A NICE STORY...

A NICE STORY…

... for a change. Don't we all need one? The news about this nation and the world at large needs compensation. There are good people. There is mutual respect and compassion. There is a sense of selfless service, a consideration of others. Here's what happened one morning recently. Well, it started quite some time ago...

... when we started noticing that our trash cans, all three of them--black for trash, blue for recycle and green for, well, green--were being returned to their place behind the lemon tree in front of our house, beside the fence with our neighbor's house, tidily out of sight from the street. Every Wednesday evening our gardener--thank you!--puts them out curbside to await the Thursday morning arrival of the big waste management trucks; and like all our neighbors on the street, we have always replaced them ourselves after the Thursday morning pickup.

Until we no longer had to. We began to find them every week, as if by magic, placed back where they belong. Closer observation confirmed that this minor miracle occurred immediately after the passage of one of the trash trucks, so we decided that it could only be one of the drivers doing us this favor. We looked up and down the street several times, and concluded that he was doing it for no one else, just us, and of course we couldn't help but wonder why.

My wife and I concurred: our man deserved a Christmas present by way of thanks for his mysterious acts of kindness. We do not often see him--he arrives early and is quickly gone--so it seemed best to enclose a modest gift with a card and a message to convey our gratitude; and to have it ready by the door, in case we might be able to catch him in person. And the night before, just in case we missed him yet again, I pinned the envelope to the fence where I thought that he'd be bound to find it.

I woke early on trash pickup morning and could not go back to sleep. It would be so much nicer, I thought, to see our benefactor and thank him personally, so I lay waiting for the inimitable sound of the trash truck lumbering down our street and the deafening crash of the trash cans being hoisted up and emptying into its bowels. 

I ran upstairs (our bedroom is downstairs) when I heard the first truck arrive. It was the wrong one. The driver picked up one of our three cans and hastened on his way. The second one, it turned out, was headed the wrong way. It was with the third one I had luck! I sneaked a peek out of our front door and there he was, a huge man of African American descent--a true gentle giant, it turned out--who climbed down from his truck and started to wheel our trash cans back behind the lemon tree.

I caught him just as he found my envelope pinned to the fence. He must have sensed me coming up behind him, because he turned with a huge grin and stuck out a massive paw to shake my hand. The man dwarfed me. He was tall, yes, but also built like an industrial scale refrigerator. And every cubic inch of him was kindness. He just radiated the stuff, like Santa, but without the ho-ho-ho. His first words: "How's the wife?" (She told me later that she often sees him on her walks around the neighborhood and they always exchange a friendly wave).

Our friend was certainly grateful for our gift, but not so grateful as we are to him, not only for his weekly act of kindness, but also for restoring our sense that human beings can actually care about other human beings and go out of their way to help. I asked him the obvious question, the one we had pondered often in the past weeks and months: why? Why us, and no one else along the street? What made us so privileged to receive this kindness from him?

"Well," he told me. "I seen you." (My wife and I are, um... of a respectable age!) "I seen your wife, too, dragging those trash bins back, and I couldn't let that happen." 

I thanked him again, from a really full heart, and he swallowed up my hand in his another time before climbing back into his cab and heading off to the next house down the street. Sentimental old codger that I am, I found myself tearing up a bit as I headed back downstairs to report on the story to my wife. After which, we hadn’t the heart to turn on the news…