Life Lessons and Pedicures

I sat down in the salon chair and breathed a sigh of relief.  I made it!  I had 90 minutes to kill before I had to pick girls up from ballet.  I had been thinking all week that I might be able to squeeze a pedicure into this window of time, but I hold plans like this loosely because they rarely seem to work out like I hope.  But this time I was in the chair.  I made it.

“Do you have an appointment?” the woman asked me when I first walked in the door.  Of course I didn’t, because it’s December.  Who gets a pedicure in December?  The weather forecast warned of snow on 3 different occasions in the next week.  Why would I need an appointment? 

For future reference, this is failed logic.  You see, all the nail people get manicures in December.  Which makes sense because of Christmas parties and office parties and such, so the salon allots limited staff for pedicures. I, however, am not a nail person, or a pedicure person for that matter, so I don’t know these sort of things.  Thankfully, they were kind enough to give me a chair and let me soak my feet while they finished tending to the patron whose pedicure was already in progress.

A little extra soaking, no problem.  I had 90 minutes.  Well, 80 now, but who’s counting.

 

One Christmas pedicure, please.

I picked my polish before taking my seat.  This would be my first ever Christmastime pedi so the decision wasn’t easy.  Do I stick to my comfort zone, an array of corrals, or go full on Christmas?  I chose Christmas.  Red, sparkly, glittery, all the Christmas.  As I walked to my chair I pondered the idea of an artsy little snowflake on my big toe.  Maybe a bit of holly?  I’d make a last minute call on that one.

Feet soaking, I glanced at the woman sitting next to me just long enough to check her status. They appeared to be giving her a final coat of fiery orange polish on her second foot, which meant the wait shouldn’t be too long.

I reached for my phone and noticed that pesky “your storage is almost full” alert it keeps nagging me with.  Perfect, I thought, finally a little down time to delete old photos and messages.  So I got to work, ignoring the world around me and cleaning up my phone storage.

I fumbled around with and re-started that comfortable, but not really that comfortable, massage chair a few times, when I realized, I had been sitting there forever.  Twenty minutes to be exact.

I shifted my weight somewhat obviously in the chair and gave a little passive-aggressive sigh to remind anyone who was watching that I was still here, waiting.  My behavior garnered a little attention as words bounced around in a language I didn’t understand and the pedicurist began pausing occasionally to check my water temperature and trim a cuticle or two, biding time before returning to the task at hand.

The woman in the chair beside me turned to me and apologized “I’m sorry. I always feel so sorry for the people who have to paint my toes.”  Her comment made no sense to me until I actually stopped to look at her feet.  Her left foot was swaying uncontrollably; she had a tremor.  How had I not noticed?  Her fiery orange polish seeped onto the tender skin next to her toenails.  It looked as if my 6 year old daughter had done her polish job.

The pedicurist would go back and forth between polishing and erasing with a little brush dipped in polish remover, but progress was one step forward two steps back on this constantly moving target.

I was sighing, the pedicurist was struggling and this poor woman was apologizing.

I set my phone down and looked at the woman’s face for the first time.  The lines carved deep in her skin told me she was more than twice my age and her smile felt something like a warm hug.  It caught my attention because it’s a kindness I don’t see as often these days.

How do you get that kind of smile?  I wondered.

Does it come with age?  With wisdom? With wrinkles?  In a society where we fight aging, we Botox the lines right off our faces, I wondered if maybe, just maybe, we Botox the warmth, the intrinsic kindness as well.

My phone now properly stashed, I engaged in an easy conversation with this woman.  She told me of her struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, which really wasn’t too bad at all, she quickly informed me.  Her swaying hand betrayed her words, but she told me she was blessed to only have this come on later in her life.

Blessed.  Huh.

Clearly she got that “Count it all joy…” stuff James was talking about. (James 1:2)

She was getting a pedicure because she had an appointment with a foot specialist the following morning.  She loved getting pedicures before these semi-annual appointments.  It was nearly impossible for her to trim, let alone paint, her toenails any longer.  But she still cared.  She reminded me of Dottie.

As we continued to chat she asked if I had children and her delight was obvious when I told her I had four, so I asked about her family as well.  She had 5 children at one time, but one of her sons was in a car accident in his 20s and passed away a few years later.  Not long after that one of her daughters was killed in a car accident as well.  Her husband has struggled with his health and has been hospitalized dozens of times over the years.

Tears brimmed just behind her smile as she recounted those years, those stories, to me.  She told me she never would have gotten through it all if it wasn’t for her faith.

As they finally finished up her top coat I looked at the clock and realized, my time was up.  Ninety minutes all spent, I had two girls waiting to be picked up for ballet.  My toes never got painted.

Right now in the midst of the busy Christmas season, my husband and I are celebrating our 15th anniversary (a little late) in San Jose Del Cabo, Mexico, hence the reason for my first ever Christmas time pedicure.  I painted my own toes once I got here and that not-so-perfect paint job has been a pretty great reminder.  I paid $27 for a pedicure I never received, but the life lesson I got instead was worth every penny.

Blessings abound in hard places, hard lives.  Joy can run deeper than sorrow, if we choose it.  And much can be learned if we put our phones down and choose to see people instead.

I’ll take that reminder over a fancy pedi any day.

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