look at each other, and some of us ask, where did all this bad energy come from?

I’m wondering if it’s from us.

If each rude, or unkind, or uncalled-for, act or word is not being collected in some cosmic pot, little details, tiny evidence of not behaving well, adding up to create this place where none of us want to be?

So what do we do?

I think whatever is in front of us. In a supermarket aisle or next to a snowbank. That’s how we turn it around.

Decency, I’d argue, is the real resistance.