Charity begins at home....
"Thank heaven and democratic progress, charity is one traditional virtue the modern world is willing to applaud. But what a lot we talk about it these days, and how often we miss its implications. Charity is not simply a donation to the community chest and a gift to the Hundred Neediest Cases at Christmastime. It is not merely giving one's hours as a volunteer in a hospital or subscribing to the relief of flood victims a hemisphere away. It is both larger and smaller than those things, at once easier and harder, and it does, indeed, begin at home. Charity is graciousness and tact. Charity is a guarded tongue. It is picking up one's toys, giving a hand wit the dinner dishes, writing a bread-and-butter letter to one's hostess. It is turning off television at a respectable hour so one's neighbor can sleep in peace, and being patient with bores. It is thanking salesladies in shops, forbearing to pass on the bit of malicious gossip so tempting to tell, wielding knife and fork so that we do not aesthetically offend."
~ Phyllis McGinley
Sixpence in Her Shoe - copyright 1960
(still true today!)
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