This is not about politics. It’s the only way I can express my appreciation to someone who did an extraordinarily good deed for me today, appreciation I failed to adequately express at the time. It’s also an admission that while I continue to have nothing good to say about organized religion it is also the case that some people are truly inspired to do good by their religious beliefs.
I’m writing this from Maine. We drove here this morning. I was driving my wife’s car in the leftmost of three lanes on 495 just north of Lowell when I ran over something, I’m not sure what, which left a three or four inch gash in my rear tire. There was no room to pull over from the left hand lane so I had to cross over to the breakdown lane on the right, which was itself a rather unpleasant task.
I managed to get the “spare” tire out of the trunk, a mammoth job considering it was situated underneath a pile of stuff we were bringing here to Maine. It was one of those temporary tires, but I figured it would be good enough to get us to a tire store to get a replacement.
Let me back up a bit and say that situations like this tend to be stressful. It’s no fun trying to change a tire when cars and trucks are whizzing by at 70 miles an hour. It’s even worse when your tires are outfitted with wheel locks. Getting the locked nut off the wheel is not easy, particularly if you’ve never done it before and really aren’t quite sure how you’re supposed to do it. As a result, you tend to be a little agitated. Make that a lot agitated.
It was when I was trying to figure out the wheel lock issue that a young African American guy pulled up behind me and got out of his truck. He said, and these are his words as best as I can recall, “Brother, I don’t know if your a praying man, but this morning I prayed that God would give me the opportunity to do good to someone, and when I saw you get that flat tire I thought that god had answered my prayers.”
He had been driving somewhere close behind me. After seeing me get the flat, he couldn’t stay behind me, given the traffic flow, so he had taken the next exit, looped around and found me and stopped to help. I needed it too. He figured out the wheel lock issue, we got the flat tire off the car, and the temporary tire on.
I offered him money, but he wouldn’t take it. I suspected he wouldn’t. I was so frazzled that I couldn’t think of any other way to express my gratitude, except with an effusive “thank you” so I’m doing it in this small way as well. Truly a good person. Far better than me, for if I had seen the same thing I would just have kept on driving.
Postscript: I fully realize that the fact that my benefactor was an African American should be entirely irrelevant to this little story. But this is America in the year 2020.
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