Kindness

When was the last time a stranger was kind to you? When was the last time you were kind to a stranger?

Today I was running an errand and a guy who was leaving the shop that I was entering held the door open for me rather than letting it slam. I thanked him. It wasn’t a matter of “chivalry” or thinking I wasn’t capable of opening a door, it was a matter of two seconds of not letting it close in my face.  It was a good thing. A tiny thing that made the world just a teeny bit kinder.

That got me to thinking about random acts of kindness. At first I thought about things that happened when I was 19, living abroad and being basically broke, and there were many kind people. Then I realized that there have been many, many more.

Most of the kind acts from recent years have been from people I knew fairly well: colleagues, friends, neighbors. Still kind, still wonderful. I could tell hundreds of stories.  But kindness from strangers …. It’s not that “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers” like Blanche DuBois in “Streetcar Named Desire,” but there is something about the kindness of strangers that is particularly memorable.

When I was 19:

Some kids my age (19-ish) that I met at the youth hostel in Paris took me to their house in the Netherlands and I asked if I could do laundry in their washing machine, after a couple of months of only washing clothes in sinks with a bar of soap and hanging them to dry. They said, sure, so I put everything I owned in the washing machine before we all went to bed. By the next morning, it was dried, folded – and the socks had been expertly darned by their mother. I thanked her profusely, although I didn’t speak her language, but her kids translated: I hope someone would do the same for my children. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

When I was 30:

I worked a late shift that meant I was taking the metro to my temporary lodging in D.C. at around midnight. It was only a couple of blocks to walk, but I heard footsteps behind me and gaining on me. Ugh. I kept walking, chin up and with a purposeful stride but ready. Then the footsteps crossed the street and the young man continued to walk on the other side of the street, faster than I was walking. When he got to the cross street, by now 20 yards or more in front of me, he crossed back to “my” side of the sidewalk and took a right. He clearly did that detour on purpose to avoid freaking out a woman who was walking alone. I thought, he must have sisters or something, but it was truly a kind act.

When I was 48:

I was traveling in England and the arthritis that would lead to hip replacement was getting pretty bad. I was lugging a suitcase and encountered an unexpected staircase at a train station – no escalator or elevator in sight. A guy grabbed my suitcase, which temporarily alarmed me, but he actually was only helping me get it up the stairs. He put it down at the top until I got there and walked away before I could say anything more than “Thank you.”

So. When I can, I try to pay it forward.