The Treasure of Kindness

 

 Photo of movie poster (from Wikipedia)   

The Treasure of Kindness

Article by Fr Seán Coyle 

LINK HERE 

The first book I ever read, when seven, was my father’s unabridged copy of Robert Louis Stevenson.

I was seven and the book, my father’s, was unabridged. Dad rarely read books but always got the morning and evening paper. He encouraged me to read and when I was eight I got a card in Dublin City’s excellent public library system.

The year I read the book, 1950, a movie based on it came out. There was great excitement when it came to our local cinema in Dublin, the Broadway. The ushers were dressed as pirates and there was to be a raffle before the main movie at the children’s showing on a Saturday afternoon. Wearing a brown corduroy suit and with sixpence for the admission ticket which would serve for the raffle, I excitedly joined the queue.

When I got to the box office, though I searched every pocket, I couldn’t find the sixpence. Then I began to walk away, crying. The manageress approached me and asked me what was wrong. When I explained she told me just to go in. I was grateful and consoled. However, I still wanted a ticket for the raffle and kept searching in my pockets and eventually found the elusive sixpence. In my excitement I ran out to the box office and got my ticket.

However, it didn’t win a prize. But as the years went by, the kindness of the Broadway’s manageress keeps popping up in my memory and when it does I pray for her and, as I write this, I have prayed for the ‘pirates’ also that all of them have gone to the ‘Treasure Island’ that is heaven.

The kindness of an adult to a child can be an ongoing treasure. The memory of it brings a smile to our face. Part of the treasure is that children learn from such experiences how to behave as adults. Around 2010 a teacher in the Philippines reminded me that when she was a child I had bought her a pair of flip-flops, known as tsinelas (‘chinEELas’). I had vaguely remembered the incident which took place in 1980. Chatting with a group of children near the parish church, I noticed that one of them was wearing tsinelas that had seen better days. It wasn’t that her family was poor but rather that her flip-flops had ‘given up the ghost’ that afternoon and her home was some distance away. We went to a nearby store and I bought her a new pair, costing me only a few pesos. I totally forgot about the whole thing until she reminded me about it.

Though I didn’t make the connection at the time, the kindness of the Broadway Cinema manageress to me in Dublin in 1950 was part of what my young friend in Mindanao experienced in 1980 and still vividly remembered in 2010. The kindness of any adult to a child is part of God’s treasure available to all of us.

Broadway Cinema Dublin 

Photo from cinematreasures.org

The cinema closed in 1956 

but the building is now used as a youth centre.