The Baboon Congress

Two Old Sails

64 Comments

Today’s guest post was written by Steve in St. Paul.

The wind was gusting between 30 and 40 miles an hour. That didn’t bother me, sitting in my van at the stoplight, but it threatened to blow away the two old women struggling to cross the street ahead of me. They were spinning about and clutching each other in panic as gusts of wind sent them this way and that.

I lowered my window and yelled, “Do you ladies need a ride?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, they began struggling toward the car. They barely had the strength to open the van’s doors against the force of the wind.
Once inside, both ladies giggled uncontrollably like a pair of drunks. They couldn’t believe how helpless they had been against the wind.

“Can you take us all the way to Snyders?” asked the one in the front seat.” We need to renew our medications.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s just a bit downwind. If you’d just held your skirts open, you would have blown to Snyders in seconds.”
“Well bless you young man, you saved two old nuns,” said the one in front.
“You were just about to become two old sails,” I said.

Wind_Nuns

We were at Snyders by then.

“I’ll give you a ride home when you’re done,” I offered.
“That would be wonderful,” they chimed.

When I returned, the nuns struggled again to get in the car. They were still laughing merrily.

“We really appreciate this,” said one. “Sister Elizabeth is 87 and I’m Sister Constance Marie. I’m 83.”
“You need to pork up if you’re gonna walk in this kind of weather,” I said. “Unless you each put on couple dozen pounds or so, you are going to blow to Wisconsin.”
“I believe God sent you,” said Sister Elizabeth.
“Then God has a sense of humor,” I said. “God should have sent you a sweet Catholic boy instead of a chubby old atheist.”

Giggling like schoolgirls, they gave me directions to their nunnery.

“You might not believe in God, but you obviously have him in your heart,” said Sister Constance Marie.
“It would be nice to think I’ve got God somewhere in me. Based on the rules, the way I understand them, I’m not a candidate for getting into Heaven. I need to start piling up good deeds or I’ll be let there on the outside, pounding my fists on the door and whimpering.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that,” said Sister Elizabeth.
“Anyway,” said Sister Constance Marie, “you helped two nuns. That counts twice as much.”
“And you helped us two times,” said Sister Constance Marie. “That’s the equivalent of helping four nuns.”
“And we would have had to change busses,” said Sister Elizabeth, “so as far as I’m concerned you get credit for six good deeds today.”
“Well, let’s hope the Great Scorekeeper is as generous as you are. If I gave rides to nuns every day for the rest of my life, I’m not sure I’d balance out the naughty stuff I’ve done. But I’ll settle for a six-nun day. That’s a good start.”

The nuns were still laughing gaily as they struggled toward the front door of their residence, holding each other for support as the wind buffeted them about.

Have you ever done a favor for a stranger?

64 thoughts on “Two Old Sails”

    1. I think Glen needs a lot of favors and kindness right now. He recently finished a last tour of the USA and will retire with Alzheimer’s Disease. Time is marching on so quickly. I remember this guy hitting the music scene back in the day.

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Loving Kindness–the meat and potatoes of Zen.
    I feel self-conscious even answering this question. I could far more easily enumerate my lifetime list of cruel acts.

    I love the nun story, Steve. Thanks for a day brightener. I can just see 2 nuns sailing along. Yesterday at Starbucks there was a group of 6 nuns having coffee. They wore a more modern form of a habit, but it was so unusual to see in this day and age. I stared! Several of them just smiled at me.

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    1. The difference between us, Jacque, is that you do acts of kindness all day in your work. I just slip a bit of kindness in from time to time!

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  3. Good morning. This winter I have provided a little help for a few of my older neighbors when it seemed to me they might slip on the ice if didn’t help them get across some icy areas. These people are not really strangers because I see them around town although I don’t know them very well.

    Years ago my wife and I picked up a woman who was wandering on a rainy night along a country road. When the woman got in the car she seemed disoriented and we were not sure what we should do. Finally we decided that we should take her to the hospital emergency room. Our best guess what that she was suffering from some kind of dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease

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  4. I love the new thing where you buy the coffee for the next guy in line at McDonald’s
    or at the toll booth or the movie theater.
    I haven’t done it done it lately or had it done to me by I love the idea of putting a positive seed out there for day

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    1. Daughter has had some interesting experiences in line lately. She was at Subway the other day and when she got to the cashier she was told that a guy in front of her had payed for her sandwhich and then left the shop. The same thing happened the next day at the grocery store. Both had the appearance of oil workers. It would be creepy if the gentlemen in question stayed around, but the fact that they left before she even knew what they had done made it non-creepy.

