The Early Bird Catches the Karma

I'm having a big problem with my neighbors, in the best possible way. WRITTEN, ANIMATED, & YES, EVEN SPOKEN by PETER MOORE, ON FRONT RANGE NPR

BACK IN MY MAGAZINE-EDITOR DAYS, a colleague and I launched a radio show called Men’s Health Live. It was of course taped, because who wants to wake up at 1am to broadcast in Wichita? Founding lie notwithstanding, it radiated out to a million people every week, and I loved the opportunity to invade their earballs. Better living through radio! So when I moved to Colorado, I reached out to our local NPR station and said, why don’t I share random-but-instructional-and-also-funny bits of my life with your audience?

Oh, with animations, too?

They said yes!

So when I looked out at my front sidewalk on a recent snowy morning, I didn’t just see evidence of my neighbor’s kindness, I saw an opportunity to pontificate about random acts of kindness.

Have you been the beneficiary of any of them, recently?

If you prefer to access this commentary through your ears, give a listen. The next voice you hear will be that of your faithful commentoonist.

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ON THE MORNING OF OUR MOST RECENT SNOWSTORM, I woke up early, like a schoolkid eager for a snow day. I’m a huge fan of snow, and Big Weather in general, as long as it doesn’t bury, blow, swamp, or burn my house down. Those four horsemen of the climate apocalypse are real possibilities, for all of us. I eye the skies warily, and with awe. It’s the Irish curse: may you live in interesting times. And so we do, conveyed to me through my Weather Underground app, of all things.

When I peered out the window shade and saw huge snowflakes settling like a flock of white doves, I rushed to pull on my fleece clothing. The sun had not yet risen, but time was of the essence. My Fort Collins neighbors are a bunch of early-rising do-gooders. If I wanted to beat them at the goodness game, I had to get out there.

But I’d already missed my chance: Our side of Whedbee Street, including the path to our front door, had been cleared from Oak Street to Olive, and somebody had even cleared a path to our front door. The saintly suspects were many: The dad next door, the environmental engineer from CSU, the church people at the corner, the guy from Minnesota who says with a straight face that, actually, he likes to shovel snow.

What’s a guy to do, with neighbors like that? It’s exhausting and impossible to keep up with the examples they set. They throw down the good-gauntlet, and taunt me: How neighborly do you want to be, punk?

Yeah, my street is weird in the best possible way. When I walk to yoga class on Saturday mornings, it’s as if I’ve stepped onto the set of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. On any given morning, I may encounter my neighbor who adopted an elderly, blind dog, because someone needed to.

Or the Otterbox exec who puts out Grinch Christmas lights, but with a heart that is definitely not two sizes too small.

Or the parishioners at Two Rivers Church. At Christmas, they dropped a parcel of candy on our front steps.

It’s as if our downtown, famously the inspiration for Main Street in Disneyland, had spread that cheerful spirit to our block. It’s a contagion of kindness.

And there I was on that snowy morning, playing the role of Goofy with my snow shovel, arriving with too little, too late, to win the walk-clearing game.

But still, I try. I wish more people, including me, would try harder.

It’s the challenge of our age, with the world shrinking, and novel life-forms asserting their right to exist, and new neighbors living in new ways. To assimilate them, we need a bigger welcome wagon, not an Abrams tank.

One Sunday morning, walking down Whedbee, I found a picture I.D. and office key on the sidewalk. I suspected that a church person may have dropped it after the service, so I emailed Two Rivers Church and asked if they knew her. Soon I had a call from her husband, a plumber, who thanked me a thousand times, and asked if he could repay the favor somehow.

A week later, he fixed my leaky toilet.

Like microbes, like intolerance, like evil, kindness can go viral too.

When my neighbors are itching to help, I need to scratch that itch, as well.So I can’t wait for the next snowstorm. I’m eager to show my neighbors that yes, we’re all in this together. And snowflakes are a terrific way to do that, one shovel-full at a time.

The early bird catches the karma. Pass it on.

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” —Mae West

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