I have completed hundreds if not thousands of random acts of kindness during the course of my life. However, since Covid came and altered the world for all of us, then after getting it a mere two months after my right lung had collapsed, I chose to not leave my house at all for the first 9 months of the pandemic, to this day I have only been inside of a dozen businesses since this started.
As a truck driver, I have traveled this country more than I would care to think about (right around two million miles in a tractor) and I saw so much… While out on the road I found that it was easy to end up parked in the middle of a field with no food (or a shower) for miles, far too easy. While driving for a company that does not allow the drivers to move the trucks for personal reasons of any type, I found myself one Friday evening pulling out of a truck stop, running late (or so I was told). At the end of the driveway, I saw a father, his wife, and their daughter. I saw they were clean, had recent haircuts, decent shoes, but I could also see the fear in his wife and daughter’s eyes as well as the despair in the father’s. I yelled out to the father and when he approached the truck, I opened my door up and told him that I was sorry about him having to do this (I have done the same and worse for food, though never with my wife or daughter present). I asked him what happened, and he told me he got laid off from a company I knew was laying people off nearby, a water bottling company nearby in north Florida. I told him to be proud, he was doing what needed doing not failing his family, then I gave him the cash in my pocket, forty dollars, and my dinner so they could sleep in the motel across the street and sleep on full bellies.
On another occasion, I saw a young woman get shoved out of a car in a truck stop parking lot. It was mid-December in Connecticut and she started walking from truck to truck, knocking on doors. I called out to her after she got a few rejections and was closer to my truck (I was unsure if I wanted to get involved at first but decided I would). She hopped up into the passenger seat and started telling me that she was only into “regular” sex or oral and it took me a second to stop her and get her to understand that I did not want to pay for sex. I instead asked her, to verify, if that was the boyfriend or husband, I saw push her out of the car. She told me that it was and then started telling me that she had started stripping at a club a few months earlier to try and make up the lost income from her boyfriend (and father of her 6-month-old baby). She swore that she had never done this before and I told her I did not care. I allowed her (she asked) to use the CB radio to try and find someone, anyone, to pay her. After thirty minutes I told her to come inside with me and have dinner (she looked hungry but not sick). While we ate a big turkey and potatoes plate each, I talked to her about what this would do to her relationship, if he was able to look at her after she sold herself what he would most likely feel or become… After dinner we went back out to the tractor, it was midnight then and supposedly her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up then. He never came, she sat in the passenger seat with me in the drivers until my break was over (DOT regulations were for 8 hours break at the time) and then I drove her home, at 4 am, in a fully-loaded tractor-trailer. Before she got out of the truck, I gave her 300 dollars and told her she should consider our talk. I hope she left him and moved back in with her mother who had been asking her to, I hope.
The final I will list here, and the only one Covid has allowed for in the last year or more was when I heard my neighbor outside yelling at her car. The neighbor lady has two sons that are fully grown (21 and 24) but they, like I do have Asperger’s (we are not supposed to say high or low functioning anymore, but one can never live alone and the other can, but he will never understand the world (they are over-sheltered in a church home). Her car was not starting so I looked at it and figured it was most likely the starter. So, I went and got her one and put it in. Later they asked me to change the radiation and I did that as well.
I always help where and when I can. I did not mention it, but I even interjected to tell a woman the other day that if she thought she should get a second opinion (from a different doctor) she absolutely should. That her feelings, thoughts, and needs (especially about her own body) were important and they do matter. I always feel like I need to help, I always feel either good about doing whatever I can or bad for feeling like I did not do enough or when I feel like I could have done more. One of the worst feelings I experience is when I have nothing to give to someone that is clearly in need, I still give them dignity; I acknowledge them, greet them, even bless them, but this always feels like a failure. The good feelings that I do receive do not stay with me due to MDD and PTSD but I love the brightness and warmth that I feel when I am able to help even if it is brief, perhaps more so because of this...?
