Friday, May 29, 2009

A Nice Man

I was going to blog about going on vacation today. Actually, I'm on the road again to Wisconsin this morning.

Anyway, I saw something on Thursday that warmed my heart. I saw some people selling raffle tickets for cars to benefit Children's Memorial Hospital. Nothing unusual about that. They do it every year.

What was unusual was one businessman stopped and shook one of the volunteers' hands and said something like, "Thanks for being out here."

Another few blocks later, the same businessman put some coins in one of the street person's cups and went on his way.

He probably had no idea he'd left an impression on me, but he did. All I could think was Wow, this is a nice man.

Have you encountered anyone who does something simple which made an impact on you? Maybe you can think of how to fit something like this in a book you're writing to show and not tell the goodness of a person. Or, maybe another author written something that made an impact. Please share.

5 comments:

  1. We so often hear about the bad guys that it's a pleasant change to be reminded of good people doing random acts of kindness.

    Jane Kennedy Sutton
    http://janekennedysutton.blogspot.com/

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  2. Random acts of kindness - heck, even a man holding the door for a woman gets my attention!

    L. Diane Wolfe
    www.circleoffriendsbooks.blogspot.com
    www.spunkonastick.net
    www.thecircleoffriends.net

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  3. The goodness others do often comes to my mind when I think about the week following when I was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer. A man from our church who I've known for most of my life stopped by the house to visit. This was rather unusual as though we had always been friends, through church, from my having been a babysitter often for his children and I was also very good friends with his wife, we'd never been the "Visiting" kind of friends. We chatted about various things and he inquired about the medical plans to treat my illness, etc. When he got up to leave, he hugged me and his hand reached out to mine and he pressed some paper money into mine, telling me this was to help with my transportation costs to and from the hospitals and doctors I would be seeing. And he told me then too that this gift was between me and him. After he left, I opened my hand and looked at the money and it took my breath away for there were 10 bills, $100 each! At that time I was unemployed and had to give up my unemployment in order to receive state medical aid for my treatments, my upcoming surgery, etc so money was in extremely short supply and about to be lessened greatly. He had no idea then how much this gift meant to me as truly for the next ten months until I qualified for the very small amount of state cash assistance, it was his gift that kept me going. As I got back on my feet over the next two years, finally got social security disability too and my financial problems eased a little, I thought of how much good he had done for me very often and wanted to somehow give back to others too. So for the next year or better, I was involved with a volunteer setup through our church of helping others with transportation to and from doctor appointments and such and refused to accept money from them or from the church to reimburse me for my expenses.Just made me feel I was somehow then kind of repaying the awesome gift my friend had given me.

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  4. Thanks for sharing stories of random acts of kindness. Made my day brighter! Cheers!

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  5. Anonymous9:51 AM

    Those kinds of people and experiences always make it into my writings - either blogs or books or both. After all, that's what I do - I'm a spiritual/inspirational author. (wink)

    The Old Silly from Free Spirit Blog

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