Tallahassee, Florida—he was homeless. Long beard, weathered skin. I was sitting in traffic. He walked between lines of vehicles at the stoplight. He carried a cardboard sign. I rolled down my window and handed him all the cash I had—which wasn’t much. Maybe fifteen bucks.
He smelled like an open bottle.
He stood at my window and said, “I don’t know you, but I love you.”
Those words. I’ve thought about them for days. I thought about them when I drove past an ambulance this morning. Two cars looked like crushed Budweiser cans. Traffic backed up for a mile. EMT’s loaded a stretcher.
One paramedic was hugging a child in the median. The kid squeezed him and cried his eyes out. The EMT squeezed back. I’ll bet they don’t teach that in EMT training.
Here’s another:
After my friend’s wife died, he adopted a cat. It didn’t take long before he’d spoiled the animal rotten. He bought toys, an outdoor pet-bed, a food bowl, a collar.
The next morning, he woke to see three feral cats on his porch. So, he
did what any self-respecting man would. He named them.
The following day; two more feral cats.
“I went from being lonely,” he said, “to being Doctor Freaking Doolittle. Cats just trust me.”
Last week, I met an old man who sat at the bar of a rundown beer joint. He was watching the band play. He was deaf. In a loud voice, he asked if he could buy me a beer. I accepted.
He told me he’d totally lost his hearing a few years ago. He woke up one morning and he was fully deaf. His life changed. It forced him to retire early. It’s been hard.
Last year, his nine-year-old granddaughter begged him to attend her school concert. He showed up with a sour attitude.
For the school’s final musical number, one hundred and twenty elementary students sang…