<p>One day my sister and I listened to a long rant just about how life was horrible from a total stranger in a store while shopping. She finished finally (divorce, money etc) and then thanked us for listening to her. Nice lady but afterwards we looked at one another and I said “What WAS that?” But my sister said “sometimes you meet angels and sometimes you are meant to be one.” Ever been an angel or run into one when you need them the most?</p>
<p>Angels? No, I don’t think so. Could have been I suppose, but asking an Angel for ID seems so tacky. </p>
<p>I’ve had strangers help me many times in life. Some of the help has probably been unintended, but so what?</p>
<p>I did, just a few weeks ago. I was driving to pick up my son from college and had borrowed one of those rooftop carriers to accommodate the stuff from his dorm room that wouldn’t fit in the car itself. On a deserted stretch of interstate in the middle of nowhere, in a blinding rainstorm, some “fuselage” from the carrier blew off and the lid of the carrier started rising up like a gaping maw, allowing rain to get in and making me worry that the lid would fly off into the windshield of another car. So I pulled into the nearest truck stop and started trying to figure out what I could do to secure the thing. First an elderly farmer came out from the diner where he was having lunch with his wife and helped me tighten the straps that attached the carrier to my car. Then two Mexican guys showed up out of nowhere bearing bungee cords and set to work reinforcing everything. I insisted on paying them for the bungees. The whole episode restored my faith in humanity.</p>
<p>As it turned out, my son didn’t have that much stuff and we didn’t need the carrier. It started making a horrendous sound near Joplin, MO, and we dropped it off at the local Goodwill (with the blessing of the friend I borrowed it from). Hopefully it will be of use to someone else.</p>
<p>“Then two Mexican guys showed up …”</p>
<p>Male Angels??</p>
<p>Oh, I’m sorry but that reminds me of Pepe and Pedro from “Night of the Iguanas”. Maybe Ava Gardner saw them as angels.</p>
<p>I only pointed out their ethnicity because it was unexpected to encounter them in such a rural midwestern setting. They saw I had a problem and took the initiative to help me out. I won’t soon forget their kindness.</p>
<p>One evening we were locked out of minivan in Yellowstone. I will never forget the kindness of the newlywed couple that hung with us for several hours.</p>
<p>Many years ago when I was in college there was a weather event that stranded lots of people in the snow at the few gas stations along the interstate. This was before debit cards and bank cards. If you didn’t have a card for that gas station you were out of luck.
My father was heading W over the pass when college students were headed east, and happened to be filling up next to some college kids headed back to campus. A young man approached him and asked if he could write a check -they were out of gas and the station wouldn’t take a check. My dad paid the bill ( probably under 20$ ). Guy objects and asks for my dads address to insist on paying him back.
Turns out the young guy was the boyfriend of my BFF and he sent a check. 40 years later we still laugh about it.</p>
<p>My 20 year old sister somehow managed to lose control of her car and flip off a freeway ramp and roll this past Wedbesday, a ford focus of all things. The car landed upside down and the frame was so crunched that the doors would no longer open. A man driving a dirt truck pulled onto the side of the freeway and broke her out of the car, and then disappeared. An older lady stopped to comfort her, and actually got on her hands and knees and crawled into the glass filled car to retrieve our garage door opener and the contents of my sister’s purse which had flown everywhere. She stayed to help even after my parents and paramedics got there. They’ll never know just how grateful we are.</p>
<p>God bless the man who helped me when my 89 year old mother fell in the middle of the street. He helped me move her, put something under her head so it wouldn’t be on the pavement and stayed with us - talking to her until the ambulance came. He was truly an angel.
Thank goodness she is a feisty one and is okay - nothing broken.</p>
<p>My favorite story belongs to a friend of my husband. The man was driving on an empty highway in the middle of the desert out west in his vintage mustage when the fan belt broke. This was in the days before cell phones. Anyhow, a few minutes later, a pickup truck pulled over and the driver had a fan belt that would fix the car. How amazing is that!</p>
<p>By the way, my sister was an angel. Strangers always were stopping to talk to her. And I don’t think anyone ever stayed a stranger to her. I wish I had that gift.</p>
<p>An older man contacted our company one day to cancel his account… the person he was speaking to asked if she could ask why he was canceling… He said because he just took a bunch of pills and didn’t want to leave more of a mess for his family to clean up.</p>
<p>She remained calm, had her boss call 911, and kept the man talking about his family until she heard them enter the house. His family continued to send them flowers at the office for years on the anniversary of that day.</p>
<p>^^^ that is so heart warming and touching</p>
<p>This is the thing I often think about. What if that ONE person didn’t step in? I stopped yesterday for a girl stuck on the side of the road. Had run out of gas, just divorced, no money to get gas (she had 65 cents to her name)…total disaster really and pretty much in a panic on what to do next as she was walking down the highway crying. I NEVER stop for strangers on the highway but I did yesterday. Glad I did.</p>
<p>When I decided to drive across the country with two small (age 5 and 6) children twenty-some years ago, I decided to take a first-aid course before I went. As I drove through Yellowstone, I saw a young woman on a bicycle drive off the side of the road and crash into a pile of leaves. When I got to her, she was having an epileptic seizure. I sat with her head in my lap, preventing people from putting stuff in her mouth, for twenty minutes while I waited for her friends, who had biked on ahead, to come back for her. </p>
<p>When my daughter biked across the country, mostly alone, she was helped and encouraged and fed by numerous strangers, many of whom made it part of their regular routine to take in strangers who were biking on the Transamerica Trail ([TransAmerica</a> Trail | Adventure Cycling Route Network | Adventure Cycling Association](<a href=“http://www.adventurecycling.org/routes-and-maps/adventure-cycling-route-network/transamerica-trail/]TransAmerica”>http://www.adventurecycling.org/routes-and-maps/adventure-cycling-route-network/transamerica-trail/)). </p>
<p>I have come to the conclusion that there are very few people out there who won’t help strangers, despite what we see on the evening news every night.</p>