Kindness is the golden chain
By which society is bound together
Goethe

When I was young, people thought long and hard before they said, “I love you” because those three words implied a life-long commitment. These days, that same phrase has no more impact than the “Good-by” you say to friends when you hang up the telephone.

I had my share of young men who swore undying devotion to me when they had something carnal in mind. There was that one unfortunate who actually committed himself to sticking around for better or worse, so determined was he to have a reliable source of physical satisfaction. By Valentines Day of the year we set up housekeeping together, he was reminding me of how poor his judgment had been. His words of love were as permanent as tissue paper in a windstorm.

I began a fruitless vigil for a stalwart human being whose devotion would last longer than a summer rain shower or an evening in the sack. Indeed, I spent many barren years waiting for someone to tell me they loved me instead of what I could give them. While I searched and hoped, dozens of strangers and hundreds of friends did loving things for me every day, but fool that I was, I didn’t think they counted.

Now that I am older and battle scarred by life’s mishaps, I realize that it was those very strangers who gave me the kind of loving that mattered. They didn’t bother with evanescent talk. They showed devotion not just to me but to all humankind because they loved living things for no other reason but that they lived.

I was given my most beautiful gift of caring the year I decided to travel around the country in a fifth wheel trailer with my two dogs, Molly and Cindy and two cats, Eileen and Michael. I set out to explore America and Americans and wherever I stopped, strangers shared their stories and their time with me. I left a ghost town in Oklahoma and began driving toward Louisiana when I had my first mechanical setback. I ran out of gasoline in Winnfield, Louisiana on my way to Natchitoches for the annual Thanksgiving Festival there. The GMC truck I was driving to haul the trailer had a severe oil leak and used up gasoline like a thirsty camel. I pulled into a service station to refill the fuel tanks, when I realized I had misjudged the distance between the pumps. If I continued forward I would crash into a waiting automobile. If I turned to the left I would hit the gas station. I threw the truck into reverse, the trailer bucked like an angry stallion and everything stalled except my nerves.

While all this was happening, a man I did not know was leaning against the side of the station watching me try to negotiate my massive vehicle into the narrow corridor in the station. He knocked on the cab window of the truck and said, “Can I help you, Miss?”

Help was the understatement of the hour. “Rescue” would have been far more appropriate. I nodded and swallowed a huge lump of fear seasoned with a sense of impending disaster. The man took my keys, and while I watched with the dogs leashed and yelping beside me, he drove my rig out of everyone’s way, took me to an RV shop and explained my problem to a bored and obviously disinterested mechanic.

In my zeal to avoid a collision with the gasoline pumps, I had severed the brake cables between the rig and the vehicle and there was no way I could stop its momentum once I began driving. The mechanic informed us both that it would take at least a day to rewire the trailer and the young man smiled at me. “Well,” he said. “Guess that means you’ll be spending the night with my wife and me. My name is Glen. How do you do?”

“Not very well right now,” I said. “My name is Lynn Ruth.”

I can still feel my thundering heart as I put my fate in his hands. I didn’t know this benevolent Galahad and had heard thousands of stories about the dangers of picking up strange men in small towns. Besides, spending the night anywhere involved housing and feeding my four animals. I opened my mouth to object but he silenced me. “I’ll just put these little fellers in the back seat, m’am,” he said. “You get into the front there and we’ll drive over to tell my wife you’re coming home with me. She works nights at K-Mart.”

The drama of the next few hours happened almost thirty years ago but its wonder still amazes me today. “I’ll have to get some food to take with me, if you really want to take me home. I’m on a restricted salt free diet.”

He helped me into his car. “Don’t you worry about bringing any food,” he said. “You’re my guest, tonight,” he said. “I’ll buy your dinner.”

We stopped at K-Mart first to meet his wife. She was a young and very tired woman who was busy checking out items at the front of the store. “This here is Kate,” said Glen.

He explained my predicament and Kate smiled at me. “Of course you’ll stay with us,” she said. “We’d love to have you.”

Glen drove me to a grocery store where he bought me makings of an elaborate dinner. “That is far more than even I can eat,” I exclaimed and he smiled. “Good,” he said. “Then we can send some of the extra home with you. My family don’t eat this way. We like chicken fried steak and potatoes in our house.”

That evening, while dinner was cooking, my benefactor decided to help me shampoo the dogs. He cleaned up the inevitable mess two small children make of a bathroom and dumped the dogs in the bathtub. By the time they were toweled dry, our meal was ready and it was delicious.

He put a mattress on the floor in the master bedroom and moved the baby’s crib in beside it. He prepared the bed with clean sheets and said good night with the promise," First thing in the morning we’ll get that RV of yours and you’ll be on your way.”

By eight o’clock the next morning I was on the road again and a man I had never met was waving to me as if he had known me all his life. ”How can I thank you?” I asked as I settled into the driver’s seat.

He blushed. “I don’t need no thanks,” he said. “I just did what needed to be done.”

And indeed he had. He responded to need as automatically as he braked the car for a red light. Kindness was imbedded in his nature and he thought no more about taking the trouble to help a stranger than he thought about eating breakfast. “I love you,” he called as I drove away and I smiled because that was the first time I truly understood the meaning of the phrase. “I love you too!” I called and we both recognized the promise I made to him.

Although I never saw him again, every time I open my heart to a stranger, I am thanking that amazing lover from Winnfield Louisiana. I make his good deed become a pebble in the human stream, sending never-ending ripples of goodness out to the rest of the world.


No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted

Aesop