The other day I was in the little grocery store, Garden of Eden, where I always buy my breakfast and lunch. They have wonderful salad bars—both cold and hot—and a station that offers fresh fruit and that ridiculously thick Greek yogurt. An elderly lady, with a thicket of white hairs bursting from her wrinkled chin, was at the cold salad bar, picking mandarin oranges and strawberries one by one from the fruit salad, which was mostly baby spinach. At first I thought, “Oh, God, a picker!”
If you frequent salad bars, as I do, pickers – those people who hover over one of the food offerings, painstakingly picking the choicest pieces, or denuding the Greek salad of all its feta cheese, are a huge annoyance. I avoided the old lady and headed for the other side of the salad bar. And then I thought, what if I tried to help her? She obviously didn’t know about the fresh fruit station, just a few feet away, stocked with a whole tray of mandarin oranges. As I told her about this, she expressed first skepticism, as if it couldn’t possibly be true, then wonderment, then deep gratitude. She headed off towards the fruit bar, and I finished composing my salad. As I walked toward the registers, she called out, “Thank you. Thank you, young man. I had no idea that was there. You’re a hero.”
No, I thought. I’m not a hero. I’m just someone who managed to convert feelings of disgust and frustration into a generous and helpful act. But these days, maybe that qualifies as heroism.
Originally published on Tom Aplomb
Photo—tom_bullock/Flickr
I know what you mean. This week, I stopped a woman from walking out into an intersection (while staring at her phone), as a car blew through it running the red light. I stopped two other people who got up to exit a train and left their umbrellas behind. I helped an older lady who was definitely on the right floor…of the wrong building. I pulled up google maps on my phone to find an address for a lost-looking man on the street who didn’t know where he was going. I let a guy who was obviously in a hurry,… Read more »