The only recent time someone noticed something I did was this one time a year or so back when I saw a guy trying to order food without a car in a drive-thru (again, Covid so, no inside ordering for the poor). The cashier was saying that she would lose her job, they are on camera, People were honking behind me, but I remained patient until I understood where I could find correct action. I told the guy to stand next to the order kiosk and pulled up. I then took his order and repeated it to the cashier adding a second burrito and a cup of coffee. Then I ordered my food. When I pulled up the cashier was crying and thanked me. She handed the gentleman his food then gave me mine. Most of the time there is no third-party witness but when there is it is usually that the response is surprise and positivity from a cashier as I buy food for whomever for whatever reason I choose to on the given occasion.
There is one person in my life that tries to be kind to me, watches for when I get too down. She tries to cheer me up and sometimes feeds me (I forget a lot). Life has been cruel recently (that is a lie, it has always been so), by the time Covid hit my oldest was dead, and my right lung had collapsed. Now I am having surgery (orchiectomy) Thursday the 14th and when I come home it will be to an empty house. People do not do for me normally. I am completely unused to even the small amount of attention my neighbor gives. Even as a child my mother protected and took great care of the baby she had after me (he lives with her still, assuming she still lives), while both my stepfather (D.A.) and she were deep into heroin addiction. As a result of this and a thousand other things, some big others small, I am always surprised and cry when someone does something unexpected for me. I am also suspicious of anyone that does but I have rules about how each person is their own person and cannot be judged by less than getting to know them. The truth is I tend to be a little overwhelmed by the kindness of others, but I programmed the machine (self-meta-programming) to hope always for love and light and to believe that most people wanted those things too; back when there was no reason to expect or believe in them (most of my examples, to this day, are fictional characters), I choose to believe that I could help create something better by being someone better and decided to always act, at least as much as was possible, like the sort of giving, kind, compassionate human I wish all of us were.
I think that the world has changed but I also know I only saw a very rare view of it growing up the way I did, with the people I had as shepherds… I feel like more people cared about their neighbors when I was a boy in the ’70s but I fear that maybe nostalgia. I know that we are worse off whether that is a true memory or one contrived. I know that social media (which I hated from year one, false friends, non-friends… no social aspect save hate…) has magnified and proliferated the narcissistic “Me First, Me Now” mentality that I believe first found footing in American minds when we all found out we could order a hamburger and have it in hand 30 seconds later. Today a large percentage of people (at least 47%+/-) seem to believe that their feelings, wants, and needs matter (I should end the sentence here) more than those around them. They truly seem to think whatever they are doing, it is somehow more important than anything “you” could be doing. People honestly believe that their ideas and thoughts about things they are uneducated about somehow matter. Fortunate for the world, there is still a true majority of people that are at least trying to try, and among them, some who always choose to give credit, assume the best, give the benefit of the doubt, and help anyone anywhere they can, whenever they can, like me.
Footnotes
There are not a lot of papers or studies about people like me, likely due to the limited knowledge of our existence 45 years ago. Several things about me make me interesting, both as a subject and as a perspective. I was born with Asperger’s, dyslexia, sensory input disorder, the gift of an above-average I.Q., and by the time I was 7 I had full-onset of M.D.D. and P.T.S.D. I was ignored but my “parents” (drugs) and had only an older half-brother but he was only with me from age two until I was seven. I taught myself most of the things I needed to know and learned the rest from mimicking him, TV, or later observing neighbors and classmates. School was difficult generally speaking, but by the 3rd grade I was labeled “special needs” and put into SE classes from 3rd until 8th grade (9th grade was half SE classes half “normal”) where I was allowed to read whatever I wanted, so I read everything I could find including the complete works of Poe, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and dictionaries from every grade level (up to Marriam-Webster College Edition copyrighted 1987 which I read in the seventh grade). I enjoy helping people, especially children for obvious reasons and look forward to seeing what I can add to many conversations that are happening right now throughout the world and maybe even ask a few questions that cause some serious consideration in possibly new directions.