The Kindness of Strangers ...

An event occurred the other night that I don't think many people experience ... it was a normal evening ... the lemon man and I waited around for his brother to come home so that we could leave his grandpa in good hands and head off to the store to buy some necessary items ... on the way home debated stopping for food ... we decided we would and then we debated where ... and we decided on the good old golden arches ...

Before we pulled in we saw that there was a girl standing at the drive-thru window ... anyone who has ever been a teenager without a car anywhere near a drive-thru knows that 99% of the time they don't let you do that ... so we found that kind of odd ... we went to give them our order ... and their computers were down so it took forever ... and while we
sat there, we could see this girl was either crying or shivering ... she was out in the cold with just shorts on ... both the lemon man and I wanted to help her ... but as I've become older and jaded I have become less likely to do things like that ...

Now, the man I love, on the other hand ... although jaded in many ways ... has not lost that part of himself and he encouraged me to ask her if she needed a ride or something ... so we did ... and she was so grateful she couldn't even answer because she was crying out of gratefulness ...

We took her to the house of a "friend" of hers ... he shut the door in her face ... so then we did the next best thing we could do and we took her downtown ... this is like a twenty minute drive ... but we took her downtown ... we got to know her a little bit in the car ... it turned out that she had been downtown with her friends and had run into her ex-husband with the girl that he cheated on her with ... her friends had put her in a cab to go to somewhere else ... but she couldn't get to where she was going ... and ended up at that McDonalds ... the manager gave her a jacket and took her phone and charger so her phone could get charged so that she could call her friends up by where we were or downtown ... 

We got her back downtown ... ironically to a bar that we are more than familiar with ... we found her friends ... and left her safe in their hands ...

On the way home the lemon man said to me that he always hopes that because we do these things for other people that someday ... if we ever need it ... someone will do it for us ... I used to be the kind of person that did things like that all the time ... but like I said as we become older and jaded sometimes we forget why we did those things ... it always is rewarding to do for others ... and sometimes the kindness of a stranger can mean everything ...

This also reminded me of one of the best things about this man of mine ... he is unbelievably compassionate and caring for strangers ... and one of the biggest things we have in common is our lack of judgment of other people ... because of a similar incident a few years ago ... I know my ex-husband wouldn't have reacted the same way ... his attitude would have been "it's not your/our problem" ... and I think a large majority of the American population would react that way ... so this rare trait I have in this man of mine is highly admired ... and I am grateful to have him in my life ...