Wow, these are great. They make me feel all warm and fuzzy.
I’m not crying. Nope. Um, bees stung my eyes. Both of 'em. Yeah.
I’ve got so many stories I could tell, and I’ve probably already told some of the bigger ones here. So here’s a smaller one. My husband and I were newlyweds, had been in a serious auto accident (no fault on our part), and I’d lost my job. We had no money, and our church was paying our rent and utilities for us until we were able to get back on our feet. That’s part one of the nice things.
It was a little rough knowing we had no money to spare–no going to the movie or running out for an ice cream cone. Nothing. We knew it was a temporary situation, so there wasn’t too much despair even though it was double plus unfun. One day we received an envelope in the mail. There was no return address indicated. We opened it up, and there was some money and a note telling us to spend the money on something frivolous, and remember the treasure we had in each other. It was signed “Phil Brotherly.”
I have no idea what we spent the money on. Perhaps we went to the dollar movie and got popcorn. Maybe we went to dinner. I don’t recall. But I will never forget Phil Brotherly’s kindness.
Way back in 1975, while I was stationed for three months at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo Texas, my husband(now ex) and I had a serious lack of money. Like Less than $20 till the next pay period ended, and he’d got a speeding ticket that needed paying. I was sitting in a classroom, alone I thought, and started to cry. Turns out a fellow classmate was there(I was so damned self centered I hadn’t seen him) and he asked what the matter was. I told him and he dug in his pocket and got out all the cash he had on him, maybe $30. I didn’t wan’t to take it but he insisted.
Larry V., if your by the slimmest chance are reading this, let me tell you I’ve tried to “pay it forward” on other occasions, and I think of you when I do.
Here’s another good one – it’s not one about me, but it was something friends of mine did for a stranger, and I think it’s touching.
A certain team in a certain government program who shall remain nameless were at the airport picking up one of their teammates. They saw a young woman sitting in the airport, crying her eyes out. They talked to her and found out that she’d flown in from home, but none of her friends would come pick her up and take her to her college. I don’t know if she didn’t have any money or what had happened, but the college was about an hour away and she didn’t have any way to get to her dorm before class started the next day. The team talked it over, and then offered her a ride. They piled her and her bags in their van and drove an hour out of their way to drop her off at her school.
My Mum passed away peacefully two years ago and my Dad followed similarly within a couple of months.
it was a huge shock to me, but lots of people kindly helped. (It’s at times like this that you find out who really cares about you.)
The two friends I’ll mention here were wonderfully supportive.
One drove 200 miles* each time and stayed the whole day, helping me with the masses of paperwork that comes at the worst possible time.
The other phoned me every single day for months. It didn’t matter what we talked about - just hearing a friendly voice kept me out of despair.
*this is a big deal in England, believe me!
This isn’t a kindness I received, but rather one I was fortunate enough to have the honor of participating in. Since it’s in keeping with the general spirit of the thread, I thought I’d share.
My company had a sales engineer named Terry. Great guy, mid-50s Southern gent who was kind as could be, well-manned and incredibly funny. He’s one of those guys who can instantly put you in a better mood.
A few months ago, he suffered an occular stroke. From perfectly healthy to being left functionally blind (10 percent vision in only one eye). Obviously, he could no longer perform his duties for the company.
Our bookkeeper realized there would be a gap of something like 400 work hours between when his paid time off ran out and his permanent disability insurance policy kicked in. She did the research on the necessary accounting and reporting regulations, made a proposal to our president and then announced to the employees of our 40 person company that anyone so inclined could donate hours from their own vacation account to Terry to help fill in the gap.
Notice I said we’re 40 people and there were more than 400 hours to fill? Inside of a week we had more than 500 hours set aside for him. He won’t miss a single dollar in pay. I only had a few vacation hours left to donate, but some people in the company donate full weeks of accrued time.
I don’t always like my job, but I do admire the people I work with.
This is the kind of thread that deserves a sticky.
I was 13, my two best friends had moved out of state within weeks of each other, I had braces, a fuzzy home perm and a botched highlight job on the fuzzy hair (courtesy of my mom) and looking down the barrel of the summer between 9th and 10th grade with my widowed mom working full time and coping with handling her 90 year old parents who were in declining health. I was dealing with my three older brothers who were akin to having Hitler around ( lots of yelling and nothing I did was right, yet I was the one, the baby, whom my mother relied upon to get the job done correctly, because they were morons with mensa IQ’s. Wheeee!) Add to this depression and insecurity and a total sense of loss in life and you have my teen years.
Laying on the floor reading the newspaper on a Friday afternoon, someone rings the doorbell. I grumble loudly that it is the paperboy and ‘Somebody better pay me back for paying him. Sheesh!’ when I am gobsmacked at the sight of my Uncle Frank standing on our porch.
Uncle Frank. My uncle from Florida. On* our* front porch. He looked like John Wayne and had that same cowboy code of honor and integrity. In Michigan. On my front porch. The only time he comes back to MIchigan is for Funerals or Weddings.
“Wha…” says I.
" Shhhh. You’re mom here?" I nodded.
