I’m from Brazil. The day I turned eighteen, I went on an exchange program to the US for a year. Everything went as nice as could be, and on the day I was returning home, I had a stopover in Chicago for a few hours before getting on a plane to Brazil.

I was carrying four pieces of luggage, a few purses, and lots of gifts my American friends had given me. I had already checked two bags and, by the time I was supposed to enter the boarding area, I couldn’t find my passport.

I had already taken a plane on that same day, so I was far from my temporary home and even further from my final destination.

I was a nineteen-year-old crying at a huge international airport trying to remember where I had left my passport and trying to figure out if the Brazilian embassy was that far from the airport.

That’s when an airline employee, a sixty-ish-year-old man, saw me and asked what was happening. I told him and he immediately pulled my two pieces of luggage from the airplane. After calming me down, he advised me to open all the luggage on the floor so I could find my passport. He said sometimes things can be right in front of our noses, but I’d miss it because of the anxiety and fear it could be lost.

I took a second to calm down and opened all my luggage and purses on the airport floor, all while he was by my side giving words of encouragement.

When I finally found it, he looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m really glad you found your passport. I hope you don’t take any frustration from this beautiful city, and maybe come back for a more peaceful visit in the near future.” He then took my luggage back to the airplane.

I didn’t know him and never got to ask his name, but he sure seemed to be my guardian angel by making sure I got back home in one piece. I hope he’s doing all right, and I hope I get the chance to meet him again.

I did go back to Chicago to meet many other amazing souls and visit an old high school friend who was living nearby. I have nothing but appreciation and love for that city.

This story was included in our May 2020 Inspirational Roundup.

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I’m a huge LEGO fan and have collected LEGO since 1986. I was browsing the LEGO aisle at a store where the employees wear red shirts and khakis in early December a few years ago. I was wearing a dark navy blue polo and khakis at the time.

A couple of elderly ladies were there and, out of the blue, one of them said, “Excuse me, which set would be appropriate for a nine-year-old boy?”

I looked over, surprised that she was speaking to me.

I asked a bit about the boy’s thematic interests and price points and showed her a few sets that I thought might fit the bill. I was just trying to be generally helpful.

After I finished — maybe fifteen or twenty minutes later — she thanked me for my assistance and tried to tip me. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t take that. I don’t work here. I’m just a LEGO fan.”

The elderly lady immediately looked me up and down then got this look of horror that I could only equate to Donald Sutherland’s expression in Invasion of the Body Snatchers before hurrying out of the aisle.

So much for being helpful, I guess.

This story is part of our Lego roundup!

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I was visiting my parents at the small store my dad owns, and while he was up front, I was chatting with my mom in the back office area. The door between the front and back was open.

My mom commented, “I wonder if that mousetrap has caught anything yet.”

I had been with my dad at the office on the weekend, and I asked, “Did you hear that Dad found a dead mouse in the garbage can last week?”

“He what?! No!”

She rushed to the open door between the front and back and called — loudly — up to the front, “You found a dead mouse in the garbage can?”

It was then, and only then, that she heard him talking to a customer up front. Her eyes widened, and she covered her mouth and almost melted away into her office chair.

After a moment, she whispered, “Haven’t made a business blunder like that in a loooong time.”

I’m about seven years old in this story. As I’m getting off the school bus, a random dog decides he wants to follow me. I try shooing him off, but he just refuses to go away. Not really knowing what to do, and worrying about what might happen if this dog sees my cat, I decide to try and get my dad’s attention in the hopes that he’ll know what to do.

Our house has a screen door just outside the front door, so rather than risk letting the dog inside, I bang on the screen door as loud as I can. My dad opens the front door and I tell him, “We have a problem.”

Before I can say anything else, he opens the screen door to see what the “problem” is. Naturally, our cat is literally right behind him.

The dog immediately chases our cat through the kitchen, into the living room, up over the couch, and back into the kitchen. Dad grabs some of his fireplace tools and uses them to haul the dog back out the door, while our poor cat bolts upstairs. After he’s gotten the door shut again, I quietly point out that there was a reason I hadn’t opened the door.

We didn’t see our cat until sometime the next day; judging by the soot on her fur she’d somehow hidden herself in the attic through the night. Can’t blame her, honestly.

A woman called the restaurant I work in — called Asian Bowl — and genuinely and seriously asked me if we “had open lanes for tonight” because she thought it was a bowling alley.

When I told her we are not a bowling alley but, in fact, a Thai and Chinese restaurant, she responded with, “I called Asian Bowl, though, right?”

What it took to hang up the phone before I laughed…