Kindness of strangers

Friday, 10:13 pm

By Kate

Dec

23

2005

Late this afternoon, about 5:30-ish, the lad was ready to leave for his Dad’s house. It had been a mad rush around here getting his clothes washed and pressed, packed and his faced scraped clean of whiskers (except for the cute little goatee which probably elicited shrieks of dismay). He was going to walk in on a rather formal party and by the time we left, we were LATE.

I drove like a bat out of hell and got him there before the first guests arrived. Whew!

The gas tank was a wee bit on the empty side when we left our house, but I figured I’d get gas after I dropped the lad off.

Pulling into the gas station, I reached for my wallet. It wasn’t there. I fished around under the seat, thinking it had probably dropped on the floor. Nooo...there was no wallet in the car. Which meant...no debit card, no cash. And, therefore, no gas.

I looked at the gas gauge and tried to calculate how much I had left and how much it would take to get home. With slightly less than 1/8 of a tank remaining, that would probably work out to around 1.3 gallons. On the highway, my car usually gets in the neighborhood of 40-44 miles per gallon. The distance between where I was and home was about 65 miles.

Well, there was nothing else to do but start driving and hope for the best. I stuck to the slow lane on the expressway and didn’t vary much from 45 miles per hour, hoping to squeeze every last bit of mileage out of my 1.3 gallons of gas.

And it worked pretty well. The needle on the gas gauge didn’t drop to the empty mark until about 55 miles into the trip. Still a ways to go and obviously not enough gas to go the distance, I jumped off the expressway and found a little gas station on Route 1 in the little town of Topsfield. I scrounged around the car for loose change and, between stray nickels and dimes and pennies, I scraped together 60 cents. It wasn’t much, but I calculated it would be just enough to get me the rest of the way home.

The gas station attendant was a man about my age. He was Greek and it has been my experience that older Greek men tend to be rather protective toward women in a sort of sweet chauvinistic way. I spent several years as sort of an adopted sister/daughter in a Greek family when I lived in upstate New York. And that also meant being a part of the larger Greek community where I learned that it’s just not worthwhile to argue gender equality with the older Greek men. It’s just not somewhere you wanna go unless you want to find yourself invited to a family meeting including the aunts, uncles, and cousins, explaining why you are too modern and definitely wrong. Not to mention being an unsettling influence on their daughter/sister/niece/cousin. Been there, done that.

So there I was inside the gas station with my 60 cents in coin clutched in my fist and I decided this was probably going to go in my favor. I plunked the coins down on the counter and told the man that my car was on empty and, silly goose that I am, I left my wallet home before my trip tonight and here I was. No gas, just 60 cents, and no one at home to call for help. But I only had about 10 more miles to go. I started counting the change out for him. He waved his hand at me and said I didn’t need to count it. I told him that, actually, there was 62 cents there, but that’s all I had.

He grabbed his jacket and said, “Let’s go get the gas.” I should mention that it was a self-serve gas station.

I stood by while he opened the gas cap on my car and started pumping gas. Sixty cents came and went. Then a dollar. Then two dollars. Plus another 19 cents. A full gallon of gas. He replaced the gas cap on my car and put the gas nozzle back in place and said to me, “You’ll be safe now. You should be more careful.”

Well, I thanked him sincerely and that’s about all I could do. The kindness of strangers is a beautiful thing. And you know, it made me miss my friends back in upstate New York and especially the community who welcomed me into their midst so warmly. Made me a little nostalgic and a little homesick. But I left the gas station feeling pretty warm inside, too.