Recently a radio station has been running a competition where you can win your mortgage or rent paid for a year.

You can only get in the drawing by being the ninth caller each time they play the cue to call. The winner of the competition is a woman who reveals she is not keeping the prize for herself, but instead using it to pay for a coworker’s rent.

The coworker is an immigrant with no family in New Zealand; his son has recently been diagnosed with cancer and his wife has given up work to take care of the son, as they have no family support.

The winner says that the whole office had an agreement to all try to call every time the cue to call came on so they could win it for the coworker.

My first year of university, my dorm floor is pretty much all first-years like myself, living alone for the first time, trying to figure out what we want to do, and desperately missing our families and friends. The very first day we move in, one girl at the far end of the hall makes it a point to ask everyone when their birthday is. We figure she’s into astrology or something, but lo and behold, whenever someone’s birthday rolls around, she has a cake or cookies ready, and leads the entire dorm floor in singing happy birthday. When we ask her about it, her response is that you don’t stop celebrating birthdays just because you’re technically a grown-up, and that we need reasons to celebrate now more than ever, now that we’re all living away from our families and stressed out by classes and trying to learn how to be adults.

As the year goes on, my dorm floor gets closer and closer. By Christmas, we’re all studying together, partying together, making exhausted Sunday brunch together, and going to each other for homework or relationship help or advice, or just to rant. The girl’s birthday is in February, and we noticed that although she bakes for everyone else, she doesn’t usually have much more than a single cookie or a bite or two of cake. One of my roommates asks her about it, and she admits that she doesn’t really like cake; she prefers fruit pie, but isn’t very good at baking it. It’s clear what we have to do.

The girl’s birthday falls right in the middle of midterms, so we are all up late studying, anyway. As soon as midnight hits, we knock on her door, wait for the, “Come in,” and the entire dorm floor files into her room, my roommate holding the cherry pie he made, lit with candles. All forty of us sing her happy birthday, and my roommate happily presents her with the pie. She is almost in tears by the end of it, and admits that she was so stressed with exams, she’d decided she wasn’t going to bother celebrating her own birthday. That won’t do, either, so we decide we’ll go out and celebrate together in a week, once midterms are done, and we stick to it.

That’s years past now, but I’m still in touch with her, and she’s still extraordinary, as a doctor and as a person, always thinking of how she can help other people. For me, though, nothing ever tops the eighteen-year-old girl trying to offer comfort and continuity to a bunch of other stressed and frightened students, and how she turned us from a bunch of strangers into a second family, and made our dorm a home!

(I wake up feeling sick and miserable, but I have to work, so I drag my sick carcass in. I get in late and overall feel bad. A few hours into my shift, an older lady comes in with a smile, saying she wants to pay her bill in her unit. I say it’s no problem, but I sound stuffed up and I sniffle and croak. I apologize for being sick and that I probably look and sound gross. The woman looks at me.)

Customer: “Oh, honey, no! You’re fine. You’re sick, and you look it, but there’s nothing wrong with that; you can’t help it. Really, it’s fine.”

Me: *giving her a smile* “Thank you.”

(I process her bill and as I am printing a receipt:)

Me: “I don’t know. It’s probably the change in weather. I’m a scrawny guy; I get cold easily.”

(I laugh it off and the woman only looks at me with concern.)

Customer: “Maybe it’s allergies; have you thought of that? Well, there is a dollar store up the road, very cheap. You should get some allergy medication, and if that doesn’t work, buy some cold medicine. That should do the trick!”

Me: “Why, thank you. I should be going to lunch here soon; perhaps I’ll run up there.”

(She nods, takes her receipt, and walks to the door before turning around.)

Customer: “I believe in being kind and understanding to people; we all share the same planet, after all.”

(I agree and thank her for the advice and bid her a good day. About twenty minutes go by and the woman reappears. I turn to ask her what she needs as she walks in, and she smiles and hands me a bag.)

Customer: “Here you go, dear. That should help you out!”

(I look inside and there is allergy medicine and two boxes of cold medicine!)

Me: *shocked but grateful* “Oh, wow! Thank you! You really didn’t have to!”

(I thank her profusely, but she only shakes her head and says:)

Customer: “Kindness goes a long way. We all share this place, so we should take care of each other. Get well soon, dear!”

(And with that, she gave me another smile and left. Blessed be to that kind woman. She has no idea how much she made my day and restored just a little faith.)

My mom always tried to ensure my siblings and I had wonderful Christmases, even when money was extremely tight. This usually meant that Christmas was provided to us by thrift stores, grandparents, and/or my mom’s sewing skills, but we never complained; we were just delighted to have something under the tree.

One year when I was about five or six, I’d expressed interest in having my own plot in the family garden… so it was a stroke of luck when Mom found a kid’s gardening book at the thrift store. It even came with seed packets that had yet to be opened by the previous owners! Unfortunately, said book also had a sizeable chunk ripped out of the cover, meaning there would be no way to pass it off as new. Fortunately, my mom is a creative problem solver.

On Christmas morning that year, I found the gardening book under the tree… and a note from “Santa” that read:

“[My Name], sorry that Rudolph took a bite out of your new book. He thought it was food! I hope you enjoy it anyhow and grow a big garden this year!”

I was so excited to have a book that one of Santa’s reindeer had tried to eat, and had a lot of fun helping plant in the garden that spring. It didn’t occur to me until much later to question why “Santa” had handwriting just like my mom’s, but to this day I have fond memories of that Christmas gift, and a love of gardening!

After living in the same suburban city in Georgia for over 25 years, I find myself relocating to Miami, Florida, for my husband’s new job. We don’t have much time to look for a place to live, so we choose an affordable apartment close to his job.

We move into a second-floor apartment in a six-story building, knowing nothing about the neighborhood. Shortly after moving in I hear the fire alarm. I go outside to discover smoke pouring from one of the sixth-floor apartments. One of the neighbors is a teenage girl, who is absolutely hysterical. She accidentally started the fire when she forgot about a pot of food she had left on the stove. She panicked and ran out of the apartment, forgetting that her father was still inside napping.

As some of the neighbors are trying to calm the girl, the father, who is a very tall, very large man, emerges from the building, a bit dazed, but unharmed. Unfortunately, he is still wearing the clothes he was napping in: a t-shirt and boxer shorts.

While my neighbors and I are waiting for the fire department to tend to the fire — the apartment is a complete loss — my next-door neighbor, who is also a very tall, very large man, comes home. He speaks to his wife, who fills him in on the situation. My next-door neighbor sees the sixth-floor dad, and then goes to his car and retrieves several shopping bags from a clothing store. He hands him the shopping bags, saying, “Here. These are for you.”

The sixth-floor dad protests that he can’t take his new clothes. The next door neighbour makes the obvious statement that he needs them more right now.

And that is how I learned what kind of neighbors I had.