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      2. I understand what you mean by the creepy factor and I’m sensitive to it. Once, in a snowbank near our house, I found one of those leatherette folders that waiters bring your bill in. This one was stuffed with cash. I didn’t actually count it but it looked as if it might be as much as $300. Fortunately there was also a paycheck inside with the name of the server and the restaurant. The restaurant had several branches so I had to call around to find the one that employed that server. She came to the phone and I told her that I had found her folder and would bring it by, since I had some other business in her vicinity.
        Naturally she was grateful and offered me a reward, which I refused. I may have been completely oversensitive in this case, but the fact that I had delivered the folder in person felt potentially creepy to me so I said to her,
        “I just did what your dad would have done.”

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        1. Teenager and I spotted a loose dog once near the library, fairly late at night. We circled back, the dog came to us happily and luckily had on a tag with a phone number. We called it and they showed up within 5 minutes (they had been out looking). The guy tried to give me money, which I refused. As they drove off, Teenager said “Why didn’t you take the money?” I told her that you do the right thing because it’s the right thing — that’s the reward. Geez – that makes me sound smarmy, doesn’t it????

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        4. Isn’t it a sad commentary on our society that you’d feel creepy about something like that? But I know exactly what you mean. We just don’t trust each other anymore. We’re worried about being scammed or otherwise taken advantage of, and tend to try to protect ourselves from that possibility. I deliberately choose to be vulnerable in that regard; my reasoning is this: If someone takes advantage of me when I’m trusting and doing what a compassionate person would do, it’s on their conscience, not mine.

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        6. It’s probably a larger subject than is suitable here, PJ, but as an older man, I find it can be tricky sometimes to navigate between simple friendliness and being perceived as potentially creepy, when interacting with young women, as in the situation above. One is often forced to minimize friendliness and exaggerate distance.

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        7. Oh, I understand completely what you’re saying, bill, and I understand, how you felt in that particular situation; I think you handled it well. I just think it’s a sad commentary of how, as a society, we have lost all innocence and view everything with suspicion.

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  5. Whenever I get the chance. One of my favorite “stranger favors” is to leave an exorbitant tip to a server who has given us good service at a restaurant and seems like they could use an extra $20 or more. We usually do this at Christmas time. The trick is to make sure to leave before the server takes the bill and tip so we remain anonymous. We call these favors and good deeds “Random Acts of Kindness.” Heard that somewhere, liked how it sounded.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  6. Morning all. I love doing kindnesses — I have way too many of these stories.

    Once a dog got hit by a car in front of my house. I ran across the street w/ a comforter from the sofa and stayed until a vet came to check the dog out (dog was fine). The owner was a wreck, so I asked the vet all the questions the owner should have been asking – what to watch for, etc.

    Another time a woman on a scooter can hit by a car while I was getting ready for work in the morning. I grabbed a comforter from the living room and ran out. There was a lot of blood with this one (comforter didn’t survive the ordeal) as she had a nasty wound on her leg, but she was very lucky that she hadn’t hit her head on the way down. As the EMTs were putting her into the ambulance, one of them looked at me and said “where is your other shoe?” I didn’t even realize I had run out of the house wearing only one shoe!

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  7. Just last week I was giving my old and overweight golden retriever her morning walk. As we passed the middle school in the next block, a car came around the corner in front of the school and coasted to a stop in the middle of the street. The driver, a woman, tried to restart the car but no go. This was at a time when the school busses were due to arrive and she was stalled right in their path. She opened her car door and asked if I would help push her car out of the way, which I did.
    “I think I’m out of gas,” she said.
    Now the school busses could get by her but she blocked the rest of the street. The woman was on the phone calling for some kind of rescue and I still had my dog to deal with, so I continued on. Our walks proceed at a glacial pace so I was a little surprised to see that the woman was still stranded when we circled back around. The dog and I returned home as fast as she would allow and I retrieved the gas can for the snowblower from the garage. Hopefully I won’t need any more gas until next year anyway.
    I raced up and put about 2 gallons in her tank. The car started right up.
    “I’m so embarrassed! ” she offered.
    “The rest of your day should be all uphill,” I replied.

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  8. the old stand by for me is the rule that when you are taking two pieces of pie pick the best one and give it to the other guy. it works in all aspects of life and if you try to figure out how to expand this to be a main determining factor in how you approach the world it results in being involved in a nice world. strangers or people we know. give em the benifit of the doubt

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  9. I would like to help out all of those people that stand on street corners with signs asking for help and I don’t usually do that. I do see people giving them money. It is hard to know where to draw the line on helping beggars. I think beggars who need help should get help from some place. Our so called “safety net” doesn’t seem be working as well as it should. Also, too many families are not in good shape and can’t help their family members who need help. Sometimes I think that giving beggars money just helps them continue to be beggars. Social workers and family members are the ones best equipped to give beggars the kind of help they need. I suppose I really should give beggars a little money because they might really need it even if it will not solve the bigger problems that they are facing.

