Have you done a good deed lately?

In My Humble Opinion
62

I love this thread.

Just today, I was thinking about what I want to do with my life. I want to be a teacher, I know, but why? And then I realized: tikkun olam. Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning “repair of the world”, and it’s supposed to be what we all try to do all the time, but sometimes it’s hard to remember when we have jobs, kids, etc. It was almost an epiphany - I was just overjoyed at the thought of working for tikkun olam, and really felt renewed in spirit. And then I came home and read this thread, which I missed the first time around.

You guys are great. There is tikkun olam going on in here, and that is just amazing. I am inspired.

As for me, I always buy an item on the “want list” for the AIDS Community Food Bank whenever they have collection bins at the market.

Nothing else really major springs to mind, but not too long ago, I dashed across a parking lot to stop a shopping cart from smashing into someone’s car. A store employee was really surprised, and thanked me.

63

Wow! Great thread. I can’t really compare to some of these stories, but here are a couple of my good deeds:

I give blood regularly and have recently passed the gallon mark. I know this is a good deed, but I have to admit that I get something out of it too. Everytime I give blood I pester the nurses (phlebotomists?) with all sorts of questions about the process. I find it absolutely fascinating how my body can recognize I’m running a pint low and just crank out some more blood for me.

This past winter when it was very cold here in the midwest I was driving down the highway when I saw a woman walking from her broken down car towards the next exit. She did not have a coat, hat or gloves on and the exit was a good 2 miles away. I stopped and let her in the car intending to give her a ride to her chosen destination. She said that if she could just use my cell phone to call her sister to pick her up that would be enough. As she’s calling her sister a police officer pulled up behind us and offerred to help out too. The woman was very thankful and it felt good to help her out.

64

I just wanted to post some excerpts from the email my friend in Utah sent to me after getting the package I mailed to her.

My grandparents have adopted you and yours. You have no choice in this matter :slight_smile:

I recieved your box yesterday and I can’t even express how wonderful and kind it was. My youngest daughter hasn’t put her hello kitty items down. She has the hello kitty backpack for school. She starts on the 6th. My other daughter spent the night at a friends and I almost drove it to her. I just can’t thank you enough. I had a hard time accepting the money, but grandfather told me it was a true gift and to accept it. I’ve never had anyone give me money. My older daughter needed a clarinet for 6th grade band. She played last year and loved it. I went down and got her a new one with stand, t-shirt, and music book. I put it on a rent to own program. If she wants to continue the money applies to the purchase price. I set her up till Jan 2002 with the money you sent. The money really helped in that I would have had to charge the clarinet at this time in my life. I will never forget your kindness. I can’t even express it. I cried last night over it, happy tears. Thank you. The girls will be writing you soon.

Those of you here who are aware of how important music is in my life will know how much it meant to me that my friend’s little girl will now have a solid chance at making music part of her life too.

If ever there was proof that it is truly more blessed to give…

65

I don’t want this to sound like a look what I did message. I do so when the situation is right.

I gave my only other winter coat to someone, that had to wear layers of hole filled shirts. I paid off $100 on a friend’s bill at the hospital in cash, and had the reciept say paid by patient. I actually had a few hundred to spare at the time. I have a lot of physical and finacial problems going on right now, but I can still drive. I’ve been taking the eighty year old nieghbor with me, to get her out of her house. Since she and I both have limited time we can walk around this works out, and we take the senic routes.

I’ve been layed off one day a week for two months now, and that losses me a hundred bucks a week. My car broke down a month ago. I can’t work on it because it’s physically beyond what I can do right now. This spring I was going to get things fixed at my mother’s house and three weeks into it I had a relapse of my illness. Now she’s saving my ass with some cash. I don’t know what I’ll do if work doesn’t go back to full time like now. I’m skilled, but sick and I can’t go get a different job. Insurance is handing out thousands each month. I had enough to pay her back, if the people I had done work for would pay up. Now I’m beyond that.

I don’t donate to group charities, but I do give annomonus gifts to people that need what I have extra of. Give home grown produce to the needy you know right now. The food banks in the area are low, but will not give out home grown produce, because it’s might be tampered with. You can give it directly to them though, and it tastes a lot better fresh from a garden.

66

Here’s mine…

So I have just arrived at a small beach town for a week’s vacation last month. It’s close to midnight, and I decide to go out for a short walk. I get about 500 yards down the road, when a man standing in the shadows outside a two-family house hails me. “How are you?” he asks. “Just fine,” I say. “And you?” I assume he’s going to say, Fine, and that’ll be that. But he doesn’t. “Well,” he says instead, “not so good. I’m worried about my upstairs neighbor. I think she might have tried to do something to herself.”

