The hub cap of kindness

Tomorrow is Random Acts of Kindness Day so i will expect some Random Acts.

i have sort of done some. i pick up hitch hikers. My daughter as a child spent some interesting travelling hours with the hungover and the troubled. She got to hear some great stories. It was more entertaining than the umpteenth rendition of 'Green grow the rushes oh', or even 'Bohemian Rhapsody' (and we do a mean 'Bohemian Rhapsody', a la Wayne's World).

On the day my father died i picked up the most amazing young man. i was driving to be with my father as he died and it was one of many sad trips. This young man was a philosophy graduate of the best kind. We had that terribly intense, two-souls-meeting conversation you have only with people you know you will never see again. He said to me that he knew hardly anyone he could speak with about such things, and i agreed, as we segued sweetly from ethics to metaphysics and elsewhere.

And then one fine and rosty morning i was driving to work on a busy road. A strange young man started gesticulating to me from his car in the lane beside me. He seemed to want me to pull over. i did. He got out of his performance car. He was fairly wildly pierced and tattoed, and wore a hoodie and a beanie. He wuld have been banned from shopping malls in the UK, for sure. The other notable thing about him was that he was deaf. And the other notable thing was a huge warm grin. He showed me with gestures that my hub cap had come off, and indicated that he would go and retrieve it for me. He roared away in his performane car. i waited in the frost, wondering. He came back, with my rather battered hub cap, and put it on for me, and left.

i was moved, by the genuinely Random Act, of course, and by his unlikely presentation. He defied prejudice on several levels. Great stuff.

The Hub Cap of Kindness hangs in my car port. It fell off again soon after, due to one of many confrontations with gutters. It is a good reminder not to be afraid, not to judge, to thank the guy with the big grin.