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  12. One of the nicest things I heard about in the past while is a guy who had to spend time in domestic violence shelters as a kid and who has been providing women in domestic violence shelters who have no money with money for lawyers to represent them in divroce and custody hearings. It has certainly helped some women out here.

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  13. Morning–
    It always feels good to help out someone. I’ve pushed cars out of snow banks and change flat tires. But I think times have changed. Can you trust the car parked on the side of the road these days? Will they trust me if I ask about helping? It just depends; you have to be smart about how you go about those things.
    Does it count if I’ve chased them off my farm, then they have car trouble? Done that too. And I asked if they needed help but the poor kid was shaking so bad I don’t think he’d have taken my help even if he really did need it. (He had a cell phone so I knew he wasn’t totally stranded)
    Long time ago, person I knew was dealing with a lot of stuff. It was winter and I left a of gallon ice cream on their door step with a note that said I thought they needed a break. Hope they enjoyed it.

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  14. I’m not coming up with anything not already mentioned, but I’ll keep thinking. I do have a tendency to give away something if a person (stranger or acquaintance) admires it, and it’s not something I’m attached to. It seems like I’m the universe’s “conduit” for bringing it to that person – the messenger, if you will. Either I’ve had it for long enough and gotten my jollies out of owning it, or it just seems like they like it more than I do. I get some interesting reactions…

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    2. It goes against the grain for this Minnesotan to tell good things about myself. Not to mention I doubt if there are any good things. Not trying to say I’m especially humble or especially bad (although judging from my jail record, maybe I am especially bad) – just that something about the way I was raised made me acutely aware of my shortcomings and not very aware of my strengths and if I have an inkling of anything good about myself – well, I shouldn’t blab about it.

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        2. Not sure what I can say to that, Steve. I don’t think of you as either an egotistical bozo or an Iowan, but not sure you can take much comfort from this jailbird’s opinion. 🙂

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      2. Edith, I have no doubt you are extremely kind and generous with your fellow inmates.

        And it would be entirely undoing the kindness to them to tell how you aided and abetted them ;).

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      3. Edith, I know a kind heart when I meet one, and you’re not fooling me, no matter how self denigrating you are.

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  16. Husband and I were residents of Canada when we married. We got married at my home in Minnesota, and after the wedding we loaded our car up with all our wedding presents and headed back to Winnipeg. Residents of Canada, even those in the country on student visas, had to pay duty on all goods obtained outside Canada that totalled $25 or more. We arrived at the border and the Canada Customs agents, who could have made us pay duty on all our wedding presents, were kind enough to justify charging us nothing, since they reasoned that each of the gifts was probably under $25 separately. They just congratulated us on our marriage, and waived us through.

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    1. It is nice when you are the recipient of kindnesses. Many years back, I flew to California to get a puppy (I had a frequent flyer ticket and dog owner was friend of the woman from whom I got my first setter). I had a big dog kennel that the airlines had told me would be $50 each way. When I got to the airport, I was quite excited and was showing the airline agents pictures of the puppies that I had with me (there was no one in line behind me at this point, I swear). They were very nice to me and waived the fee both ways!

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  17. Here is another way to approach today’s question that may or may not generate some discussion. What about the reverse situation where you seek help from a stranger? I guess I’m not one who often asks strangers for help except for one situation where I frequently need a little help.

    The warning buzzer that lets me know I haven’t turned off the lights on my car doesn’t work and I am not very good at remembering to turn them off. I have found many people that I don’t know are willing to let me hook up my jumper cables to their vehicle to get my car started when my battery is dead due to leaving the lights on. The first couple of times I asked for this help I wasn’t sure that it was something I should do. Apparently almost anyone is willing to provide this help and I no longer hesitate to ask.

    Once a guy who said he would help had to wait for some traffic and left without helping me. That was the only time that I didn’t get help from a person I approached for assistance on jump starting my car.

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  18. I find it a lot harder to ask for, or even accept, help from others than I do to help others. I still reflect on, and am grateful for, all the help offered and tendered by a bunch of baboons last spring; they toiled on a beautiful spring morning when they could clearly have been working on their own gardens, and whipped my yeard into shape for the growing season. Likewise, when I had cancer seventeen years ago, the number of friends who came out of the woodwork to stock my freezer with delicious home cooked meals just blew me away. Very humbling to be the recipient of such kindness; I’m blessed with generous friends. I know I could have never asked for these favors, but I sure was grateful when they were offered.

