Brotherly advice taken to heart

 Sometimes life’s lessons are learned not so much with that figurative slap up alongside the head, but with more of a splash of fresh water across your face that gets your attention and somehow leaves you revived.

I was talking on the phone the other day to my middle brother, Rodney. He’s a big teddy bear of a guy who gave up dairy farming many years ago when milk prices soured, so he became a massage therapist and kaleidoscope maker.

Yes, it’s a weird combination of jobs, but both professions suit him and he’s good at both. If you’re familiar with West Acres Mall in Fargo, N.D., the gigantic floor-mounted set of three kaleidoscopes featured there were made by him. He sells big, fancy kaleidoscopes to rich people all over the country. If you Google “Rodney Haug kaleidoscopes” you’ll find on YouTube the very nice piece Prairie Public Broadcasting did about him.

Anyway, Rod’s day-to-day job involves making house calls throughout the Red River Valley to give people massages. Last week he had an appointment with one of my high school classmates, who was an immediate fan of Rod’s massage abilities. As they visited during the hour-long kneading of sore muscles they talked about high school and “Susie” wondered what I was doing.

Susie was one of those kids who blended into the background, an average student at best who didn’t participate in any clubs or extracurricular activities. I was friends with her in first and second grade, though, and have her first-grade picture in one of my photo albums. I think I even went to a birthday party at her house.

She was tall and lanky for her age in grade school, and I vividly remember our teacher asking her to demonstrate how to do somersaults backwards and forwards because she had the maneuvers down pat.

But as so often happens in school, we drifted toward other groups of students and by the time we graduated we barely acknowledged each other’s existence.

Susie has never come to any class reunions, even though she still lives in our hometown. As Rod talked with her during their massage session, he learned she still was nursing old wounds of being a “loser” in high school, of not ever fitting in. She was never good enough for most people, she told him, not one of the “in crowd.”

That last statement took me completely aback, because I had always marveled at how she could run her dad’s hardware store single-handedly if she had to. Susie knew every size of bolt and screw and I marveled at how she knew where everything was in that store. The girl had skills.

Rod suggested I look her up the next time I’m back home in Minnesota. I’m ashamed I’d never thought of doing that. He told me how he’d befriended one of his “cast-off” classmates and how she had later turned up at a reunion bonfire he’d hosted at his farm, grateful that he had reached out to her.

“Sometimes it takes just a ‘Hi, how ya doing,’” he so profoundly advised.

Right then and there I vowed to get in touch with Susie the next time I’m home.

My brother is right as rain on this one. It takes so little to connect with people if we’re willing to go outside our comfort zone and make the first move. How much better off would our world be if more of us could move past the past and start anew on old relationships?

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.