The kindness of strangers

Many years ago – decades, in fact – when our kids were young, the internet, cell phones and debit cards did not exist and we had no credit cards, I was driving back from a winter holiday visit to my family in a car I had borrowed from a friend. I had three of our four kids with us. To make more space for them in the back seat, I had put their coats (and mine) in the trunk.

By the time we got close to Brighton, it was dark and snowy, and the car suddenly lost power. I managed to get it onto the shoulder of the highway before it shut down completely.

But now, what?  I figured we would have to walk to the closest exit, so I headed for the trunk to get our coats, only to discover that it wouldn’t open because the electric system wasn’t working. I lined the kids up beside me, told them to hold hands and we started walking. Within minutes, a small car pulled off the highway ahead of us. The driver – a woman – got out and asked if she could help. Well, yes, I said, and explained our situation. She told us to hop in her car and drove us to the closest gas station. The attendant was willing to tow our car, but wanted to be paid, and said no one could look at the car until the next day. I had about $80, which was not going to cover the cost of the tow let alone a hotel room for the night. My good samaritan had $100 in cash, which she gave me, on the strength of my promise to send her a cheque when I got home.

I thanked her profusely, and said she was a very trusting person to give a stranger $100. (That was a lot more money then than it is today.) Her response: the trust was when she let four strangers get into her car on the side of the highway; the money was not such a big deal.

Off she drove and, continuing in her spirit of generosity, the tow truck driver agreed to take us to the closest motel after he picked up our car. I had just enough money for the tow, the room, breakfast in the morning and – importantly – a stiff drink from room service.

The children, naturally, were delighted at the opportunity for an unplanned night in the motel, especially because there was a TV — something we did not have — in the room.

The mechanic was able to make the car driveable enough to get us home the next morning, but the best part of it for me was the kindness of that stranger who pulled over on the highway, in the dark, to give us a ride. (And I sent her a cheque as soon as I got home.)

Or not

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I had spent a wonderful weekend with three women friends at the cottage of one of them. The snow in the forecast for Sunday, when we were to return to our respective homes, looked to be a minor irritation. However, by early morning, snow squall warnings were in effect for pretty much the entire length of my drive. I should have known my decision to brave the elements was not a good one when I couldn’t even get out of the driveway. Stuck in a snowbank, I called CAA and, after a wait of about 90 minutes, got winched out.

Off I went, with everything proceeding smoothly for about half an hour. Then, suddenly, I was in the middle of a total whiteout of heavy blowing snow, on a highway that had not been plowed. I could not see the side of the road, the yellow line down the middle or anything that might have been travelling along the highway. Flashers on, I proceeded slowly for about 15 minutes before realizing that I could not possibly go on.

I pulled into the next driveway, my body shaking from head to toe, and made my way to the front door, which sported a cheery wooden sign saying “Make merry.” It was opened by a large man, likely in his early 40s, with a woman standing just behind him. Through my tears, which threatened to turn into uncontrollable sobbing at any moment, I explained my dilemma and asked If I could sit in their house while I, and maybe the blizzard, calmed down.

No, they said, you can’t – “We have our family here and we don’t know who you are,” said the woman — and then they closed the door in my face.

Really, I thought, as I stomped my way through the snow back to my car, you are afraid of a 69-year-old woman and are willing to let her take her chances on a highway with zero visibility?

I called my partner, put the phone on speaker, and asked him to keep me company while I drove. I had seen a sign for a motel a few kilometres back, so I turned my car around in the driveway and gunned it onto the highway, hoping like crazy that there were no cars. There weren’t, and I made my way slowly, while talking somewhat hysterically to my poor partner, to the motel, where I checked in for the night.

Unfortunately, there were no amenities, so I wasn’t able to order myself a drink, but I was warm, dry and my fingers were not clenched around the steering wheel of the car. As I set about the business of reorganizing my Monday schedule, my mind kept returning not to the drive — terrifying as it had been – but to the people who had shut their door in my face.

I’ve tried to come up with a story to make sense of their refusal to let me sit in their house. Were they perhaps running a human trafficking ring? Operating a meth lab? Had they been robbed or otherwise harmed by an out-of-shape, sobbing 69-year-old woman in the past? Did they not understand that I might have been at least as scared of them as they claimed to be of me?

One of my sisters with whom I had been texting, and who also subscribes to the worst case scenario approach to life, responded to my hypotheses about the door slammers by writing: “I suspect you just escaped with your life,” after suggesting that perhaps they were serial killers with a victim already tied up in their basement.

I will never know the story of those people, of course, so I’m doing my best to put them behind me. Instead, I will be grateful for the many kindnesses — both large and small — that I encounter almost every day.

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