I grew up in the big bad city and am natually suspicious of strangers, especially strangers in unfamiliar towns at midnight. But something makes me stop. “Done something to herself?” I repeat, and I cross a little closer to him. “Yeah,” he says. “She was really down on herself earlier today. She takes pills and stuff, and I’ve been trying to reach her by phone for about three hours now but the line’s always busy. She’s never talking to anybody for that long. Anyway, she’s got a big ol’ golden retriever which always barks, and it isn’t barking now. I think she’s done something to herself.”

He’d called the police, he said, but they were taking their sweet time. He was clearly agitated–as he should have been–and quite alone. And so I stayed. I talked a little to him, and I listened a lot to him. He went back and forth–“She’s gonna hate me for calling the cops, she’s probably just asleep” and “She’s probably dead in there; why don’t those fuckin’ officers come?” He talked and talked, about her, about his concerns for her, about how he should have seen it coming, about how he should never have left. About how he’d seen a mental health form in her car the other day. About how she’d gotten fired from her job, unfairly, and hadn’t fought back. About this and that, and through it all I just stood there and listened and sympathized and assured him that he had done the right thing by calling.

The cops did show up. They gave him a hard time, God knows why, and eventually bashed in the door (“Oh, my landlord’s gonna kill me,” he said). For a while they wouldn’t give him an update. Finally they said that the neighbor was in bad shape but still alive. They called in the EMTs, who told us that she’d taken quite a few pills and left a bunch of self-hating messages around the apartment. Bottom line is she will recover and hopefully get the treatments she needs.

So what did I do? On one level, absolutely nothing. He was the one who cared, he called the police, the cops called the EMTs, the EMTs pulled her out. But I stayed with a fellow human being in distress, a total stranger moreover. It was an act that surprised me greatly–it’s not part of my usual M. O.–but it turned out to be such a blessing. For him, absolutely, but for me as well. As Frederick Buechner wrote in one of his novels, “To catch other people when they are falling…perhaps that’s the most important work we can do.”

Thanks for reading…snac

67

Thanks Kyla, I’ll have to remember this phrase, I like it a lot.

Chris

68

Alright now I feel downright despicable, I can’t even think of one good deed I’ve done in too long.

About all I do good deed wise is donate blood every time I can for the past 4 years (Its as long as I’ve been able too)

69

i had a friend do a wonderful favor for me today.

<background>
a good friend of mine. is living in manhatten for the summer on an internship. we have only been communicating through email for the past few months; i don’t even have her phone number. this tragedy of the past week knocked me off-line until tonight and i have been worried sick about her, not knowing enough about new york to know if she was anywhere near the disaster.
</background>

today a friend at work told me he got an email from our friend. she is okay. she was on the roof of her building, just three blocks away, that morning and saw the whole thing happen. she is quite shaken up but alive and (physically) unharmed. he didn’t think he did anything special by passing the news on to me. but i can’t help but think…there are thousands of families in nyc now that are praying for half that information.

if you are one that can’t thing of a good deed that you’ve done lately, pray for those families. it doesn’t cost anything, but the benefits are amazing.

70

Amen, tolyri! Welcome to the boards!

Paul

71

I know it ain’t much but I always gather up all the shopping carts in the parking lot of the grocery store, if that counts.

Also, in my city there was a garbage strike this summer, and that in the midst of a heatwave. The month end came, and across the road from my newly puchased house, the tenants in the rental property moved out, leaving a bag of not terribly well wrapped garbage at the curb.

A couple of days go by, some birds or squirrels get into it, it’s getting strewn about the yard soon to be all over the street.
So, the next afternoon, when no one was looking, (hey, I didn’t want my new neighbours to think I was picking in the garbage!)
I went out and gathered and double bagged it, tied it nicely and deposited back onto the curb where it remained, undisturbed, until the city workers were back on the job, about 12 days. I know it’s just picking garbage but what can I say?

And I always bring in my neighbours recycling bin, I’m here all day and they usually come right after he goes to work, and besides I’m going to the curb any way.

72

We donated our son’s cord blood when he was born.

73

I rescue cats, but that’s because someone in my neighborhood has picked up on the fact that I rescue cats and frequently dumps them in my yard. “Good deed” is what the vet does - he doesn’t charge me for strays, which, once they are certified as OK, are de-flea’d and de-mited and given their shots so that they CAN be adopted.

I also do a lot of the hold the door open, let people in line ahead of me, tell a friend she has spinach in her teeth type good deeds as a matter of course, but that’s more common courtesy than “good deeding” to me.

It should be noted that although I am a chronic doer-of-small-good-deeds, I am also a mean, bitter, nasty woman who will eventually catch the person who keeps dumping cats in my yard, and I will behead him/her with my TEETH.