" How would you like to come back to Florida with me for the summer?" He said a bunch of other words, none of which I heard because I was nodding furiously before he finished speaking. He didn’t have to ask me twice.
Florida. That godforsaken mosquito filled swampland! Hell yes, I wanted to go! They lived 100 yards from the beach. Had horses inland at their farm. Six kids, four still at home who did stuff like socializing and Normal stuff other than watching Goddamn STAR TREK. The more I become familiar with mental illness, I realize that my brothers all suffered deeply from depression and a rousing thrills of paranoid delusions for one. Introverts, all of them.
I had one day to get ready and we flew back to Orlando sunday afternoon. That summer changed my life. I learned how to properly ride a horse. Tan my lilly white Michigander-Irish skin to a dark Thanksgiving Turkey Brown. Learned how to drive a farm tractor, shoot all calibers of pistols and rifles and outworked my cousins in the house and on the farm. God, I was so grateful to be somewhere other than my house. Most importantly, I grew out my craptacular home perm and learned how to socialize. Oh, and I grew boobies, too. ( When I flew back down the next summer, it was like I never left.)
He came up all the way from Florida to save me from being in that house all summer long.
Uncle Frank and his family gave me a sense of normalcy when everything was crap.
I am trying to repay that kindness by being the homebase for a divorced friend’s kids and being there for them and being a normal* stabilizing home for his three kids. And it has grown from 3 kids on a fairly regular basis to a rotation of 3-10 kids of my best friends. We all help each other out more than family. We’ve built our own insta-family, minus the guilt and bullshit that only a real family can bring.
*Whatever normal is.
I was a live in nanny in Pasadena, CA in 1990. I was 2000 miles from home, and working and living with what turned out to be a horrible woman. The man wasn’t so bad, but he was never around. I took care of two kids. They were great little kids, but again, the mother made the job hell. I was determined to stick it out. I was so stressed out, and on top of the job having some major boyfriend troubles.
The next door neighbor to my nanny job, kept me sane that whole year. She was such a kooky sweet lady. I was 25 at the time, and she was probably about 45. She and her husband didn’t have children, and she sort of adopted me on the spot.
One particularly bad night she wisked me into her house and had me stay over night. I was so depressed at the time, and really didn’t have anyone to talk to. I didn’t want to worry my family back in Wisconsin, so kept them in the dark for the most part.
That lady(Linda) and I still keep in touch, and I have told her over and over that she probably saved my life.
I didn’t expect this kind of response. There are some great stories here. Today I’m feeling down in the dumps, but hearing about RAOK’s is very inspiring. It makes me want to go out and do something nice for somebody.
What if each person reading this did something nice for someone else?
I think after the initial good feeling of all these wonderful acts of kindness (with most the people having no idea how it affected “us”) I get a bad feeling…
…I can guarantee you there is no story out there about me…I feel like such an a-hole now that I haven’t done anything that good to somebody…talk about selfish…
Story my grandfather tells (and my grandmother hates hearing every time, LOL)…
When he was in the military money was tight and my grandmother needed some medication that they couldn’t afford. He knew a guy who was basically a bookie and loan shark. My grandfather went up and asked him if he could borrow some money, the guy told him the terms of the deal. My grandfather took the money and promised to pay it back and the guy asked him what it was for. He told him my grandmother needed medicine they couldn’t afford.
Guy said, “Just take it.”
As for myself; two incidents. One was my ex-roommate, with whom I ironically had a tremendous falling out towards the end of our relationship. Nonetheless at the begining I was a college sophomore and ended up partying a little to hardy one night. We’ll just say the bathroom wasn’t a pretty sight. So I woke up in the morning getting ready to clean it up and they already did it.
I was pissed. They shouldn’t have done that and I told them as much. But it wasn’t the action that stuck with me, it was his reasoning. He said, “…because somebody did it for me.”.
Second, as I mentioned we REALLY didn’t like each other towards the end of our relationship, however my roommate’s girlfriend was always around and we had grown to become friends. She ended up hopelessly caught in the middle most of the time.
So anyway, my inability to screw up the icing on cakes was a constant source of humor for our apartment. So we started delegating duties, I’d make it, she’d ice it. Towards the end my roommate and I weren’t talking and I had made the cake a day or two ago. She kept telling me she was going to finish it, but it was pissing me off that she hadn’t done it yet. So I come home from school for the last day to see the cake sitting on my computer chair of all places (where she had to put it to hide the fact she was doing something nice for me) “Happy Graduation” From, her.
Just start watching out.
One thing I will never forget about my father. We were leaving Fred Meyers and all of a sudden he stops and turns around. Some elderly lady probably in her 70s was trying to load bags of rocks into her cart (kind of ridiculous, these bags probably weighed 50 pounds each).
It wasn’t that we helped it was that he was aware enough to recognize that the lady needed help. You don’t have to be throwing down $40,000 for someone’s college tuition, just help someone that looks like they need it.
When I was a teenager, back in the late 80s, early 90s, I was suffering from depression quite badly. My father, who was, and still is, an alcoholic, was making my family life miserable. When I had been younger, school had been a refuge, but by about age 13, I could no longer escape by going to school.
