I have been lucky enough to be on the recieving end of quite a few kindnesess (is that a word?), but a few really stand out.
About 13 years ago, my husband and I and our new-born son were driving from San Angelo, Texas to Fort Worth to visit his family. A few miles out of one of those teeny, spot-on-the-map towns that Texas has so many of, name of Winter, the car died. So there we are, the three of us, standing on the side of the road in 100 degree Texas heat, when a guy in a pickup truck stops and offers us a ride into town. Having no alternative, we took it. The people in this town were incredibly nice to us. The local garage went out and towed our car in, tried valiantly to fix it, then apologized and refused our money when they couldn’t. The owner of the garage loaned us his car so we could go get some lunch while they were working on our car, and when we got back, the wife of the owner let me come down the street to her house so I could lay the baby down for a nap. We ended up having to get towed back to San Angelo (a hot, long, and expensive trip), but it would have all been much more disatrous had it not been for the good people of Winter, Texas.
A few years later, we were in Okinawa, Japan. I was about 6 weeks pregnant, and had been spotting blood for about a week. I woke up around 3 in the morning with a fever of approximately 104. My husband raced me to the emergency room, where they diagnosed a retained miscarriage, and scheduled surgery for the next day. Besides being sick and heartbroken, I felt like a mess. I had left my house without any personal articles, and had then (as I have now) very long hair. After that night, it was a rats nest. I know it sounds really strange under the cirumstances, but what I really wanted to do right then was to comb my hair. My husband had to go home to care for our son, and couldn’t come until that evening. I had asked a couple of the nurses if there was anyway I could get a comb, but they just kind of looked at me strangely. About 10 that morning, a chaplain who was just kind of circulating on the floor came in and asked if there was anything he could do for me. I told him I really would like a comb. He also looked at me a bit strangely, but he left and returned about 10 minutes later with a comb he’d bought from the shoppette. I don’t think anything anyone else did for me during that whole episode made me feel any better than that simple act.
And then there was the time about a year ago, when I took the curving on ramp from 95 to 100 a bit too fast in rain. Instead of continuing on the off ramp, I slid rather gracefully into the (mercifully) soft muddy bank on the far side of it. Not hurt, but stuck. No cell phone, panicking because we really didn’t have the money a tow truck would cost. I think about 7 succesful business-men looking types in big shiny SUV’s passed me. The first person to stop was a gentleman in dirty work clothes with a battered pick up. He tried to tow me out, but couldn’t. He didn’t leave, though, and was talking with me, trying to figure out what he could do to help. In this space of time, several more big 'ol SUV’s pass by. The next person to stop was a gentleman driving a big moving-type truck. He was able to pull me out to the shoulder, then he and the other gentleman got some leather gloves and straightened the part of my wheel well that had been bent in. I thanked them extremely profusely, because they had turned what could have been a major disaster into a slight bump in the day.
