Surprises

Hi neighbors. Surprises can be fun, and we all love those special occasions when our friends or family surprise us with the gift of a party, a meal out, or simple gifts. But we all get surprises we don’t appreciate sometimes.

Remember when in school and in an apparent afterthought, the teacher smiles and tells the class to sharpen their pencils because she is handing out a pop quiz!

Throughout our lives, we all receive these sneak attack surprises that are not welcome gifts. Like when you are in middle school and you find out when dance classes are ending that your steady boyfriend only wanted a steady dance partner.

How about when you are driving to work and your car throws you a surprise with either a blow out on a tire or a breakdown in some engine part.

We’ve all gotten up in the morning or came home from work to find water on the floor and a broken water heater or other water pipe leak. Those are always bad surprises!

There are some surprises we might hesitate to appreciate, but once we get used to the idea we are grateful. Like the time your child has a stray pup or kitten follow them home. Or the occasion when the science teacher was giving away guppies — lots of surprises there!

But life thrives through changes and change often appears as unexpected surprises. Mothers, can’t you remember the thrill of that first dandelion bloom given to you by your three-year-old child? Or all those little gifts proudly presented to you by them as the years pass? Often gifts were hidden for you to find — little surprises. The earthworms stuffed into the jeans pockets for instance, or the tiny box turtle carried proudly under the cap on their head.

Some surprises are difficult to accept. We’ve all gotten “those” types of phone calls from friends or relatives about a loved one getting injured and or even dying.

With most teens carrying cell phones we often get surprise calls about needs for gas out on some weird dirt road no one has heard of before. Those sad calls about a flat tire or even those more drastic calls about the car suddenly dying and the “check oil” monitor lighting up.

How many parents have received a call from an adult stranger that started with, “Are you _’s mother? Don’t get upset, but (s)he is in the hospital getting stitches in the head — but (s)he will be just fine!”

Or worse when the child is grown to have the roommate call to tell you your child is sick and hasn’t enough money to go to the doctor. Oh, my.

I have figured out that the further away from you your child of any age is, the more severe those surprise phone calls can be.

Of course, there are nice phone call surprises as well. My granddaughter would call me at age three and we would talk for hours as she repeated the entire plot and most of the dialogue of some animated movie she had seen. I could hear her little shoes clicking on the hardwood floor as she would run from the ‘bad guy’. When she tired of running she would say she was hiding and I was to be quiet. The ‘good guy’ always showed up just in time (just like in the movie) and rescue us. I so enjoyed those talks and was disappointed to find out she didn’t remember them now that she is 16.

I still get surprise phone calls but usually from some man named John Wayne in India or Nigeria trying to get me to turn on my computer and allow him access to it. Really? Sounds too much like one of the “bad guys” to me.

Until the next time friends remember that everything and everyone changes. Whether we like the changes or not is inconsequential. It is the constant process of change that keeps us alive. Embrace changes, just like stones thrown in a pond, it all settles back in time.