Stories of Kindness from Around the World

Recently, within the past couple of weeks, on my way to work in the morning I came up behind a "stalled" van in the left-turn lane. It was just short of the stoplight by several car lengths at least. By the looks of the van's condition the owner/driver likely was not in a high income bracket, so may have been a person of limited resources.

I got out to offer my help and the woman driving the van explained she was out of gas so she would need either a hand pushing the van or pay for a tow. Since it was slightly uphill to the light at a fairly busy intersection I couldn't see pushing it by hand  as a very safe option so I elected to use the little Chevy S-10 work truck I was driving to push her through the intersection and around the corner a half-block to the gas station.

So she got in to steer the van and I did just that. It went relatively smoothly all the way to the entrance to the gas station where I realized just how steep the driveway was to get up to the area where the fuel pumps were. That could be a little hard on the front of the truck and/or the clutch. This is not a truck with much power!

I elected to continue and with a bit of clutch burning and banging and bumping managed to get her van to the pumps where she could get fuel. She thanked me, and when I turned around, we saw that the license plate and holder on the front bumper of my truck had broken off...

Oops!

"No big deal!" I told her, picked it up, threw it in the back of the truck and went on my way.

It was at least a week before I finally fixed that license plate by simply drilling holes through the metal bumper and fastening it with sheet metal screws, removing the now-defunct plastic attachment that originally held the license plate on.

That "homemade" attached license plate will always be a reminder of a small act of kindness that likely made someone's day. I know not her name or anything about her and neither does it matter. What matters is that someone received a helping hand when it was needed. She most likely will remember that for a long time and, I'm quite sure, knowing human nature, will repay that in kind.

And so the world goes...