And So We Talked All Night about the Rest of Our Lives…

What do you remember from your high school prom? The two I attended were a long time ago, but a couple of things stand out: Our theme one year was Billy Joel’s “This is the Time” (which now makes me weep just as surely as Vitamin C’s “Graduation” song). And my prom date was a cute urban musician with a ponytail before there were ponytails. Partway through the sit-down dinner, he leaned over and said to me with a puzzled grin: “Someone just pulled on my hair.” (I went to school in a small town full of mullets.)

I also know that I had a couple of gorgeous prom dresses, thanks to a creative mother who was master of the sewing machine. My gowns shimmered in ruby red and sapphire blue and they both made me feel like a princess. Thanks, Mom.

Wouldn’t you love to make another teenaged girl feel like royalty at her prom?

At this time of year, a number of North American organizations are accepting donated dresses for high school students who can’t afford them. Whether you’ve got a cocktail dress or an evening gown, a Vera Wang original or a Walmart knock-off… if it’s hanging in your closet doing nothing but rubbing shoulders with your work suits, maybe instead it can go to good use. Your gently used gown might make the difference between a girl staying home on prom night, and going out to dance her three-inch heels off.

Here, here and here are a few links to get you started. In the U.S., use this directory to find a drop-off location near you. Or, from anywhere, Google “donate a prom dress” to find oodles of drop-off locations.

I don’t actually know what happened to my hand-stitched dresses. But I do know what happened to the guy with the ponytail – last I heard, he’d become the TV co-host of a home improvement show.

We grow up, and we move on. But our dresses don’t have to stay behind.

Don’t laugh. It was the eighties.

Family Portraits

A schoolteacher friend of mine tipped me off to a movie trailer for a film called That’s a Family! This award-winning documentary comes to us from GroundSpark, a U.S. organization dedicated to social change. That’s a Family! gently reminds the viewer that families are cast in all kinds of shapes and sizes.

My friend has been discussing the film’s theme with her students, as part of the Mother’s Day and Father’s Day curriculum. “The students have loved it, and I love their reactions,” she wrote to me, adding: “I wish adults could be so accepting.”

She thought the film might be suited to 50 Good Deeds. Why, on a blog about acts of kindness? Maybe because striving to accept members of a family unit for who they are, even when their skin colour, disability, sexual orientation or gender happens to be different from ours, is big-hearted behaviour. Especially if that broad acceptance (oops, I could almost make a pun here) doesn’t come easily and naturally.

And it doesn’t, for everyone. Our species evolved to be somewhat xenophobic. In a caveman community where everyone knows everyone else, strangers could mean a threat. And that distrust of diversity can be hard to shake if it’s hard-wired.

So I say, if you’ve made a point of overcoming that fear, if you embrace differences – heck, if you embrace people with differences – then you are committing a supreme act of kindness.

Acceptance is the new black. Tell all your friends.

A Tat that’s All That

Thank you! It’s early for my birthday, but I received a gift anyway. Someone (whoever you are, I adore you) has nominated 50 Good Deeds for a Ninjamatics’ 2012 Canadian Weblog Award. Two, in fact: This blog received nominations for both the “Activism & Social Justice” and the “Life” categories. Ninjamatics will continue to collect nominations until the end of November, and winners will be announced in January.

Speaking of people to adore, have you heard about Basma Hameed? She makes a noble living helping others, and now she’s preparing to do it for free for a week.

It all started with a severe oil burn when Basma was a toddler. In the years since, the Toronto woman underwent over a hundred surgical procedures to repair damage and scarring to her face. But Basma was still insecure with her appearance.

Then she had an eyebrow tattoo – and an epiphany. She enrolled in aesthetician school, learned tattoo artistry, and promptly fixed her own facial scars using skin-tone-coloured inks.

Basma was so thrilled with the results that, in 2007, she opened a clinic and began treating other people with scars and birthmarks.

