The landline to my friend’s house rang, and I answered it. “Nancy?” a woman’s voice inquired. I told her that my friend was in Colorado, and I was caretaking the house and animals. “Well, I wanted to tell her that there was a strange car parked in her mother’s driveway,” she said. “I thought she should know.”
I had taken my friend and her daughter to the airport the previous day; I would not see them again for 22 days. Before she left for her sojourn “out West,” she had been trying to help her elderly mother get her car repaired. She told me that the local repair shop had an employee who lived near her mother and who had volunteered to pick up the car on his way to work, repair it and return it that evening. I told that to the concerned caller, saying that the repairman had left his car when he picked up the other car. When I hung up, I thought of the call as indicative of a level of vigilance and concern and willingness to inquire that is seldom seen in the ways we live in larger cities.
A couple of years ago when I was providing care to my friend’s dying husband, I answered her door and spoke to the mail carrier. “I just wanted them to know that I saw the front door open the other day,” the woman said. “I knew they were not at home, so I closed it.” The recent phone call from a concerned neighbor was not an aberration, but the continuation of a theme of helpfulness.
I used to live in Southern Indiana. The town I lived in is about 10 miles from where my friend now lives, and when I arrived there, someone put a business card under my windshield. It was from the Ku Klux Klan, and read, “Racial purity is America’s security.” There was one other black family in that apartment complex, and my search found only one other card: it was on that family’s car. That moment fell outside of most of my family’s human interactions there, however, and the neighborhood we moved into was warm and welcoming. When my dog alerted me to the presence of strangers outside the gate, I called my neighbor to tell him that his garage door was open. In the morning, he found his car keys in the ignition, in the “on” position. His golf clubs and boxes of tools were missing, but when I walked outside to see the open door, I had prevented a greater loss.
When, during my stay at my friend’s house, I developed a slow leak in a tire, I took it to the same repair shop that had serviced her mother’s car. The serviceman showed me the chink in my rim (thanks, pothole Indy) and suggested a temporary solution; another serviceman walked by and clanked a rim on the floor of the garage. “I was gonna trash this, we’ve had it so long.” It was the exact rim needed for my car. A large repair became a small one and no one tried to sell me more than I needed at that time.
In the western film Unforgiven, a character resists the law saying that he may not carry guns in a town, saying he would be defenseless, and dependent on “the kindness of strangers…” My experience in those Southern Indiana towns proved that, while we need not rely on those kindnesses, there are those who deliver them more frequently than we realize. We would do well to remember that, and “pay it forward.”