A couple of my close friends knew about the situation, but, being teenage girls, with home lives that were what I would describe as more normal as mine, they really couldn’t offer much in the way of understanding or support. I felt pretty alone.
One day, when I was about 17, things were particularly bleak for me. My father had once again quit drinking for a short period and started again. Financially things were stressful, my mother was at her wit’s end, and my brother had escaped the situation by leaving to go to university. I was sitting in geography class, barely able to muster the energy to talk to anyone. The conversation that was going on around me only highlighted the differences between their perspectives on life and mine. One girl, though, must have noticed my withdrawal, and with what I had been saying, had put two and two together. This was not someone I would have normally have spoken to, much less considered a friend. In fact, she is someone I would normally have avoided because we had nothing in common.
After class, she caught up with me, and asked me if I was having problems because my father was an alcoholic. She then revealed that she too had the same issue, but was dealing with it okay at that time because she did not have to live at home with the situation. She offered me exactly what I needed at the time, which was the knowledge that someone knew what it was actually like to live with an alcoholic father, and a sympathetic ear if I ever wanted to talk about it. It seems like such a small thing, but it really helped me that day.
I had forgotten all about it, but this thread has brought it back into my mind. Thank you Alice, wherever you are now.
One other incident I can think of happened much more recently. Having struggled with infertility for a year and a half, I found out that I needed to have an operation to remove a very large ovarian cyst. During the operation, to add insult to injury, I lost one of my ovaries. While I was recovering, a friend came to visit me. This was someone I had known for years and who knew about our troubles conceiving. Without any preamble she said in a very matter of fact way, that if we wanted her help, she would be more than happy to be a surrogate for us.
What is more remarkable is that I know that she doesn’t want children herself, and going through a pregnancy for someone else would be a really big deal for her. While we, fingers crossed, don’t need that kind of help, it was remarkably touching and way beyond the call of duty.
You aren’t dead, are you? If not, there’s always time to do good things for people. If you’re aware they’re out there, you’re more likely to see the opportunities. If you see the opportunities, you’re more likely to act.
Helping a neighbor with a bum foot load groceries onto the front porch can be just as big a deal (to them) as pulling a wrecked car out of a ditch.
It’s not the size of the gesture that matters, it’s the willingness to make it.
I was the family friend of a girl who went off to college. She found a boyfriend there. Sometime during her 2nd year, I had worked like a dog all day this particular day and had just got home when my phone rang. I didn’t even know that she had my number. It seems that she and her boyfriend had been having some problems and she told me that she, “just saw him today driving past campus in his Jeep with another girl. I really need someone to talk to. Will you come?”
I said, “I’ll be there in 90 minutes.” (it would take that long to drive there.) I immediately walked out the door cursing myself for working all day and then driving an hour and a half without any supper and for what? I talked to myself this way beating my fist on the steering wheel at my foolishness all the way to her door. When she opened the door, the look on her face was a gift beyond price. It was only then that I realized that I was 33 years old and this was the first time in MY life that anyone needed me for anything.
She became my best friend and 10 years later, she became my wife.
I guess I had a lot of something bottled up in me because this broke the dam. It’s taken over a hour to get able to respond. Glad I’m working at home today. sniff
Awwww…
Most of the time it IS Awwwwww…
But sometimes it is GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! :eek:
I think the bees came and stung my eyes too! /sniffle
I love this thread! I have two to share.
I went to college in Baltimore and, during my junior and senior years, had my own small one-bedroom basement apartment. One Sunday morning I was coming back from the farmers’ market when (to cut a long story short) I was attacked by a homeless man with a knife. Through a combination of groin-kicking and screaming, I fought him off, but I had a couple bad cuts. I was just a block away from my apartment, so I ran home and called 911. The paramedics and police who responded were wonderful and took terrific care of me. I’ll never forget them. Then, a week later, I was at home when someone knocked on the back door. Naturally I was reluctant to answer it, but when I peered through the peephole, it was the female officer who’d responded to my attack! She’d stopped by just to make sure I was okay. It still kind of blows me away that a busy Baltimore police officer took that sort of personal interest in one of her cases. It meant a lot to me.
All during college and the first couple years or so afterwards I didn’t date except for a couple very short, casual affairs. I’ve always been the independent type, and I was happy to be on my own, but it meant that there was noone but me to take care of myself. When I was sick, I made my own tea and chicken soup and wished to hell my mom would magically appear to take care of me. In February 2007 I started dating the guy who became my boyfriend, and not even a month later I came down with a terrible flu. He had slept over Friday night, and it hit me on Saturday. I could barely find the energy to move or eat, and was basically incapable of doing anything except sitting on the couch under a blanket and shivering. My boyfriend had things to do that weekend, but instead he stayed at my place from Friday evening through Sunday evening to take care of me. Anything I wanted, he brought me. He went to the store and bought me soup and medicine. I’ve tried to tell him how much it meant to me, but words aren’t enough. I pretty much fell in love with him that weekend (though I waited a couple of months to tell him). Of course, he caught my flu, so a few days later I was at his place taking care of him. 