Some people get caught in a light drizzle and curse their lack of an umbrella.
Others skip in the rain and dance playfully in the puddles.
And then there are those special individuals who, even in the darkest of storms, create rainbows for others wherever they go. My friend Nick is just such a rare human sunbeam. Let me share one shining example.
On a rainy winter morning, Nick ventured down his driveway to retrieve the newspaper and spotted a quite elderly gentleman doing likewise a handful of houses away. The neighbor, however, was using a reach-grabber tool so he wouldn’t have to – or, perhaps, couldn’t – bend down to pick it up.
Furthermore, the man was accompanied by his wife who was holding him seemingly so he wouldn’t fall. In truth, the wife appeared to equally need her husband’s support to keep from toppling.
Indeed, the couple’s driveway was literally a wet and slippery slope waiting for an accident – perhaps a broken hip or arm – to happen.
“I was worried one or both of them would fall and get hurt, maybe seriously,” Nick thought with serious concern. His next impulse was to help this couple he had never met, but quickly a third consideration embraced him: “I didn’t want to bruise their dignity if I walked down the street to help them.”
Nick slept on the matter and the following morning rose a little earlier than usual. Again it was raining, so he walked down the street and stealthily deposited the three newspapers the elderly couple subscribe to on their welcome mat along with an anonymous note that read: “Your paperboy wanted to make your morning a little easier and brighter.”
Thus began a new morning ritual for Nick that brings to my mind Sparky Anderson, the late Hall of Fame baseball manager, who coincidentally lived not far from Nick’s Thousand Oaks neighborhood. Each week on trash day, during his afternoon walk, Sparky would move his neighbors’ barrels from the curb up their driveways. Asked what motivated him to do so, he replied simply: “Woody, it don’t cost nothing at all to be nice.”
Curious about the identity of their nice Samaritan “paperboy,” the elderly couple asked around and eventually phoned Nick to thank him and a new friendship was born.
In sunshine as well as rain, day after week after month, Nick continued his new one-home paper route. And then the mishap he had feared for the elderly couple happened to him – not a fall and injury, but rather COVID-19.
Before going to the hospital with a dangerously low oxygen level, Nick had the presence of mind and heart to find a substitute paperboy. For the two weeks Nick was a patient, and a good while longer while he recuperated at home, a 13-year-old neighborhood boy dutifully delivered the early morning kindness.
When Nick was finally fit to resume his paper route an unexpected problem reared its head – its teenage head.
“He wouldn’t give it back,” Nick says with a laugh. “He told me it started his day with a sense of purpose and responsibility and a good feeling in his heart.”
And so it was that the teen boy continued the daily Sparky-like act of niceness until the couple recently moved away to be closer to their grandchildren.
Here’s hoping that another human sunbeam in the couple’s new neighborhood sees them with a reach-grabber tool and is inspired to escort their newspapers up to their welcome mat. As Ernest Hemingway wrote in the “The Sun Also Rises”, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com