Have you ever benefited from the kindness of strangers?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Suggested by a couple of cynical threads I don’t intend to link to. I’d rather people shared stories in which they were helped or comforted by people they didn’t know, but I don’t object to the the reverse. I’m fairly sure I’m not the boss of y’all anyhow.

I’ll start with something that happened not quite five years ago, shortly after my mother’s funeral. Mother had been ill for years, so her death was no surprise, and yet I was devastated by it, far more so than I expected to be. We had some unsettled business. I don’t mean things I held against her; I mean things I felt the need to atone for, ask forgiveness for.

For a variety of reasons that now sound idiotic, I was not at the hospital when Mother die; by the time I was able to get there her body had already been moved. In the four days betwen her death and funeral I was never able to spend any time alone with her body, which I desperately wanted to do; the best I could do was write her a letter about those issues to place it in her casket.

The funeral came. I went alone to the church beforehand, hoping that might be my chance to spend alone with her; but unfortunately, because Mother was so beloved, the church had a dozens of people in it over an hour before the service. The best I could do was put the letter in her casket.

By coincidence Mother was buried not far from my office. Some days after her funeral I went to her gravesite. The cemetery staff gave me a map to help me find it, but I had trouble because the grave was still unmarked. But as I searched I drew the attention of a man whose name I sadly do not recall. He was there to visit his own mother’s grave and had inferred what I was doing; so he approached me and helped me find the grave. Then he walked off a bit; I thought he’d left entirely. That was good, because I wanted to be alone. So I stood there awhile talking to what was left of Mother, and I cried like a baby. After what seemed like forever I left. As I did I found that the guy had not gone away entirely; he’d moved out of earshot but not out of sight. He walked with me to my car, and comforted me by telling me about his own mother, how it had felt to lose her, and that I would feel better in time; and that I should not fear I was betraying her by feeling less crushed by misery.

I owe him a major debt I cannot repay, except by paying it forward.

Anyway, that’s just me. Anybody else?

2

When my grandpa died I was pretty young, probably about 10 or 12 years old. My brother was a year older but still fairly young. I remember my mom getting the call from my step-grandmother and nearly losing it. She packed us in the car and through tears, speeding and swerving, drove us over to their house. Walking in the front door we were greeted with the body of my grandfather lying dead in the middle of the family room. I remember my mom kneeling next to his body and crying and my aunt arriving almost hysterical and laying next to him hugging his body and weeping.
A neighbor arriver shortly after, an older lady I had never met but she must have been a friend of my grandfather. Seeing what was going on and with the coroner pulling up into driveway, she grabbed up all the kids that were at the house, loaded us in her car, and took us to McDonalds for dinner.
By the time we had returned from dinner, the body was gone, my dad had arrived, and my mom and my aunt had calmed down enough to get on with the business calling people. They were still sad and crying but the hysterics were over. I don’t think that women will ever realize how much she did for me and being a young kid I couldn’t properly thank her. It took a person with a little more emotional distance and a big heart to recognize what had to be done.

3

That very nearly happened when my grandma died; my mom, halfway there, got the call from my dad that he’d made it there–how he made it to Hanover Park from Arlington Heights faster than we could get there from Elgin, Ill never know–and that she should really take my sister and I to Burger King. It’s a very good thing your neighbor did what she did.

Mine happened about seven-eight years ago. My sister and her friend were going to the Warped Tour, and I, being a fan of at least one of the bands, said that I would escort them, thus saving my mom from the ordeal. It went horribly; it was ridiculously hot, my sister didn’t want to be supervised, I didn’t want to leave her unsupervised, and the place was a thousand times more crowded than I’d anticipated (my only concerts until that part had been very small venues like bars/clubs, or organized arena-type seating). After getting hit in the head during the crush at Bowling for Soup (really?), and having words with my sister, I went off to a relatively empety grassy area, sat on the ground, buried my head in my knees, and had a cry.

I figured that, since I was away from people, no one’d really notice. I was wrong; after a couple of minutes, a very nice guy with a pass came over and offered me a backstage pass. That was. . .wow. Just unexpectedly nice.

4

I have far too many to count much less recite here. Mainly in Asia (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan).

I spent several months backpacking solo in Tibet in the 1980’s. I went to places that time forgot with nomadic pastorialists not far out of the dark ages. No cellphones, no phone lines, no electricity, miles and miles to the nearest dirt track “road.” Invariably, once the nomads got over their initial shock at seeing a white boy for the first time ever just show up on their tentstep, speaking about maybe 100 Chinese words in common, I would always be made welcome. Honored place by the fire, fresh yak milk, yak butter tea, they would probably have slaughtered a sheep in my honor but I was a vegetarian, the most wonderful barley bread, sometimes really good goat or yak cheese, and most importantly chained up their mastifs (Tibetan mastifs are about 50 pounds of whopass dog that would eat a fighting pitbull for breakfast), and otherwise made welcome. I would be the entertainment for the entire nomad population. I always took along a book of photos with stuff like a picture of the ocean (which no one had seen), a prize stud bull from the Denver livestock show, family pictures, etc. A really big hit was when I would give out a dollar bill as they had never seen any kind of money outside of Chinese money before. The kindness these people showed me is something I will never forget.

One trip, I went out to the nomad lands with a group of young monks from a monastary. It was in an area that was illegal for foreigners to visit but I had snuck in. A famous lama in the area had sent 10 prize horses to the monastary, and these horses had been looked after by various nomad clans. We went out to the nomad clan area and spent about a week camping out while the young monks went out looking for what family was taking care of the horses.

Anyhoo, to cut a long story short, we went back to the monastary and then I spent the night in the neighborhood with one of the monks at his parents house. This was literally at the end of the road. It was also the day that the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize. The village had about an hour of day of electricity and one TV. The whole village was watching the news when the Peace Prize was announced. I then explained that despite the Chinese calling the DL murdering seperatist scum and a gravy sucking pig, that actually in the rest of the world, his photo was going to be in every newspaper and have great writeups. Right then, that evening, runners went out to spread the word about the DL.

But I digress. Pre-dawn the next morning, we hiked about 5 miles down to the road where someone was waiting for me with a bus ticket. An hour later, the bus was stopped by a really fearsome looking Tibetan, and I boarded. If I had tried to buy a ticket at the terminous, I would have been arrested for lacking proper permission. When the bus arrived at the nearby largely Chinese town, I was met another Tibetan who gave me another bus ticket and put me on the bus heading back for 4 days to the provincial capital. Again, I would have been busted had I stayed in that town and tried to buy my own ticket. The Tibetans who befriended me probably would have had some serious issues. I made it back tot he provincial capital without incident (there were very limited phone lines back then and cell phones were of course non existent).

5

Too many times to count. When I was sixteen I got in a car accident when the guy behind me slammed into me going about 45mph. The car was destroyed, my mother, the passenger, had just had major surgery, and I totally fell apart. The guy who hit me held me while I cried. What’s weird is we were about 40 miles from home and he ended up living just down the street from us.

About a year later I ran out of gas on the highway. A man stopped and offered me a ride to the gas station but out of a sense of personal safety (never get in a car with a stranger, etc.) I said I appreciated it but I really didn’t feel safe doing so. I felt like a terrible person but I’ve always been really cautious about stuff like that. About twenty minutes later he came back with a full gas can.

For no apparent reason, the director of financial aid at my enormous undergraduate school (50,000 strong) bent over backward to get me the equivalent of a full ride, even after I had withdrawn from classes twice due to psychological problems. When I ran out of one scholarship (because it was a four-year and I took six years to graduate) he found me another and another. He kept saying, ‘‘Nobody should have to worry about money at a time like this.’’ I think I met him face-to-face approximately once. I was so disoriented I really wasn’t aware of the magnitude of what he did, until long after I graduated and calculated that he’d given me about $70k in scholarships and grants. I mailed him a card but don’t know if he ever received it.

My whole life is rife with kindness from strangers.

6

I’ve driven many a POS car, and I’ve been helped numerous times by strangers to help push a car off the road into a parking lot. There’s no worse helpless feeling than having a dead vehicle, AND having to ask for help to get it out of the way of the angry people behind you.

I’m of the opinion that civilization can only continue when we stop to help people in distress.

7

When I was sixteen, a friend and I went with my mom to spend a week at a condo my dad’s company owned at Myrtle Beach. (North Myrtle, actually.) My mom had her car and my friend had her car. We left my mom at home and went out on our own in my friend’s car to the mall, which was quite some distance away. It was late and we left when the mall closed, and the car wouldn’t start. Eek! This was before cell phones and I didn’t have the number for the condo where my mom was. We called AAA and they said it would take an hour.

Now this is the stupidest thing in the world to do, we even knew it at the time, and your teenage daughters should NOT do this! However, a van full of frat guys pulled up and asked if we needed help, and we weren’t assertive enough to not let them give us a ride. We should have ended up raped and murdered in a ditch, but they very kindly and politely took us back to the condo (which was WAY out of their way especially in Myrtle Beach traffic) and even waited for us to get safely inside the door before they left. My mom practically had a heart attack.

8

Humans are social animals, and random acts of kindness from strangers far outweigh the acts of malice.

