You know when you're walking along somewhere and you happen to notice a fellow human being who is in distress, but you keep walking along, pretending not to notice so that you can get away with doing nothing to help? Yeah, me neither. I personally always try to do something to help. Even if I don't necessarily think I'd be much of a help, I still offer my assistance. And I've always been this way. The steady threat of ABC's "What Would You Do?" hidden cameras has not suddenly made me a decent person. I, like most of you, tend to do the right thing. However, if you are one of those people who pretends to not notice that your help is needed, and just go along on your merry little way without stopping to offer someone a hand when a hand would obviously be appreciated, I'd like to think that you, at the very least, would be both artful and considerate enough to never ever mention to the very person you failed to help, how you saw him or her in distress, but did nothing about it. I mean, surely there cannot exist the type of person who would offhandedly remark, "I saw you. I saw you slip and fall on the ice. I saw you struggling and everything to pull yourself up...but I didn't help you."Surely not. Not unless you are one of the women I happen to work with.
You see, a colleague of mine actually said that very thing to me the other day. My hard fall onto the ice was, at least, two weeks in the past and no one was talking about it anymore. And yet, there she was, admitting to me that she had seen me struggling and didn't help me...because she didn't want to bother me. Did you catch that? She didn't want to bother me. She hadn't even offered an empty, "Are you okay?" I was so stunned that I could do nothing but listen as she rambled on. Was she kidding me? Who would be dense enough to admit this sort of thing? Then I sarcastically told her that it was probably a good thing that she didn't help me because she probably would have also slipped on the ice and then fallen on top of me, making it much worse. But as I tiptoed away from this morally questionable space cadet, I couldn't help but remember all the times I helped other people out, strangers included, and how good it made me feel to do something.
Perhaps, had she done something to help, she might have felt the way my sisters and I felt on a super sunny spring afternoon at the local Dairy Queen, back when I was eighteen years old. This specific DQ is no longer standing because word eventually got out that the teenage boys who were working there were, um, how do I say this? Squirting themselves into the soft serve vat of cream? Oh my God, I'm gagging. Anyway, who knows if it's even true, but that was the rumor.
Anyway, this rumor was a good two years away as we sat in my sister's Volvo eating our ice cream. Then, as if on cue, we all looked up from our treats at the same time to notice a thin, disheveled-looking elderly man. This probably wouldn't have kept our gaze had he not also appeared to be both alone and mentally retarded. Eating his vanilla cone in front of the DQ, he wore a pained expression on his face. He seemed confused, lost, scared even. As he licked his ice cream, he squinted and pressed one hand to his forehead with such pressure that it looked like he was pushing his loose forehead skin into his eyebrows in the hopes of pushing them all the way down and off his face. "What's wrong with that guy?" my little sister, who was nine at the time, asked from the backseat. But, before I even had a micro chance to try to answer her question, I heard it. The sniffling.
My older sister, who was twenty-two at the time, had already begun to bawl. The napkin that had been wrapped around her cone to absorb any dripping ice cream was now suddenly working overtime as it wiped away her tears. The thing is, my sister, a.k.a. Tenderheart, always cries when she catches even the most fleeting glimpse of mentally retarded, or physically disabled people. And she always utters the same 9 words once the floodgates open. "WHY do I always have to SEE these things?" she laments. And our response to my sister's wounded soul is always the same: we laugh. At her. Not at who she is crying for, just at her. And through our laughter we always ask, "But why are you crying?" As she fights to catch her breath, she usually replies, "It's so saaaaaaaaaaaad." And then she adds, "I don't know WHY I always have to SEE these things. WHY do I always have to SEE these things?"
But I will be honest with you, okay? The sight of this particular man in front of DQ, on this particular day, in this particular moment, tugged pretty aggressively at my own heart strings. Seeing this elderly, mentally retarded, and, likely, lost man was like stumbling upon the tearjerker trifecta. Within seconds of my older sister's initial sobs, my little sister and I joined in with our own. Oh how we blubbered. It was worse than when we watched The Champ.
"You should go see if he needs help," I finally sniffed to my older sister as I wiped my nose. But by now she was wailing. She couldn't do it and, well, my other sister was technically still a child. And apparently children aren't supposed to talk to strangers or something, so I couldn't really instruct her to do anything about it. Plus, she, too, was still a weepy mess. So, with no other choice than to forge forth on my own, I pulled myself together and got out of the car to see if I could do something for this man who appeared to be in need of some assistance.
Hunching my shoulders slightly and bowing my head a bit, I approached him. I don't remember him as being shorter than I was, but for some reason, I always hunch my shoulders slightly and bow my head a bit when I say, "Excuse me..." to anyone. Maybe a body language expert or psychologist could help me out with this one but, I'm guessing that this is my way of presenting myself as somewhat submissive. A non-threat. Like, "Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you. Look at my lousy posture. I'm probably brittle and weak. If you had to, you'd be able to run away from me easily." Anyway, I asked him if he needed help and he said that he did. I couldn't completely understand what he was saying, but somehow I caught that he had gotten on the wrong bus and needed to get home because his wife would be worried. I hadn't been talking to him for more than a minute when my sisters suddenly crept onto the scene like the Munchkins coming out, coming out, from wherever they were...which, in this case, was the tear-soaked interior of my sister's Volvo.
Now, this was before the days of everyone having a cell phone, so we asked the teenage DQ dummies who had been watching this scene unfold from behind their sliding glass windows, if this gentleman could use their phone to call his wife. Before they could say yes, the man we were trying to help added this heartbreaking detail about his wife: She wouldn't hear the phone. She was deaf. To my right, once again, I could hear the sniffling begin, but then it abruptly stopped. My sister had a plan.
We made the DQ dummies call the guy a cab. When the man started crying that he couldn't pay for a cab because he had no money, my sister announced that we would pay his cab fare. When the cabby arrived, we handed him fifty dollars and told him to give the gentleman any money that was left over after he dropped him off. We also told him to make sure he got into his apartment safely. The cabby couldn't have been any nicer, or more pleasantly surprised by how much kindness we were showing this stranger.
Then, as the cabby drove off with our new friend in the backseat, the three of us smiled broadly at each other. We didn't say it, but we were all quite proud of ourselves. We almost joined hands and did a Ring-Around-the-Rosey dance right there in the parking lot to celebrate our inspiring wonderfulness. And then some smartypants asshole guy who had been watching, but doing nothing but eating his ice cream on the sidelines the whole time called out, "That cabdriver ain't gonna give him that money." Whatever. We ignored the smartypants asshole...because we knew the cabby would follow our instructions. We just knew. And then it happened. A burst bubble. My older sister realized that we hadn't given the cabby a tip. She started to panic. I could see it in her eyes. This good deed was now completely undone. "Why didn't you remind me about the tip?" she snipped. "We didn't thank the cabdriver!"
No matter. She would figure it out. The next day my older sister brought a generous tip to the cab company to thank the cabby for doing his part. When she walked in, all the drivers already knew the story. They were impressed and moved by what we had done and talked about how our particular cabby was just the guy for such occasions. As it turned out, he was the male equivalent to my older sister. He would have done the same thing we had done. You, likely, would have done the same thing we had done. Had you known you had fifty dollars on you when you encountered a lost, elderly, mentally retarded man with no money and a deaf wife at home, you would have used that money to get him home, too.
Unless, of course, you're the type of person who wouldn't want to bother him.
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