Hello All,
I had said that I was planning on telling a story from my past, something to entertain the masses. Tonight finds me a wee bit down, rather sore, and just a tad exhausted, so I'm not up to telling one of my stories...but late this evening I was reminded of a story I heard a long time ago, and its one that deserves retelling so I am not the only repository of it.
I first heard this story, related in part, back when the better portion of the readers of this blog were very small children. But it is far older than that short stretch of time, most of those here were not yet born, and I would venture to say that even the eldest were but babies when it actually happened if they had been born at all.
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On the streets of San Francisco there was a young man, a worker in his heart, but the rest of him had become haggard by the ministrations of an unkind world. Life had honestly beaten him, he had no money, no job, no home, and no person to turn to, not even to merely talk with. He had not given up fully on life, but it was impossible to think that it might start being kind...it would have just been too much of a change.
He lived on the street, just one of many whom were too poor to do anything else. Unlike many of the others though, he tried his best to find a job, but no employer would look twice at the man before them...too unkempt, too ragged, for them to waste their time upon. He had not been on the streets long, and each failure took away a bit of his drive to press on, and added to the growing chance that life merely would not let him get by.
It did not take long before he was forced to ask any he saw for help, not for a handout, but for a chance to work at any odd job...just for a bite of food. Few, as is the norm in San Francisco, would give him the time of day, but he had no choice to the contrary, a man must eat. The requests worked, rarely, but, on occasion they worked.
One day he asked a man for something to do, hoping for perhaps a sandwich in trade for some menial labor, and the man said he would help, asking him to get into the truck. The man took him back to his home, and gave him lunch. Then the man told him to get cleaned up in the shower and showed him clean clothes he could put on. After dinner the man gave him a small sum of money and sent him back into the world once again, only smiling with a twinkle in his eyes when asked why, and saying he respected a man who work instead of handouts.
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In many stories the young man would now go on to become something great, or he would repay the other older man in time...but I do not tell fairy tales, and this is no exception. The young man went on to get a job, nothing spectacular, but he would be able to support himself and have a place to live. Perhaps he found a wife in time, perhaps he made a family, the only thing I know is that he would always be able to remember kindness and what it can do, that even the smallest bit of kindness paid can change the world of another person.
I will never know the young man, nor even his name; but the other man, the older one with the twinkling eyes, was my grandfather, a man of kindness...
-John