"Gronk, the Social Worker"

 

The Gardener’s Daughter

“Paulina, the gardener’s daughter, cares

About flowers doomed to die.

If I bring her a bouquet, she frees it

From the ribbons and gently places it in the hospice

Of a vase…”

Tadeusz Dabrowski (“Bouquet” translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

          This poem by Polish author, Dabrowski, was one of the prompts for writing last week. Writing from prompts is an interesting exercise because each person sees the poem through their own lens and each one is different. This is what I wrote:

“I had a dog once when I was in High School. His name was Gronk, and he was a beagle mix—built low to the ground, with long, velvet ears, and a bugle bark. My grandmother referred to him as “Gronk, the Social Worker.”

“When I feed him,” she said, “he walks out to the end of the driveway and barks. Then all the dogs in the neighborhood come running fast and eat up his food! Stupid dog!”

I know, however, that some people and dogs are just tender hearted. They care about things and people, and the planet—all the time. They think about people who are hungry before they put a bite of food into their mouths. They worry about feral cats on cold nights and put out blankets for them. They carry food to sick neighbors and visit people who are lonely—even people they don’t like very much. Sometimes, they annoy other people with their caregiving, but those annoyed folks eat the food anyway, because it’s good.

Gronk was like that. So was Paulina, the gardener’s daughter. I’m not, so I’m glad they were.

          Hopefully, most of us have a little Paulina and Gronk in us. We care about other people, sometimes to our own detriment. It’s only a problem when we care about other people more than they want us to, and we act in codependent ways that make them feel suffocated or incompetent. When we do too much, they pull away from us so they can grow up and become independent adults. We mean well, but we do harm. It’s a good thing to think about before we just assume that someone needs something, but we don’t ask them.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane