Good deed? Good Samaritan? An angel in disguise? A close encounter of the third kind? However you choose to look at it, I witnessed, first hand, a truly unforgettable act of kindness while shopping at my local food store.
I walked into the store after giving my grocery cart a thorough sanitizing, proceeded to the condiments aisle with nothing on my mind except getting the items on my list. Suddenly, from out of the blue, this tall, elderly man wearing faded-out blue jeans and with long, grayish-white hair neatly tied in a ponytail began speaking.
“There’s toilet tissue on Aisle 16, but it’s going fast,” he spoke, adding, “There are a few extra-large 24 rolls.” I looked at him, and he was, in fact, speaking to me.
“They don’t have any paper towels or sanitizers, just toilet paper, and limit one,” he ended. The old man laughed and walked away.
Instantly, I felt compelled to rush immediately over to Aisle 16 for a pack of this “golden commodity” before it was all gone. I raced down the condiment aisle, turning my cart sharply, running into a young lady’s cart and after a quick apology continued on my quest to Aisle 16.
At this point I’m feeling pretty good that I’ll make it before the shelf is emptied because I’m on a straight stretch to Aisle 16. I’m passing by the other aisles fairly quickly until a little old woman wearing a face mask sweetly asks for my help. I reach up to the top shelf and get her four cans of baked beans, but as I’m putting the canned beans into her cart she blurts out, “Oh, no, honey, you took the wrong cans, I want the beans with maple syrup.” Briefly, I huffed, smiled and returned the four incorrect beans to the shelf and picked up four beautiful cans of maple syrup beans. She was most thankful, and I was very happy to be on my way.
Finally, Aisle 16! The shelves were bare. I could see a couple of white packages on the far right end of the aisle. Funny thing, I actually caught myself saying a little prayer, pleading for just one package. There in front of me, sitting on an almost empty shelf were two large bulk packages of Kleenex! Not what I needed to see at all. Oh, well, I gave it my best shot, so I gathered the remaining few items and headed for the self checkout feeling rather defeated and over what? Toilet paper!
But in the end, no good deed goes unnoticed because as I was checking out this same old man with the long, white ponytail stood right behind me and placed a large package of 24 rolls of toilet paper in my cart, grinning and saying to me half-laughingly, “Somehow, I knew you’d get tied up, so I went back and picked you up the last pack.”
Shocked? Bewildered? At a loss for words? Yes, totally speechless! I finished checking out, walked out of the store, pushing my cart like I had just ran a marathon and when I had loaded the items into my car and closed the trunk, I looked around the parking lot, and wouldn’t you know it, this man really existed. I watched him as he climbed into a black 4x4 pickup truck holding a large package of toilet paper.
I sighed, and with this massive grin on my face, I knew that I had just witnessed a grand-scale act of kindness.
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THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE April 2 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUISITOR.