Tag Archives: samaritan

Friendships Reign in the Rain

by Woody

The harder the recent rains fell, the greater became the flood of phone calls and voicemails and text messages from friends, far and farther, asking how I was doing on account of our coastal paradise making the national news.

I bet you had friends do likewise—or maybe you were one.

The atmospheric river may have been Man Bites Dog worthy news, but friends checking in on friends is as common as Dog Wags Tail. And yet such acts of friendship, and family-ship too, are worth acknowledging—no, worth celebrating!—and not taking for granted.

A week ago in this space I chronicled how a Good Samaritan took 20 minutes out of her day, and drove quite a few miles out of her way, to personally deliver a package that had mistakenly landed in her mailbox.

If a kind stranger will go to such lengths, one can only imagine the distances our friends and loved ones will travel. I didn’t have to imagine the other day when, as the deluge hit full force, I received the following text from a relatively new friend, but already a dear one for some friendships are as fast and hearty as instant oatmeal, who lives in Northern California:

“Hey Pal, just checkin’ in to see if you’re ok. I’m just hearing and reading horrific stuff, and they start talking about Montecito, SB, and Ventura. I think the worst is over for us up here, but if there’s anything I can do, it’s only a four-hour drive. There’s nothing on my plate that can’t be postponed. Let me know. Stay dry, my friend – dj”

Only a four-hour drive! That, in a nutshell, is friendship, where distance and time are no obstacles. As Abdu’l-Bahá eloquently put it: “Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble, and there is always time.”

This quote often makes me think of my friend Scott and his now-grown son, Justin. A ballpark figure for how many youth baseball games Justin played in is 1,500, but father and son can both tell you the exact the number Scott missed: three—two of them because of emergency surgery.

Another sporting example of love being blind to trouble and always finding time is my longtime, and now long-distance, friend Randy who checked in on me from New York during the heavy rainstorm. In turn, I asked how his son Charlie’s tennis season at Merrimack College is going.

In a word, and befitting rising floodwaters, swimmingly! As a junior, Charlie is a team co-captain playing No. 1 doubles and No. 3 singles. And here’s the Abdu’l-Bahá-like best part of the update: Randy and his wife Debby, despite an eight-hour roundtrip drive to home matches, have attended 80 percent of them, plus most road contests too.

One final vignette of love and friendship, which are one and the same, ignoring distance. Not long ago, my college buddy Mikey was in Italy, in the coastal paradise of Sorrento, in a marketplace alleyway where he saw a man sitting with a typewriter. Knowing my affection for QWERTY machines, Mikey investigated, learned Paolo Grasso was a street poet for hire and requested one honoring my 20-year consecutive day running streak.

Titled “The Runner,” the custom creation is typed in Italian on one side, translated into English on the other, and is lovely. Even lovelier, however, is that Mikey thought of me some 6,000 miles away.

The poem includes this beautiful stanza: “This continuous running / towards a goal / makes the moment precious.”

Friends, shine or rain, make the moment precious as well.

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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.

Two Stories of Delivered Kindness

by Woody

The scene seemed so perfectly choreographed as to belong on a movie screen, not on a real city street.

A teenager, male and perhaps pushing age 20, was pedaling a bike while being pursued at a dead sprint by a young boy, no older than seven or eight, who in turn was being chased—flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop—by a woman in sandals.

A bicycle theft in progress was my first reaction, but in a flash I realized the bike was far too big to be the boy’s. No, the teenager must have stolen something else belonging to the boy, who surely belonged to the woman for she was calling out a name as a loving mother would. The boy, meanwhile, kept running and kept yelling “stop! Stop! STOP!”

Surprisingly, the thief hit the breaks and turned around…

…and turned out not to be a thief at all. Rather, he had dropped his hair pick and the boy had picked it up and raced him down to return it. I wish you could have seen the tall teen’s warm smile and the small boy’s big grin, and mine as well for having witnessed this feel-good deed.

Another good-hearted stranger gave me a broad smile the other day, except this time I was on the receiving end of the kindness. This tale begins with me sending a Priority Mail package to a dear friend. Alas, the advance copy of my soon-to-be-released novel “The Butterfly Tree” (more on this in a few weeks) flitted into the wrong mailbox.

Marcela Pearson, the unintended recipient, initially considered writing “Wrong address / Return to sender” on the front but instead decided to take matters into her own hands and fingers with a Google search.

“The picture of the typewriter on the return address label was a clue and it matched the graphics on your website,” Marcela explained as to how she found my email address and surmised I was the right Woody Woodburn to contact. She further asked for the correct mailing address so she could personally drop off the package.

