Yesterday I had several examples of people being kind and caring in which to appreciate. The first was related to one of my daughters, who was in New Jersey with one of her college roommates for the weekend. She joined me in Manhattan for the Iowa Hawkeyes game watch (and while we had a great time, our beloved Hawkeyes lost!), and then she was to take a bus back to NJ to join her friend. While I accompanied her to the Port Authority and saw her off on what we thought was the right bus, it turns out that it was not. Added to that was the fact that her cell phone battery had died, so she had no cell phone.
Before I left the Port Authority (and not yet knowing that my daughter was on the wrong bus), I stopped to buy a juice from a store there for my ride home. A woman with a young child was ahead of me, along with a customer who was buying, too. The woman with her child was told by the cashier that she was 50 cents short, so she gave the cashier a debit card, which was declined. The customer next to her reached in her pocket and paid the 50 cents. Later, the woman with the child found a dollar and tried paying the other woman back and they “discussed” whether or not she would take it. I smiled as I watched this exchange of gratitude, happy for the kind, caring woman who helped her out.
A little later, as I’m coming off of the subway, I received a call from a number I didn’t know: it’s my daughter, using someone else’s phone on the bus that was taking her way out of her way into New Jersey to places I’d never heard of! She used this man’s phone several times to call both her friend in NJ and me. In the end, she was able to get off the bus and wait at a restaurant (where there were more kind people who offered her things and didn’t require her to buy anything) until her friend picked her up. In fact, she said she got to watch some of the Ohio State-Penn State game! After she was safely in the car with her friend, my daughter told me that the man and his wife offered to drive her to her friend’s house, too, if needed.
While one might look at that last offer with a word of “caution” about not accepting rides from strangers, I think it’s evidence of the kind, caring people who were part of our day yesterday. We’ll never know for sure, but I am very grateful for that man letting her use his phone and helping her figure out where she had gotten “lost.” This was the second example of kind, caring people who offered their assistance to complete strangers yesterday.
And while I’m still in shock over my Iowa Hawkeyes’ loss from yesterday, I’m grateful I had the opportunity to share it with one of my daughters.
Appreciation Magic 