The Kindness Of Strangers

Something really nice happened to my family yesterday, and if you don't mind I'd like to tell you about it.

It's time to plant the garden, and with yesterday being a holiday I got Dad to come with me to the garden centre. It was pretty hard for him, because this was a small place full of plants and people, and poor Dad has to haul around this huge walker which tends to bang into things. And on top of that, he hasn't been out of the house much (except to go to his day hospital program) in the past five years, so he was kind of disoriented at first, and had to rely on me to scout out the shelves for him. Then I'd come get him and we'd work our way through the green, crowded aisles to wherever the best seedlings happened to be stashed. At first he was kind of mad at the crowd for, well, crowding him, but after a little while he started to get into the experience and was more like his old self, telling me which plants were better than the others (a lot of them were wilting from lack of water, poor things), and which ones he'd like to find.

So we gathered together a nice collection of seven plastic pots full of little vegetable plants (my dad's not a flower guy, except for Geraniums and roses, and we didn't need any of those), and we stand in line to pay. I'm in front with a cardboard box full of the seedlings and he's behind me. I keep shooting glances back at him to see if he's getting tired, but he seems fine at this point, much better than we arrived. We decide to buy some onion bulbs.

So I get to the cashier, and by this time I've figured out the total in my head, so I tell her "it's probably just under seventeen dollars." And she says, "You're going to be pleasantly surprised when we get to the end." Dad asks for the onions, then she totals everything up and it's actually a couple of bucks less than I thought it would be.

Then she turns to my Dad and says. "I told you you'd be pleasantly surprised. A lady about eleven or twelve people ahead of you gave me this..." And she shows us a twenty dollar bill. "She said that you reminded her of her father who recently passed away, and she wanted to pay for your purchases." And my Dad is just stunned, and so am I. At first Dad doesn't seem to understand, since he reached into his pocket and put his own twenty on the table. But she ignored it, rang everything up on the till and gave Dad six dollars, saying "And she said that you were to keep the change, for a nice coffee or something."

Then Dad and I are both saying "Thank you!" and I ask the cashier if the lady is still here, because I'd like to thank her in person. But she keeps saying that no, the woman was long gone.

So my Dad got free plants for his garden, and we both got a lesson on how kind strangers can be. Dad was a little ambivalent about starting a garden this year, since he wasn't sure he could eat all the vegetables, but that anonymous woman seems to have gotten him all fired up about growing things again. He said that he thought about what she did all last night, and today he's full of ideas on where he wants to put the plants. (And he wants me to write a letter to the newspaper thanking her, so maybe this is draft one of that.) And I'd really like to thank her, whoever she was, because her impulsive, unrequitable act of kindness really changed my Dad's mood that day, and may have made his whole summer.