Month: November 2025

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Dallas Kindness Week is over. Yes, the dates have come and gone. The Festival on Saturday—full of hundreds of performers, thousands of happy participants—fell silent after the gospel choir One Voice sang “O Happy Day.”

We heard from 600 Dallas ISD students who sang or danced or played instruments or read stories. They were followed by many other students and adults alike—from Duncanville, Richardson, Midlothian, Waxahachie, Frisco, Oak Cliff, Grand Prairie, and DeSoto. So much variety as these performers represented not just professional organizations (Dallas Winds and Dallas Symphony Orchestra Young Strings) but also private and public schools, different genres of music and dance, some by way of Northern Ireland and India. Art by definition shares what it means to be human. That happened Saturday in a rich display of talent and joy.

From its earliest planning stages, Thanks-Giving Foundation President and CEO Kyle Ogden has called the week “First Annual.”  One focus was kindness in the classroom. Over a million stickers and buttons with a QR code to the Kindness Pledge flooded Dallas ISD and other area schools. Students found ways not only to act kind but also to observe kindness in others. Resources of all kinds were made available to businesses and community centers. Cards with a quotation on the front and a challenge for fulfillment on the back were popular: Plato wrote, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Challenge: Write a letter of appreciation to a family member.

Isn’t love important? Remember the 1965 Hal Leonard-Burt Bacharach hit “What the World Needs Now”? Love, sweet love—for everyone…True enough. But love is a feeling. Kindness is an action, a reaction, a gift. You can’t love someone who has cut you off in traffic or said something disagreeable. Or worse. You can take a breath and respond with kindness.

People think in pictures, so an image helps us understand a principle. Kyle Ogden often writes about common ground, a great unifier. Kindness—the decision, the action—needs motion. In recent articles, he has used a different approach: “Acts of kindness ripple outward—turning small gestures into cultural change. Our goal is to position Dallas as a national leader in compassion and inclusion.”

On a personal level, I have felt changed by the Pledge. It’s more solemn than a promise, certainly weightier than those pages-long agreements we sign without reading. Yes, sometimes it’s easy enough to give a compliment to a friend. It’s not always as easy to wait a few seconds before making a snappy comeback to a rude stranger. Those few sentences beginning with “I will” are making a difference in my life.

Most people are warm and friendly. That goodness can go to the next level with a little time and attention. The ripple has a center. And that center can be your kind words or quiet actions. Let’s watch as others catch the vision, too!

The Kindness Pledge (if you don’t want to go to the link)

This is Dallas Kindness Week. Kyle Ogden, President and CEO of The Thanks-Giving Foundation, caught the vision for this commemoration in February 2025. Thirty years ago, Dee Silverstein and Jackie Waldman recruited Jim McCormick (of the famous spice company) to help change Dallas’ image after seeing Schindler’s List (1993). Dallas Acts Kind was a week of luminaries—Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King III, and W. Deen Mohammad came to town.

Kyle thought we needed to do this again. And do it he has. A million “kindness stickers” for local schoolchildren—one every day for every child in Dallas ISD. Thousands of buttons. “Challenge Cards” with 25 quotations and a fulfillment suggestion: Maya Angelou~~ “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Compliment a stranger’s smile. Visit the website for resources.

There’s a kindness festival on Saturday, November 15, 10 am-6 pm at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in the Dallas Arts District. Dallas ISD is bringing 15 buses of performers! For the afternoon, we’ve scheduled almost 2 dozen performances of all kinds—choirs, soloists, the Desperados, ballet folklorico, classical Indian dance, comedians. A premier trio from the Dallas Winds! A bagpiper! The schedule will be on the website soon.

Kyle’s excellent editorial in the Dallas Morning News describes the practical side of kindness. Simply put, it’s good for business. Here’s a favorite paragraph:

“Google’s Project Aristotle demonstrated over a decade ago that teams work best with high social sensitivity and empathetic communication. Strong teams that practice kindness find room to recover together rather than retreat apart. A culture steeped in kindness doesn’t deny challenge; it meets it with courage, patience, and humanity.”

My story is simpler. On Saturday, I represented TGS at the 5^th Annual Kindness Event, Third Church of Christ, Scientist. I staffed a table but visited others—Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, for example—and received a temporary tattoo.

The woman asked a question I never would have thought of: “Do you want it so you can read it or so other people can?” What? There were two possibilities? The “right” way—so other people could read it. But think of the implications. I’m not a billboard advertising kindness; I am kindness. I shouldn’t just display the phrase; I should be it.

Upside down attacks my OCD. Yet—It’s easier to be snarky, snarly, or mean. And momentarily, it feels better. “Ha! Showed you!” The Golden Rule is clear: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But wait, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” We usually take that as the basis of charity. But it goes the other way, too. If you are unkind to someone, guess who you’re mistreating? Yes. The One who is Kindness. So, be kind to everyone, especially when you don’t feel like it. Kindness isn’t weak.

Used to (copyrighted phrase, remember), I would have a writing student say, “I have nothing to write about.” My response was, “Yes, you do. You just named it.”  (I can be irritating—life-long gift). I would get the look of, “You poor, unintelligent thing. I just told you I have nothing to write about. That means, duh, I can’t write something that I don’t have.

“Ah, but you do. What does it feel like to have nothing to say, to write? That is your topic!” Because they had long known they were in the company of a teacher who was a bit askew (if they knew that word), they would dutifully go about the task of writing about what is was like to have nothing to write about.

And that is where I find myself tonight. During writers’ group I read an excerpt from an old short, set in Paris near a giant sculpture called Le Pouce (The Thumb). The article in the link is on a site called Atlas Obscura. Like a regular atlas, it details places in the world, but it highlights obscure places, foods, trips, and stories—but bad pop-ups.

Randomly (or…was it?), I looked into one of Barcelona’s hidden sites, a fountain that pumps mercury instead of water. An American sculptor, Alexander Calder, was commissioned to build it to commemorate the centuries of quicksilver mining in Almadén. The metal, liquid at room temperature, is both extremely toxic and extremely beautiful.

And there, finally, is my topic. When I was a child, we lived in a shabby old house with some high cabinets above the ones where the melamine plates and jelly glasses were stored. For reasons unknown to me, there was a pint of mercury in a pint jar stored in one of them. I would occasionally stand on a chair and hoist my little middle-school self on to the faded Formica countertop and open the cabinet, take out the jar, and open the lid. Mercury weighs a lot—that pint would have been about 14 pounds. An equal amount of water, about one. The density, the weight, the oddly swirled surface—it was all fascinating. I’m sure we were told never to touch it, which I took as a suggestion.

We knew it was used in thermometers, the kind your mother would reset with a few snaps of her wrist. If one broke, that mercury slithered out and immediately formed into little balls that had to be captured because, yes, poison. Ironic, that toxin silver contained in fragile glass, slipped under a tongue, then dipped in alcohol for the next foray. Which is how fever “used to” be calculated.

The mercury disappeared one day, sold, I assume. The oddity of its heft and mystery lingers. And that is also how things go when you think you have nothing to write about.