I know I already posted my thankful for today, but I thought of an extra one. I am standing in my kitchen and waiting for my onions to caramelize, and wearing my favorite apron. It is double-sided, blue, green, and pink and covered in little frogs. I like it better than my great grandmother's delicate, floral waist apron, my cool blue ruffley vintage one, the lace one that looks more like a negligée than a cooking tool, the dumb hot lips one--a gift--that says "I kiss better than I cook" (I can only be good at one?) Anyway, I like it so much not because I think cartoon frogs and lily pads are the height of good taste, but because of the woman who gave it to me.

When I was a junior/senior in college, I worked at this shitty little coffeeshop in the communication building. It wasn't an easy job--we'd get slammed at the juncture of classes and have a line of 40 people stretching around the corner and out the door. There were usually two of us on shift, three if we were lucky enough that the lazy, snaggletoothed harpie who managed the business would emerge from her backroom dungeon to give us a little backup. It was my second job in addition to my 22 hour courseload, and stressful, but I had a broke-ass car to fix up and a mile of student loans. The kids we served--my Lynchburg college fellows--were nasty as shit to us, often having waited a long time and impatient or late already for class.

My sole cellmate in this frappe hell was a woman in her late thirties. She was big, with fuzzy orange hair, a take-no-shit attitude, and a single mom from a trailer park. This coffee job--my martyrdom fill-in-the-cracks-of-higher-education employment--was the primary means of income for her and her elementary school son.

 I did not get the feeling she liked me so much. She had something negative to say about everything I did, and her sole topic of conversation: the great unhappiness and dissatisfaction of her life, of which I contributed. Not that I didn't have my bones to pick with her: she called me--from the moment I introduced myself as another name to the last time I ever saw her-- "Jessie." What was more, she had this habit that many women I encounter have: of randomly and insultingly making comments about my body, as if my height and fitness level make me immune to having any kind of feelings or body issues in my own right. Calling me a stick, or beanpole, or that I should eat more, or criticizing my lunch choices, or what. Nobody enjoys this, baggage or no, and I resented it. I judged her as ignorant Lynchburg trailer trash, and watched her scornfully as she drawled and lost and wolfed down candy bars and 22 ounce Pepsi's, with a quiet superiority that I didn't earn or deserve.

Because of my schedule, I'd often come from class or my other job, and not be quite dressed for eight hours of slogging through minimum wage food service. Particularly, the health code regulation about needing to constantly have a bleach bucket on hand for rags was troublesome, and it wasn't long before everything I owned was covered in bleach stains. To this day I can locate the few surviving garments of this era that remain in my wardrobe by searching for the little white constellations of stain that pattern the hip of each.

So this is the backstory of the day that my seemingly antagonist presented me with this apron that I'm wearing now, as an out of nowhere, beautiful, thoughtful gift. She had been working on it for a while, and picked out the fabric specially because something about the happy frogs had reminded her of me. I didn't even know she could sew.

She still bitched and fussed at me. I was still, probably, an entitled, Northern Virginia little ingrate, missing my multitude of blessings and advantages for the fact that some graphic design major just yelled at me over a mocha. But sometimes it just takes a small act of kindness to jolt somebody out of their perspective, and I'm thankful for that, and the lesson there, then and now.