As you might expect, the ministry of health isn’t exactly falling over itself to pay for folks to get tattoos. But Basma has decided that price shouldn’t be an obstacle. Starting May 21, she’ll offer her cosmetic tattooing services free for the week.

“I’ve been given a second chance to live and I’m grateful for everything, and I feel like this is another life for me,” Basma told a reporter. “I think I was put here for a reason, and I want to give back as much as possible.”

A Tale of Carin’ Karen

About a year ago, I was catching up with an old friend who happened to be in town.

“Old friend” doesn’t actually capture the natural and solid connection that persists between me and most of the kids I grew up with. We lived in a tiny community, so we didn’t just go to school with our neighbours. We were on the same soccer teams, we were in the same choirs and brownie troops and 4H clubs. Their parents were our teachers and our librarians and our coaches. We babysat and we tutored each other.

In the case of Karen, she was my devoted piano student (which means her family is responsible, in part, for funding the university degree I have buried in a file somewhere).

You’d think, living and working so closely together, we’d all have known each other’s histories up and down. And often we did. But throughout those years, Karen was experiencing health challenges I never knew about.

One thing I never forgot about Karen: She was strong. She had to be, as the youngest of four loud siblings. She told, not asked, her mother to hire me at the piano. She personally handed over my weekly fee. She worked harder at this instrument than any other student I ever taught. When she passed her exam with honours, I couldn’t have been prouder.

So last year, when Karen asked me to take a look at a manuscript she’d written, I was happy to help. I was also surprised: It turned out to be a detailed and personal story of her decades-long struggle with epilepsy and seizures, brain surgery and depression.

She calls it the “roller coaster ride” of her life.

Determined as ever, Karen has now turned her experience into a printed book, with two selfless purposes: to inspire others living with epilepsy, and to raise money for awareness and research.

And while she works at promoting and selling her new book – she has already raised over two thousand smackeroos for Epilepsy Ottawa-Carleton because, remember, she’s strong – she continues to point to those who’ve supported her. Here’s a brief rundown: My pal Heather contributed her editing talents for an extremely modest fee. Last weekend, my sister Sylvie hosted a book signing at the local general store. A mess of family and friends have cheered Karen on for years.

If you needed any more proof of how gracious Karen can be, she takes four pages of her new book just to express her gratitude to these people. (Who doesn’t like a thank you?)

Want a copy of My Life Time Roller Coaster Ride with Epilepsy? contact author Karen Fisher at karen.fisher@xplornet.com.

Tell her hi from me.

Pretty in purple: Karen and my sis Sylvie share a moment at the book signing.

Open Home, Open Arms

If you read this blog last week, you’ll know that my young daughter voyaged quite a distance from home with her choir. Four thousand miles, in fact. She was away from us for 10 whole days, which meant that for 10 whole days I wasn’t hugging her, feeding her, bathing her (well, not that I still bathe her, but I do pay her hefty hot-water bill). For 10 days, my daughter was in someone else’s home – two homes serially, in fact – being fed, laundered and splendidly looked after.

It takes a special family to open their home to strangers. Even ones as sweet and cute as my daughter and her choir friends. These folks gave our children beds, fed them breakfast, chauffeured them around, packed them lunches, showed them the sights, and embraced them – in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. If I couldn’t be at my daughter’s side as she took in the exciting experience of Sweden, these families were definitely the next best thing.

I hope that they felt at least some payback. I hope my daughter gave suitable answers to all the Canada-themed questions that a set of nine-year-old twins peppered her with while their six-year-old brother listened shyly. (My kid makes these boys sound so adorable and delectable, she could almost have made a sandwich out of them.) And I hope my daughter remembered to smile, to pick up her damp towels, to make her bed, to say please and thank you (or, rather, “tack så mycket”).

In short, I hope the families’ experience was a positive one. Because there’s no question they made a difference. Not only for the 12-year-old girl travelling in a foreign country without her parents for the first time… but also for the anxiety-prone mom and dad who waited for her at home.