    But today’s question is about doing favors for strangers. I do it all the time, in small ways, but it’s not so much a matter of doing them a favor as it is boosting their spirits, and there are so many opportunities for it. Last week, while grocery shopping, there was a young couple with two very unruly kids who were getting a lot of disapproving stares from other shoppers. One child, perhaps two years old, was very unhappy and wailing loudly much of the time; the other, slightly older, child was constantly whining; the father was clearly frustrated and angry and had no patience whatsoever with either of them, and the mother looked like she was scared of what was going to happen next. I happened to have a gift card to a neighboring coffee house, and with some trepidation I approached that father as he stood in line at the check-out. I told him that it looked to me as if his little family could use a mini vacation, and suggested that they stop in at the coffee house and treat themselves to one, and thrust my gift card into his hands. It was just amazing the transformation that happened right there. At first he looked stunned, and then smiled sadly and told me he had just lost his job; he was worried sick about how to take care of his family; then he thanked me for my gift . My very small gesture of compassion touched him deeply. I know that that gift card did a whole lot more for that family than it could ever have for me, and that made my day.

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      1. Edith, it was a fun morning, wasn’t it. It was also the first time that I met most of the baboons, including you.

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        1. Ha! If you want a real good time, have a chainsaw party. Next time we come to your place, PJ, we’re comin’ with chainsaws.

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        3. mig, I wouldn’t be surprised if a baboon jackhammer party is within the realm of possibilities should you need it. I don’t have a jackhammer, and I probably wouldn’t be able to operate one, but I’d sure as heck contribute somehow.

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      2. I would add that I had a great time at both those Baboon functions. I think I would go almost anywhere with a bunch of our Baboons. Jackhammer party? Bring it on!

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        1. The baboons’ idea of a theme party: Chainsaw Party; Jackhammer Party. The possibilities are endless.

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    2. When I was out of work a few years back, I was surprised a couple of times by relative strangers and acquaintances buying me lunch or coffee, or paying for a treat for my daughter. Truly a blessing – I can see where it would be huge for that man and his family. Good on you, PJ.

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    3. PJ, you also must have done this skillfully, in a way that was not-threatening enough that they were able to accept your gift. That is another gift…

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  19. No surprise to me that Baboons have numerous tales of doing acts of kindness-that’s just how things seem to swing here on the Trail. Great story, Steve. Gotta love laughing nuns, they are the Church’s best ambassadors.

    The s&h and I were discussing this just the other night. I was telling him a couple of stories about this sort of thing and finished by telling him that most of these stories I have never told, because then it becomes about me, and really, it’s not.

    I believe it is Larry Shue’s The Nerd that has one friend wagering that the other friend cannot do an act of kindness without the recipient knowing about it. Most people don’t think that that is what that play is about and Wikipedia is not helping me here, but I know this idea definitely comes from a show I worked on.

    Well, that and the Biblical injunction that when you are doing an act of kindness you right hand should not know what your left hand is doing.

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  21. Busy day at work…but it allowed me to really think of something I have done for a stranger. I only know of one person who this really helped (because she reached out and found me via another blog), but there may have been others: I went on national radio and said it was okay to admit to being unemployed. I talked about people stepping away from me like I had a communicable disease when I said I had been laid off. I talked about my husband getting headaches because when it came to a choice between day care (so I would have time to look for work) and glasses, day care for our daughter won. That being scared was okay, but that it was nothing to be ashamed of. I talked about finding friends at a job search group and finding that we could laugh at our situations when we were together. This one woman found me online and said thank you, hearing my story helped her feel less alone and less ashamed about being laid off.

    There was a second woman, too, now that I think on it. After that radio interview, my group of friends (we called ourselves “The Dung Sisters”) was invited to speak at a women’s expo. An attendee at that event came to find us to say thank you for voicing what she had been afraid to say and that knowing our stories helped. I heard from her a few weeks later that she had 2 interviews for jobs – jobs that she would not have applied for before our talk because she was afraid. Hearing our stories made her less afraid.

    So, there. Two women I helped because I was willing to go on national radio and tell my story about being laid off and unemployed.

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    1. You just never know how you may help someone else, do you, Anna? It takes a special kind of bravery to admit that we feel like a failure, that we’re afraid, and that we need help; very few of us muster the courage to do that. Good for you, Anna; I salute you.

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  22. For a day when I thought I had nothing to contribute to the trail, here I go again. I just had a major insight into myself. Because I find it so difficult to ask for help, I go out of my way to offer assistance when I sense it’s needed. Makes sense now that I think about it, and it also explains why some people don’t offer assistance; they’re the ones who have no trouble asking for help. Whatever the case, from time to time we all need help, and it sure feels good to know that there are plenty of helpers out there if you only know how to access them.

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  23. And we’ll grow kindness in our hearts for all the strangers among us
    Till there are no strangers anymore.

    – Patty Griffin

    I like to watch for the driver who is trying to make a turn onto a busy street and can’t get a break in traffic. Then I stop and wave him in. It’s a kindness I find easy to offer, because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s sort of sad that so many people are in such a hurry that they won’t do that little thing for someone else.

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