I assumed my Good Samaritan would merely have to walk a few houses up or down her street, but this proved to greatly underestimate how far the mailing had missed its mark.

“Dear Woody, I just dropped off your package,” Marcela emailed me later the same day, and like an Amazon delivery driver even attached a digital photo of the parcel on the “Welcome” mat. “It was only 10 minutes from where I live, so no big deal. I guess (1234 Something Drive) somehow morphed into (234 Different Avenue). Have an awesome day, Marcela.”

No big deal? Far from it. It was an eight-mile round-trip out of her way, and 20-minute out of her day, big deal.

After I thanked her most sincerely, yet still inadequately, Marcela replied: “I am super happy I was able to help. It is really no big deal to drive 10 minutes to a very nice neighborhood; go to a place I have not seen yet. Sounds good to me. Life is about exploring.”

Her note concluded: “Just last week I met some really good people in Colorado. Finding good people sometimes feels like looking for a needle in a haystack—but they live and I keep searching.”

On the topic of good people, Coach John Wooden liked to say, “You can’t live a perfect day until you do something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

In my book, Marcela and the bike-chasing young boy each recently lived a perfect day.

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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.

Column: Special Samaritans

by Woody

Serving Up Random Kindness

 

            Following a morning that included a dentist’s drill, a handful of cell-phone-talking drivers so recklessly rude they made me grit my numbed teeth, and a slow-moving line at post office, I was in a mood to write a column of rants.

 

            This changed when I was in line at the supermarket and a woman with a hand basket of items kindly told a young mother with a full cart, and a fussy baby, to go in front of her. This same woman soon allowed another person to leapfrog her, and then a third who also seemed in a rush.SpecialNote

 

            “I’ve never seen anyone let more than one person go ahead of them,” said the cashier, smiling in admiration.

 

            Thus clouds yielded to sunshine, which brightened further with a few feel-good stories that arrived on my computer screen via links on Twitter, Facebook and The Star’s on-line edition. The latter chronicled more than 500 Cal Lutheran University students who, as part of CLU’s “You Got Served” program, spent a day cleaning up hundreds of pounds of trash nearby Olivas Links Golf Course and Harbor Boulevard in Ventura.

 

            Across the country in a pizza parlor in China Grove, NC, Ashley England and her family “Got Served” a surprise when the dinner bill arrived.

 

Ashley, in a story reported by North Carolina’s WBTV, explained that her 8-year-old son Riley has special needs resulting from a severe form of epilepsy. His seizures, which number up to 100 per day, began at age 18 months and have robbed his ability to speak. The boy’s frustration at being unable to communicate leads to outbursts, like the one at the pizza parlor.

 

“He threw the phone and started screaming,” Ashely noted. “The past few weeks have been very hard and trying for us, especially with public outings. Riley was getting loud and hitting the table and I know it was aggravating to some people.”

 

Before she could calm the storm, a waitress came to the table – not to ask Ashley to take her son outside, but to tell her that another customer had paid her family’s dinner bill and also sent over this note: “God only gives special children to special people.”

 

The mystery Samaritan’s kindness made Ashley cry.

 

“To have someone do that small act towards us shows that some people absolutely understand what we are going through and how hard it is to face the public sometimes,” said the grateful mother.

 

            A similar anonymous kindness recently transpired at Tampa International Airport when a traveler had his credit card declined at the check-in counter.

 

Confused and in a rush to make his flight, and perhaps most of all “extremely embarrassed,” the man stepped out of line to check his credit-card balance.

 

Upon returning to the counter with the matter hopefully sorted out, he learned that a Good Samaritan had generously paid his baggage fee and left a note reading: “Hey, I heard them say your card was declined. I know how it feels. Your bag fee’s on me. Just pay it forward the next time you get a chance. Have a safe flight. :)”

 

Here is a third random act of kindness I read about this same day. While vacationing with his family a father was approached by a man trying to sell a flower for money to buy food for his own family, or so he claimed.

 

Remarkably, generously, and perhaps naively if he thought the money would go for food and not alcohol, the vacationing father gave the man a 100-dollar bill.

 

“Fifteen minutes later,” the vacationer was quoted in the on-line story, “we see the same guy walking on the sidewalk again. This time, he had at least 10 bags of groceries hanging from his arms, one of which contained diapers.”

 

Touched by the above examples, I went back to the supermarket and bought a turkey sandwich and Gatorade which I gave to a woman out front who looked down on her luck. I know we are encouraged to donate to worthy charities in order to discourage panhandling, but sometimes you just have to do a “You Got Served” deed right now.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His new memoir WOODEN & ME comes later this month and is available for pre-order at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.