Found!

I finally found my birthday celebration project. It came about quite by "chance" ~ if you want to call divine appointments chance. I was standing in line behind a customer who just couldn't seem to get anything right. What should have been a two minute checkout ahead of me was taking much longer. I felt sorry for the clerk, but being in no hurry, didn't bother to jump line.

Neither did the woman behind me. We smiled at each other knowingly, then struck up a conversation. Turns out we had a good twenty minutes to chat, and somewhere along the line, she mentioned a young lady she had recently met who needed some cheering up. This young lady was Korean, and she and her husband had recently bought a nail salon. The business was struggling along. Suddenly, her husband died, and a week later she found she was pregnant - a real shock since her daughter was already eighteen and about to graduate high school.

She is due any minute, and still struggling to keep the business going and deal with her grief all at the same time. As I finally stepped up to the cashier, I asked where the nail salon was and jotted down the address. "Worth checking out," I thought.

It hadn't even entered my head to get my nails done. I don't have them done often - somehow I have a hard time justifying spending the money - which is also why I tend to wait so long between haircuts. The salon was way on the other side of the city, but I had to check the mail for Jairus House, and it was right down the road from the post office. I sauntered through the open doorway. Not a customer was in sight.

There was a Korean woman sitting dejectedly on the stool behind the counter, her belly so swollen she could hardly fit between the wall and the cash register. She looked up as I entered, and asked hopefully, "Can I he'p you?" She looked relieved when I said I wanted to get a manicure.

I sat in the swivel black chair, soaking my hands in the little green dish, and we chatted. I asked her questions discretely, and before long, she was telling me the whole story. The lady in the grocery store had been right. This was a woman who needed an arm around her, some support. Her family all live in Texas, and she had only moved here for the business. The location was good when they purchased the salon, but construction had begun a year ago that blocked off the entrance to the plaza and was just finishing now. Customers didn't like fighting the mess and stayed away in droves. It had taken a huge bite from their profits.

She talked on and on, as if a dam had suddenly burst and she couldn't prevent the words from tumbling out. She fussed with my fingers until I thought they would drop off - not hurting me, but just doing and redoing each step to buy time so she could keep talking. I listened without saying anything.

I hadn't meant for my birthday celebration project to benefit myself, and I felt almost guilty getting the manicure. Perhaps it can be justified by the amount of time I spent there - two and a half hours, during which not one soul entered the little salon. After she finally came to the end of her angst, we moved on in our conversation to happier topics, the arrival of the baby, times in her past that she remembered with enjoyment.

I left knowing she would be the object of my year long celebration of life. I believe my next project will be to send her some cheerful spring flowers. And of course, I will continue to go there on those rare occasions when I do get my nails done. Perhaps I can recommend her place to my friends - after my nails recover!