A Little Goodness

Dallas. The mid-1980s. There were three Mexican boys in the supermarket. The meat department. They were covered in sawdust and drywall mud. They were eyeing the beef, looking for the cheapest cuts. Counting their nickels and dimes.

But they came up short. They were about to walk away when the butcher came from behind the counter and handed them 25 pounds of ground beef.

That’s a lot of meat.

“The expiration dates are technically past due,” said the butcher, “but this is still perfectly good meat if you freeze it. And it’s just going to go to waste if you don’t take it.”

“How much do we owe you?” asked one of the boys.

“Nothing,” said the butcher. “On the house.”

The three young men looked at each other. No words were said. One of the boys started crying.

“God bless joo,” was their response.

“God bless j’all too,” said the Texan butcher.

Rural Kansas. The man was walking his dog in the neighborhood when it happened. A car wreck took place in front of him. On the street. The Ford Contour plowed into a telephone pole. Nose first. Game over.

Soon, the vehicle was on fire. Someone inside the automobile was screaming.

“They were horrible screams,” the dog-walker remembers.

He didn’t know what to do, so he plunged into the burning car and dragged the driver from the inferno. There was a baby was in the back seat. He saved the infant, too.

Today, the baby is a grown woman who drives a truck for a living. A few months ago, that truck driver visited a nursing home.

“You don’t know me,” she said, as she sidled up to the elderly man’s bedside. “But you saved my life when I was a baby in a burning car. I just wanted to thank you.”

The old man died last week. The truck driver told this same story at that man’s funeral.

Pennsylvania. Lancaster County. There was a dog, wandering on the side of the highway. The dog was limping. He had a broken leg. He could barely move, but he was trying.

An old widow named Carla found him. She took him home only to discover that “he” wasn’t a “him” inasmuch as the dog gave birth to nine puppies on the woman’s kitchen floor.

During labor, the animal died.

The puppies immediately became Carla’s entire world. She had never owned a dog before. And at the time, Carla was a widow with severe depression. But now, she had nine dogs.

So she joined canine clubs. She participated in dog-training competitions. The dogs changed her life.

That was a long time ago. And as of last night, the last of that litter died. She buried the animal beside its brothers and sisters.

“After my husband died,” she said, “I once thought my life was over. But those dogs came along and saved me. You can’t tell me that wasn’t God.”

Atlanta. The homeless guy was seated in the parking lot of an old gas station, cradling a paper bag, from which he kept taking sips. He had reached the point of not caring. He was done asking for money. He was done trying to find enough food and booze to stay alive.

He went to an overpass bridge. He was going to jump into traffic. He really wanted to.

But someone stopped him. It was a man with a strange accent. The stranger was Russian, maybe.

“Don’t do it,” the stranger said.

“Why not?”

“Because your life means more than you think it does.”

Then the homeless man was wrestled to the ground. That was the last thing he remembers. Being pinned to the ground.

The next morning he awoke with a stiff hangover. But thankfully, he hadn’t kicked the oxygen habit.

Today the former homeless man oversees a community homeless program in an inner city. He owns an apartment. He has a girlfriend. A car. He has been sober for 32 years.

“A lot of people might think the world is falling apart,” he wrote to me. “But they’re wrong. I’ve been on the other side. There are a lot of good people out there.”

And if you don’t believe him, just visit the meat department.