Worm Food

I was told a story that sent me on a crying jag in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon. It was about a bus driver who noticed an elderly woman passenger wearing a fur coat on a hot sunny day. Sensing that something might have been wrong with her, the bus driver inquired about her destination. She answered him vaguely about some restaurant on 8th street where she would be dining with friends. After speaking with the woman, it was clear to the driver that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s. The lady was distraught about the possibility of missing an evening with her friends and was almost in tears.

The bus driver then took on the persona of a limousine driver and decommissioned his bus for public service. After arriving at 8th street, the bus driver went into every restaurant on the block and looked for a group of elderly people that may have possibly been her friends. His search was fruitful and he chauffeured the woman to the entrance of the restaurant and opened the door for her like a queen. The woman had a wide smile as she entered the restaurant but before she sat down with her friends she turned and spoke to the driver.

“You know I was diagnosed with cancer today but instead of being the worse day of my life, it has turned out to be the best.”
“There is nothing like spending an evening with friends to cheer you up.”
“Thank you” she said with deep earnest, put her frail veined hand upon his strong one, and turned to meet her friends.

I cannot do justice to this story by putting it in my own words, D told it much nicer. Both of us were crying before she had gotten halfway through the story. Small acts of kindness have the potential to cause huge amounts of impact. Kindness has the power to strike us deeply and make us reflect on our own behavior. It is also contagious. Let one person merge into traffic ahead of you and more often than not you will see that same person let someone merge ahead in traffic in front of them. Traffic is a good example of the opposite of kindness: selfishness. There is something about being behind the wheel of a car that can make you feel invisible …and when you are invisible you can do anything. Normally good people: tailgate, give people the finger, yell vulgar expressions, drive too fast, don’t use turn signals, and are generally discourteous on the road. It all stems from the feeling that regardless of my actions (unless a cop notices me), there will be no repercussions because the people being acted upon are strangers to me and I am a stranger to them. In other words, if I don’t know you…fuck you. People seem to be mean because it is easy. Kindness requires effort, effort takes time and time is something none of us have in abundance…especially for strangers. It is this “I am an island” attitude that gets the whole world in trouble. A more truthful statement would be that we the people of the world are all stranded on the island of Earth and suffering from the terminal disease of life. Everyone living at this moment is part of a brotherhood in time. A blink from now and we are all worm food.