Our kid had a great time, and she’s got the memories – and the Dala horse souvenir earrings – to prove it.

Memories of Stockholm: Has Dave Nichol come up with a meatball sauce yet?

Lost at Sea… Found Again

Out of devastation comes extreme decency. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to survive a large-scale natural disaster with nothing more than your very life. Thousands of people lost everything they owned in the tsunami in Japan. But here it is a year later, with the front edge of Japanese debris beginning to arrive on the western coast of North America. And wouldn’t you know it, acts of kindness are cropping up too.

A week ago, an Alaskan couple discovered a personalized soccer ball with great sentimental value for the 16-year-old who had lost it. They’ve already made direct contact with the young owner – how serendipitous that one of the pair speaks Japanese – and are making plans to return it. They also found a volleyball and, against considerable odds, have managed to track down its rightful home, too.

That’s not all. Earlier in April, a B.C. man found half a moving truck washed up on a remote beach – incredibly, with a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, golf clubs and tools still inside.

He has been cooperating with Japanese officials to try to find the owner of the items. He’s also encouraging any other would-be treasure finders to show restraint. “I think the most important thing is that people treat the things they find with respect,” the man said in a news story. “These are parts of people’s lives… I think people have to keep that in mind when they make a find like this.”

Something else to keep in mind: How much it means to return a cherished object to someone who thought they had nothing left. “I’ve lost everything in the tsunami. So I’m delighted,” teen Misaki Murakami told a public broadcaster after he heard he was getting his prized soccer ball back. “I really want to say thank you for finding the ball.”

The Blind Side

“My heart is warm and glad this morning,” my friend Kim blogged on Tuesday. Truthfully, it wasn’t all that unusual, since Kim is a generally sunny person. But this week she was particularly moved. Backtracking: Kim writes a blog that I love to read, called “Great Things about Being Blind.” I’m her number-one fan.

Kim, a storyteller and disability trainer, lives in Ottawa and has been blind from birth. I’ve known her for years. On her blog, she talks about some of the most rewarding, fascinating or just plain funny experiences that her blindness has afforded her.

“I started the blog because I was concerned about the way blind people are perceived and portrayed,” she says. Read a few of her posts and I promise you’ll learn, and laugh. Maybe occasionally blubber a bit.

Often, even while you’re giggling, your eyes are opened. Read this story about two obnoxious ladies on the sidewalk (and Kim’s grace in an awkward situation), and you’ll see what I mean.

Sometimes Kim writes about her work, or media, or travel. There was that time an airline pilot, in full uniform, took Kim’s guide dog for a pee break during a flight stopover – earning some extremely startled looks on the tarmac. Sometimes Kim talks about her childhood: the letters from Santa that were written to her in Braille, the time she gazed romantically up at the moon, only to learn she’d been staring at a streetlight. The site is full of details about Kim’s job, about her guide dogs, about learning to ice skate, about how she identifies money or reads audio books.

For Kim, it’s an outlet. “Even on the day when my retired guide dog died, writing about it was so wonderful,” she recalls.

The thing about a blog is that anyone in the world can read it. “You never know what situation someone is in when they happen upon your words,” Kim says. “You don’t know who you will reach. You offer a gift, and someone takes from it what they take.”

This week, the woman who took Kim’s gift was a new mother across the Atlantic Ocean who had just learned that her baby is completely blind. She was distressed and despairing – until she found Kim’s blog and started reading. That’s when some of the anguish slipped away. She had found hope. And she emailed Kim to tell her so.

“I felt so touched,” Kim says. The new mom lives in England, but the two women have been exchanging emails all week. Even Kim’s own mom has been passing along encouraging messages.

Just imagine the impact that Kim’s funny, encouraging, personal stories have now made on a family three thousand miles away.

“We may never meet,” Kim says. “But I’m glad to know I made a difference for her at a rough time.

My beautiful friend Kim with her unquestionably devoted (if slightly slobbery) guide dog, Tulia.