It’s been an eventful afternoon.
I attended a memorial service for a 19-year-old, something I hope never to do again. But I was there with friends, and we sat together, not speaking much but communing just the same.
I sat in my car for a bit afterward, cooling off and breathing deep. When I pulled out, a man I don’t know chased me, waving. “You have a flat,” he said, and pointed.
I pulled over. So did Chris, a woman I met for the first time when she got out of her car and said she had a compressor and did I want her to put air in that so I could get to a tire shop? I thanked her profusely, but she said she had nowhere to be. We chatted about how we knew the family while the tire inflated. We disconnected the compressor, and she announced that she was following me to the tire shop to make sure I got there safely. She told me right where it was; helpful since I’m 20 miles from home. I know where the restaurants are here, but not the tire shops.
So I am sitting in the lobby of the tire shop (where there is free WiFi; what a time to be alive), having been shepherded so efficiently to this location by kind strangers that I never for one second wondered what I was going to do. The guy at the desk was nice, didn’t act like I was dumb, and figured out the cheapest way to get me safely home.
Grief is hard. Life is inconvenient. But people. Man, they can be so great.