While driving home, I get stuck waiting at the railway crossing near the station of my little hometown. The station is to my left, the train has just stopped there. From my right, over a grassland, two preteen boys are biking toward the crossing. I mostly notice them because I am a bit worried about them knowing to look out for the train. They do; they lie down on the grass just under the bank, probably to watch the train from below. They’re nearer than I’m really comfortable with but safe enough.

Once the train is gone, one of them runs up the bank and puts something on a rail. Then, he looks around and adds two rather large stones — about the width of the rail itself, as far as I can see from where I am sitting in the third car from crossing. Then, he grabs his bike and goes to join his friend standing near the crossing; they obviously want to cross both the railway and street.

Seeing these actions, I roll down my right window. With half a dozen cars in each direction, they won’t be able to cross the street before my car reaches them, so I will be able to tell them off.

Only… the first car stops at the crossing. I don’t hear what is said, but one of the boys runs back to the rail and swipes the stones off. The cars in front of me drive away.

Wait, but he left the first thing. It’s not a stone but something colourful; maybe it’s soft, but still, I’m not going to take any chances.

I stop by the boys and shout for them to get the last item, as well, while the first car from the opposite direction has also stopped and is honking. The boys go and get the third item, as well, and we all drive on.

Somebody got a triple dose of being raised by the village today. And I got my belief that I am living among decent people confirmed.

CONTENT WARNING: Spider (Large!)
 

When I was in high school, I headed to bed one night, not bothering to turn on lights along the way. Fortunately, I did turn on my room light. A huge spider was sitting in the middle of my bed — at least six inches long. This is not normal here.

I quickly ran upstairs.

Me: “Dad! There’s a huge spider on my bed!”

Dad: *Laughs* “Huge, huh?”

Laughing some more, he grabbed a fly swatter. I tried to warn him, but he was too busy laughing at me to listen.

He walked into the room, and startled exclamations replaced the laughing as he hurriedly backed out.

Later that night we saw more, even bigger spiders outside. Dad took the BB gun instead of the fly swatter.

We still don’t know what they were; Dad said he had never seen anything like them, and I have never seen any again. It was a long time before I walked around the basement in the dark after that.

The old Woodward’s store in downtown Vancouver used to have a photo booth near the food court. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, my friends and I loved to go down to the photo booth. We would save up our change, bring props, and get all sorts of fun selfies.

One day, I was there with a friend having fun as usual when I noticed that a very small girl, maybe three or four, had appeared next to the photobooth. She was looking longingly at the curtains and at us.

I could see that her mom was nearby, so I said something like, “Sweet girl!” to her.

Mom: “She’s really curious about what’s going on in there.”

Me: “Would it be okay for me to bring her in there and take some pictures?”

The mom was 100% on board with this idea, and the little girl was somewhat in awe of being allowed to go into the booth. I still have two of those four pictures. I gave the other two to the girl and her mother.

This happened about thirty years ago. I was definitely the a**hole in this situation, but in my defense, I was five.

My family’s home phone number was one digit off from a sporting goods store in my town called Joe Jones. Naturally, we’d get a fair number of calls from people with the wrong number. We had caller ID, so my parents would see an unfamiliar number on the ringing phone and say, “Looks like it might be someone trying to call Joe Jones again.” They’d pick up and say, “Hello? I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” and then just hang up and say, “Yep. Joe Jones again.”

Now, since I was five, I failed to realize two key things about this situation:

• “Joe Jones” was the name of a store, not a person an easy mistake to make.

• It was different people calling each time.

Since my parents could always tell when it was a call for Joe Jones, I thought it was always the same number that they kept recognizing. I had only ever used the speed dial to make an outgoing call, so I assumed some friend of Joe’s had just misprogrammed their phone to call us instead of him and was really lazy about fixing it. I was annoyed that this person kept bothering us.

Then came the day of the story. My dad was at work, and my mom was home with me. She was busy with something when the phone rang and asked me to answer it. I went over to the kitchen phone and reached up to pull it off the hook.

Me: “Hello?”

Caller: “Hi. Is this Joe Jones?”

I was finally talking to the person who had been bothering us! I summoned up all the righteous fury young me could muster.

Me: *VERY sternly* “No! He doesn’t live here! Stop calling us!”

My mom jumped up and snatched the phone from me to apologize to the caller and smooth things over.

After she hung up, she took the time to talk to me to make sure I understood what was actually going on and how to be polite over the phone. She wasn’t angry.

These days, I always try to be polite on the phone, regardless of the situation. I think back to this incident as being the day I learned that lesson.

Thanks, Mom. I miss you.

When I was probably six years old, I was playing “kick the crackerbox” in the kitchen with my older sister. I had my socks on, and I slipped and fell chin-first into a stool. I was taken to the emergency room and had seven stitches put in.

As this was the late 1980s, there were still cigarette vending machines in the hospitals. A guy had bought himself a pack of smokes, and with his change, he had gotten a pack of Reese’s Pieces. He gave them to me and told me he hoped I would feel better soon. Thirty-five years later, I still remember that moment.

I also remember my grandmother pouring the candy into a bowl for me the next day and how painful it was to eat them with my wound — but they were all the more pleasant because of it.

I seriously doubt that man remembers that day, but I will never forget that random act of kindness that a stranger gave to a little kid in a lot of pain.