RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

(The author of this article wished to remain anonymous. We hope others in our community will write pieces about their own experiences with Random Acts of Kindness, which may be printed without attribution, or with your byline.)

So, there I was sitting in my car – waiting to turn left onto Concord Road. Admittedly, I was thinking about a lot of things at that moment. I was talking with someone on the phone – handsfree. We were even talking about the light and the intersection where I was stopped. Left turn lane, no left turn lane, keep parking spaces, lose parking spaces, and what about the jaywalker up at the Soda Shop – would a change in the traffic pattern be more dangerous for pedestrians?

And then it happened…I saw a young man run up behind an older woman on the sidewalk to my right. And in a simple gesture, he handed her a wallet. That’s it. That is what I saw, and that could be the whole story.

But it was more than that. I stopped the conversation I was having. And relayed what I had just seen, and said that it was a Davidson story – and that it warmed my heart to see it.

The more I thought of that simple gesture, the more I thought of other unseen aspects of the story.  You see – the rest of the story, is the story that I have imagined or even the counter story that might have happened in an alternative (non-Davidson) universe.

Maybe the woman had been a customer at a store or restaurant on Main Street. And maybe she left her wallet behind. Maybe the young man worked at one of those establishments and ran to catch her before she remembered that she had left it behind. Maybe the wallet had fallen out of a purse as she walked toward Spirited Cyclist and Kindred. Perhaps he had seen it fall and picked it up as it fell onto the brick sidewalk of our Main Street.

I imagined, someone finding a wallet or seeing someone drop a wallet – and choosing to walk the other way. Walk, maybe even run in the opposite direction. But, that’s not the story.

Thankfully, a young man ran up to a woman and handed her a wallet. Yep, that’s the story.