A Girl Most Ordinary

Sometimes I’m afraid that I have too much faith in people, that I’m naive in believing that most people are good. 

What happened today has told me otherwise. 

As you no doubt gleaned from the title, I was robbed. Well, my house was. My quiet family home in Markham was broken into while my parents were out. I came into the backyard from the outside to harvest the last of my tomatoes and noticed our window was open, which was odd given how fricken cold it was today. I thought my parents had left it open for some bizarre reason, but no. They had not. 

The nuggets who burgled my home took mostly small stuff, jewellery, my step dad’s antique model trains, and they drank some pop while they riffled through our life. 

Yes, this is super shitty. Yes, it was kind of rattling going through the house seeing what pieces of it had been picked apart by strangers. 

But I wasn’t doing it alone. I was on the phone with my parents while I walked through the house discovering what was amiss. I talked to a really nice friend when my step dad went to call the security company and I was all panicky. My aunts came over right away to help, bought dinner for us and stayed for almost 5 hours. A glass repair man offered to come over and fix our window whenever the police were done, even if it was 10 at night. The police officer and the forensic identification person were kind and patient. Two neighbours came over to make sure everything was okay, to see what they could do to help. Friends of mine offered to come over and help as well. Friends who couldn’t be there sent me virtual hugs, and basically everyone’s first question was if I was okay. 

Yes, there are people who do bad things. But there are also so many people who do really good things. 

I mean, just looking at my tiny little example from today. At best, I’m looking at a 10-1 ratio of good to bad people. Maybe 10-3 if there was more than one burglar. Even that’s a pretty good ratio. 

So I’m not going to give up on people yet, because a lot of people just showed me today that they are kind and generous and incredibly helpful.

So thank you to my neighbours, friends and family for reminding me and validating my belief that there are really good people out there. So even though someone riffled through our stuff and took a lot of it, I’m actually lying in bed now thinking how lucky I am to be so loved and to have good people around me. 

Until Next Time, 

Rachel Coulter