Celebrating kindness of strangers

There is a nobility to those actions that expect nothing in return, other than, perhaps, that the gesture, at some later point, be reciprocated and passed on to someone else.

Though the bar was laughably low, I felt like I had made some progress as I cast a salmon fly into the waters of the Margaree River last weekend.

But nothing lasts forever, and so, as the sun set over Ward’s Rock, I mis-timed a back cast, causing the monofilament line to lasso around me a couple of times, forming a snarl of knots from which my blue charm fly bobbed impotently in the breeze.

The light was disappearing fast, making the twists and loops nearly invisible. Pulling the line this way and that just seemed to make things worse.

“Ah, that has happened to me before,” said a voice that turned out to be an angler I had just watched neatly flick a line into the water a little further downstream.

There was no mocking of my woeful situation, no sarcastic inquiry about whether I needed a hand.

Like some sort of benevolent river spirit, he just walked over and began deliberately working away on my snarled line.

He had grown up fishing the Margaree’s pools with his dad, he told me. Now a married father himself, the Bedford firefighter said that he returned to the river whenever he could, staying in a place inherited from his pa.

He made no fuss when the untangling was complete, instead just giving a nonchalant wave as he headed off, leaving me to cast into the swirling water and ponder, perhaps for the thousandth time, the kindness of strangers.

We all know about the big things, the acts of selflessness that become the stuff of legend, the grand philanthropic gestures that change lives, the volunteerism that justifiably earns applause and newspaper headlines.

But what about the quiet deeds, the everyday feats, the random acts of kindness that go unnoticed except by the performer and the recipient?

There is a nobility to those actions that expect nothing in return, other than, perhaps, that the gesture, at some later point, be reciprocated and passed on to someone else.

These acts of grace are all around us: the elegant wooden tiny libraries — one for adults, another for kids — that someone built and regularly replenishes a couple of blocks from our house in Halifax; the young woman who earlier this week wormed under a car to recover my friend’s key fob in a Fredericton supermarket; the interview subject who just the other day gifted his own personal U.K. VHS copy of the Halifax shot action flick Siege to Chronicle Herald colleague Stephen Cooke after discovering that he was a huge fan of the movie.

Janet Conners knows exactly what I mean.

Three weeks ago, the AIDS activist was in the parking lot at the Atlantic Superstore in Sydney River, struggling to fill the back of her Mazda SUV with a large load of groceries.

A car stopped next to her and a man whom she had never seen before, got out. At first Conners was confused, not knowing what the stranger wanted.

“Never you mind,” he said starting to load the bins and bags into her trunk. “I’ve got this.”

When the work was done, he cracked a joke, got back in his car, and drove away as Conners yelled thank yous.

“I don’t know if he even heard me,” she told me. “I sure felt happy on the drive home.”

Andra White, co-owner of Lahave River Books, also knows a thing or two about random acts of kindness.

Two years ago, she contracted Lyme disease. Lacking a family physician, at one point she had to sit in the waiting room at South Shore Regional Hospital’s emergency department for eight straight hours.

The pain became unbearable. Thinking no one was watching White began quietly weeping. An elderly man, connected to an IV drip, and clearly suffering from his own medical troubles, approached, patted her on the back and asked, “Are you alright?”

When she said that she was not he found a nurse who brought her pain meds.

“The kindness of that man,” she recalled this week.

It makes the heart swell, doesn’t it? I felt the same way when I heard how, late the other night, Ryan Veltmeyer biked to the Sobeys store at the corner of Halifax’s North and Windsor streets to get his provisions.

At the checkout counter he realized he had forgotten his wallet. The manager of Halifax’s soon-to-open Light House Arts Centre was asking the clerk to put his groceries aside while he pedalled home, when a mid-20s guy who had heard the whole thing said he would cover the $45 grocery bill.

Veltmeyer said he couldn’t possibly take the money of a complete stranger. The man insisted and afterwards hurried off.

“It was a weird feeling,” said Veltmeyer, “like such a random act.”

When he posted the incident on his Facebook page, his friends gushed about how it restored their faith in humanity to know that such kindness still exists.

Now, Veltmeyer knows what he must now do: pay the random act of kindness forward.

“Maybe I’ll go get out $50 in cash to keep in my pocket just so that I’m ready,” he said.

Because, like Blanche Dubois, every one of us from time to time depends upon the kindness of strangers.