Acts Of Kindness

This is a story I wrote for Kaldor Public Art ProjectsActs Of Kindness session at the 2011 Jurassic Lounge winter season. It was inspired by Michael Landy’s CBD installation Acts Of Kindness and the speakers were asked to write a story around the theme “an act of kindness”. 

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When I was in Grade 5, I wanted to start a small business.

I don’t know exactly what inspired this desire to enter the Australian economy. I like to think it was my tenacious work ethic, my passion to contribute to my local community and my willingness to grapple with the mighty waves of capitalist market forces.

In actual fact, it was because at school they were teaching us how to use Microsoft Word, and they’d shown us how to use Microsoft Word to make business cards, and I thought it would be cool to have a business card that I could make for myself by using Microsoft Word.

I was a pretty popular kid.

After a failed attempt at both an actual lemonade stand and a series of business cards promoting that lemonade stand, I decided to have a crack at a dog-walking business. I designed an appropriate card, awarding myself the somewhat pompous title of “Lord Of The Leash”, distributed the cards to neighbours’ letterboxes and then just waited for the Benjamins to roll in.

After a week of silence, I finally got a call from Janet Godfrey.

Now Janet Godfrey was not in the best of health. She was in her 70s. No one in their 70s is particularly agile, but not only was Janet Godfrey in her 70s, she also had a gangrenous foot that was quite swollen and required her to move about on a wheeled walker.

Oh – and also she was morbidly obese.

She was a morbidly obese 70-year-old lady with a gangrenous foot. Basically, she would be like the worst Golden Girl ever.

But she was lovely. She was a lovely, sweet old lady with a dog who needed walking that she couldn’t provide.

Now if you had to guess what kind of dog a 70 year old morbidly obese lady with a gangrenous foot might own, you might think something small, something low maintenance, like a beagle or a little fat sausage dog or a Jack Russell or something like that. You probably wouldn’t guess a fully-grown long-haired German Shepherd, but it turns out, in the case of Janet Godfrey, you’d be wrong.

Despite the fact that she was incapacitated, Mrs. Godfrey was the proud owner of the massive beast that she’d named Thumper. She’d owned German Shepherds all her life and she wasn’t going to stop just because she was in her golden years.

Thumper didn’t get out of Mrs. Godfrey’s flat much, so when I nervously turned up one afternoon and made it clear that my arrival meant that someone was going for walkies, that dog went apeshit and proceeded to essentially walk me around the block, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, only stopping occasionally to shit on the footpath and humiliate me with the subsequent plastic-bag-based-cleanup.

Don’t worry, though, I was making some serious money; yeah that’s right, I was on the princely sum of $1 per walk. I would say to myself: Come on, Tom – only 5000 more years of this and you can afford a down-payment on a house.

For the next seven years, throughout high school, I walked that goddamn dog every week. But that wasn’t the entirety of my relationship with Mrs. Godfrey. You see, Mrs. Godfrey didn’t just need help with Thumper; it was clear she needed help with almost every part of her life. She had a nurse come to look after her foot and her family visited regularly, but there were always little jobs that needed doing. She was skilled in the art of the leading question. As I’d return from a walk – or a drag, as I like to think of them – she’d casually mention:

“Oh…I’ll have to bring the washing in soon, I suppose…”

I’d be bound to ask: “Oh. Would you like me to do it for you?”

She offered to throw in an extra 50 cents, but I told her not to worry about it, because I’m that kind of guy.

Over the years, I brought in Mrs. Godfrey’s washing, unpacked her shopping, drew her blinds, took out her bins, extracted burrs from Thumper’s coat, played game after game of backgammon with her, helped her with the crossword and even watched Wheel Of Fortune with her, and that show is excruciating when you know the popular phrase and the contestant can’t figure it out because they’re the stupidest person who has EVER WALKED THE EARTH.

It’s clearly “A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE”!

Eventually my fee disappeared altogether as I got older, found part-time employment with a slightly higher minimum wage, and realized that I did these things for Mrs. Godfrey not as an employee, but, kind of weirdly, as a friend. As someone who could help. These acts of kindness were very rarely much fun and I could certainly think of other ways I’d rather be spending my time, but I also knew that it was right for me to be doing them. I couldn’t just announce that I was unable to visit Mrs. Godfrey anymore; that wouldn’t be true and it just wouldn’t be right.

Thumper died during my Year 12 year from a tumour. Mrs. Godfrey followed him the following year, though not before buying a new GERMAN SHEPHARD PUPPY.

She really loved those dogs.

I’m always suspicious when I hear about how easy it is to do the right thing. I don’t think it’s easy to do the right thing; it’s easy to be an arsehole. We’re all fundamentally arseholes, all trying to move as far away from our inherent arseholery as possible. Partaking in acts of kindness can be boring and smelly and frustrating and time-consuming and can sometimes mean you have to spend quite a lot of time with a 70 year-old morbidly obese woman with a gangrenous foot.

But that’s okay. It’s the least I could do, what with me being the official Lord of the Leash.