I think Blance DuBois summed it up best:

You can always depend on the kindness of strangers…
To pluck up your spirits, and shield you from dangers…
Now here’s a tip from Blanche you won’t regret…
A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met…

9

When I was seven, I missed the school bus and decided the logical option was to ride my bike the ten miles to school, down the freeway, in the middle of a roaring blizzard. I ended up lost and circling some residential neighborhood and knocked on this guy’s door. After going into his house and unsuccessfully trying to contact my mother, the guy offered to get me to school. He loaded my bicycle into his trunk, drove me first to my babysitter’s (where it appeared nobody was home) and then to school. It was probably about noon when I got there, and my principle told me that while he admired my dedication to my studies, I should probably never do that again. I basically spent half the day with a random man I had never met before in my life.

My mother about had a nervous breakdown when she heard this story at the end of the day (the school didn’t even call her!) She still twitches when I bring it up. Let’s just say there’s a good reason I never get in the car with strangers. :stuck_out_tongue:

10

This is only a big deal because I was pregnant and saturated with hormones. My hubby and I moved when he was transfered from AZ to CA. I was 8 mo. pregnant with my first kid, huge, alone, scared, contracting, and carrying Christmas packages into the Post Office. This guy rushed up grabbed my boxes, carried them into the Post Office for me, butted into the front of the enormous line, glared at anyone who dared argue with him about it, while I mailed my packages. He then escorted me to my car, kissed my hand, and walked away.

I sat and burst into tears. When I think about him I still burst into tears. Damn hormones.

11

On Orkney, I walked from Stromness to Skara Brae. It was a lovely day, and a beautiful walk. On the way back the heavens opened, an utter downpour. I wasn’t badly equipped, but ended up totally soaked. As I was trudging miserably along at the side of the road, a really nice old couple stopped and asked if I needed a lift. Yes!

As it turned out they lived near Stromness, so I ended up at their house, my clothes drying in front of their fire and in their press, wrapped in a huge warm dressing gown, eating homemade soup and sharing a few drinks, and chatting away. Orcadians are cool.

12

I was sitting in a hospital stairwell, after listening to three days of relentless confirmation of bad news about someone I love. I don’t cry easily, or in public. I was startled, and panic stricken when a door burst open on the landing below me, and a lady pushing a mop cart came clattering into the stairwell. I looked up at her, and immediatly started to get up.

She spoke with a Jamaican accent, and said, “Oh,no darlin’, don’t you go nowhere! You be sad. And after you been sad a while, then you go ahead and get back happy.” Without another word, she turned and left the way she had come in.

Compassion, acceptance, comfort, and encouragement, and she did it all in ten seconds. I don’t think Freud or Jung could have done better.

Thanks.

Tris

13

I unexpectedly had to travel from my home in Tucson to Europe because of the death in the family. It was just me and four kids, aged 1, 3, 5 and 7. The flight is loooong and the kids were naturally restless and whiney. I was doing my best to keep them happy and quiet, but there is only so much one can do when outnumbered 4 to 1.

The lady next to me, instead of being annoyed and asking to switch seats, spent hours playing tic-tac-toe and hangman with my 7 year old. The 2 LDS missionaries in front of me read the same dinosaur book at least a dozen times to my 5 year old, and played peek-a-boo with the baby endlessly.

In the end it benefited me, the kids (who stayed happy) and the whole plane since they weren’t crying and tantruming. But I am mostly just grateful that these lovely people helped out a young mom who needed a hand.

14

Just a week ago, I cut a corner into a gas station too sharply and struck the curb with my right front tire hard enough to rupture the sidewall. I’m standing there balancing on my cane trying to decide if I dared attempt to change the tire, knowing all the while that I couldn’t. A guy who was walking past came into the parking lot and changed the tire for me. I asked if he would allow me to give him something for his trouble and he said the only thing he would accept was a “Thank you.” I’m an emotional wreck right now for several reasons and I had a hard time saying thank you in a very choked up voice. He patted my shoulder and told me things would improve; as he walked away, I simply lost it.

15

I was in grad school and totally broke. Had about a 5# bag of pinto beans and a jar of bay leaves left for food for the month. A woman I had just met, a recent convert to Islam, could not do her Ramadan fast and made me her charity in lieu. The groceries she bought me fed me for three weeks. I don’t know how I’d have made it except for her kindness.
After 9/11 and the wars began, all I could think of was the kindness of the faithful Muslims I knew.

16

Have I?

I’ve probably benefited more from the kindnesses of strangers more than the kindnesses of people I know. I seem to attract the kindness of strangers, for some reason.

17

It’s a story that I’ll live with forever. I was born with CF, cystic fibrosis and was always a very sick (and sickly looking) kid. In about 1979, the family moved from New York to Florida and we didn’t have much money at all. My dad couldn’t get a job for a couple months and my mom had never worked, so we were doing without a lot of stuff. One day my mom took me to the local drug store to pick up a prescription for one of my medicines and was surprised by the amount it cost (it was probably something I hadn’t taken before, but my meds were switched all the time). She actually didn’t have enough money to pay for the medicine. There was an older couple in line right behind us that saw the look on my mom’s face as she started to walk away from the counter and said, “Here, let us help you with that”, and they gave the full amount to the woman working the register. My mom, who had looked so sad moments before, realizing that she couldn’t pay for the medicine for me, started to cry, and the woman who’d helped us out gave her a hug as my mom took the bag with the medicine in it.

