Mystic Judaism believes in the idea of 36 secretly righteous people in this world. I’m relatively sure I met six of them today. Faith in humanity restored.
There was three and a half feet of snow in the parking lot today. Everyone was snowed in. The front door of the place was snowed shut, although we could still get out the back. The snow plow came and pushed a path through the parking lot… Which dumped more snow onto the cars.
I began to get panick-y. My friends were going out to shovel their dad’s driveway, and they offered to come and help get my car out. When they arrived, one of the women in the neighboring apartments, who looked to be in her seventies, was out trying to dig her car out. She had just a shovel, and a leg brace. My friends were not going to let her be; they helped her shovel, as did I. (The puppy helped, too, jumping on piles of snow and keeping our morale up.)
As we worked, the woman told us all about other blizzards she’d been through, and kept telling us we didn’t need to help her. We weren’t hearing it.
As we worked, another young woman from my apartment came out and began to help. Due to weird drift, her car was the only one in the lot that had -no- snow on it, yet she wanted to lend a hand.
Soon another neighbor joined, and another. At any given time for about two hours there were seven people working. Talking. Joking around about the dark weather.
We freed six of the ten trapped cars, and at this moment four of them are still out there working.
At one point I pulled my car out of the parking space to make shoveling easier, and as I sat in my car, I realized that I have fantastic friends. People I could never thank enough. And that the world isn’t such a bad place; it may take incredible weather to draw us together, but we worked, we laughed, we accomplished something for which there was no particular pay, no necessity to help anyone else with… And yet we did it, without being asked.
An amazingly touching moment.
Christmas of '08 (I think it was) I was visiting in Langley, BC during an unseasonal snowfall. Because the temps were above 0 during the day, the snow was slushy, which then froze as temps fell towards evening, the “snow” was actually layer after layer of ice on sidewalks, streets and driveways.
For the first time I met most of the other citizens of the street. Every time we heard a car
frozen into the ice, a bunch of us went out to help shift it. My daughter spent hours (most evenings) clearing the driveway before her husband came home from work about 11pm. Even the older grand-daughter, then aged about 12, would not let me help but stayed beside her mother, working with great enthusiasm.
There isn’t anything like shared adversary to have us all working together. It’s wonderful to experience.
I live in a city that is not unfamiliar with snow days and bad weather, and I always say it’s one of my favorite things about snow days. You can almost feel the lovingkindness, in the city, swell. Where I live, also, neighbours dig each other out without asking, etc. It’s awesome to see! Children are digging out fire hydrants and mailboxes, everyone is checking on their neighbours. It’s like we’re suddenly watching over each other, like we’re one big family.
I read a short memoir in a literary magazine once, by a person who’d grown up on the Gulf coast. This was years before Katrina, by the way; not sure if the author would feel differently now. He said he secretly looked forward to hurricanes hitting the coast, because it was the only time everyone admitted there was something more important than their own personal advancement, and the community would all come together and help each other.
I think that sounds similar to what you’ve experienced.