It’s a scene that I will never ever forget, and a reason why I will always try to ‘pay it forward’ throughout my life. Truly a beautiful thing to do…

18

As a tough street-wise 5th grader in Evansville, IN:rolleyes: I would often hitchhike to the local mall. Google Earth shows it to be 1.08 miles, but it was about 18 miles when I lived there. :stuck_out_tongue:

Nice grown-ups would pick me up, and invariably scold me and take me home.
Thanks everyone for not killing me and thanks for not ratting me out to my parents.

At 16, I got my MG stuck in a ditch in a snowbank. We had a snow day, and all us kids were driving around instead of staying home. I knocked on the nearest door and this nice older lady - maybe 29! - let me use her phone to call a towtruck. Upon hearing it would be 60 bucks to come get me, I said no thanks. I mean, who’s got that kind of money, right?
The nice old lady insisted on paying for the tow, telling me I could pay her back later.
Who does that? Well, while waiting on the truck, a carload of friends came by, and after some negotiations about food, agreed to push me back onto the road. So, I bought some fries and drinks for everyone and cancelled the wrecker. She still had to loan me 20 bucks for that, but I paid her back the next day.

Thanks, old lady!

Years later, (ok, 2 years later) my mom had a semi-famous TV travel show here in Atlanta, and often had guests from around the world on the program. One day, she instructed me to collect some lady from her hotel downtown and bring her to the TV studio. Having just bought a cool new Porsche 924 days earlier, I was happy to head for the highway & a long drive. I picked her up downtown, and headed up I-85 north. We began seeing some smoke, but passed it off as coming from the road construction at that point. We then started smelling it, but still assumed it was coming from outside. When my passenger pointed out some fire dripping down by her feet, we couldn’t avoid the obvious. We’re on fire. Problem was, with the construction there, they had placed those concrete wall units all along the road for miles, giving me nowhere to pull over. I knew they ended up ahead somewhere and hit the gas, hoping to make it there and pull over. I didn’t.
We had to jam to a stop and bail in the middle of the highway as flames engulfed my new baby. I managed to get her luggage out, but sucked in a good bit of smoke and passed out. Later as the firemen were putting out the car and giving me oxygen, a car stopped and asked if they could help. Remembering my duty, I asked if they could take my passenger to the TV studio for me. They were happy to, and only later did it dawn on me that I had just given some Brazilian stranger to some other strangers and didn’t know anyone’s name or anything. I only remembered it was a pink Cadillac with Mary Kay stickers all over it.

Thanks Mary Kay lady and husband for delivering Carmen Miranda or whoever to the studio on time and not kidnapping her.

There are many more times that kind strangers have stepped in and saved me from myself, or at least a long walk. I try to pay that forward all the time.

19

My brother, two friends and I went to the second Lollapalooza back in the 90’s. It was held in some outdoor semi-rural location outside of Houston and it was August. Of course, driving to the festival it’s bumper to bumper on a two-lane road. Tens of thousands of people all heading to one place. Pretty soon the people that lived along that road started offering to let people park in their yards for a few bucks. We parked in some family’s yard for ten bucks.

So, show’s over. It’s hours and hours later. We, like everyone there, were damp from August Texas heat, covered in mud and general day-long festival grime and we’re exhausted and trudge back to the car.

When we get there, the folks that owned the house said, “Y’all want something to eat and maybe some water? We took the money y’all gave us and made some fajitas.”

We could not believe it. These were total strangers and we were a bunch of stinky 20-somethings and they invited us into their home and used the money we gave them to feed us. Totally freaking amazing.

20

Many years ago, before most folks had cell phones, my then-SO and I were on our way home from a gig in Indianapolis in the middle of the night. About fifty miles from home, on a rural two-lane highway, we were rear ended by a soldier home on leave.

So, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, there we were with two disabled vehicles. Fortunately, none of us was injured beyond a few bumps and bruises. My SO and I walked about half a mile to a farmhouse and knocked. Did I mention that it was the middle of the night? :stuck_out_tongue:

The farmer who opened up his door to us took our word that we’d been in an accident and allowed us to use his phone to call the sheriff’s department and my dad. His wife got up and made some coffee and put out a plate of cookies while we were waiting. Her husband fired up his pickup truck and took us back to the accident (along with cookies and a thermos for the soldier) to wait with us until a deputy could get there.

Without his hospitality, we could have been there until morning or until a deputy found us on patrol and it would have been a much longer night.

Thanks, Hoosier farmer!