Kindness
This afternoon my wife and I drove to the hospital for the baby's anatomy scan. It was a long appointment, and even then the tech wasn't able to measure everything because 1) baby was moving around too much ("naughty baby" is how she put it); 2) baby is still too small.
But I'm not writing about the appointment.
When we drove into the parking garage, we drove past an older man who was wandering around. I wondered out loud, "Oh, is he looking for his car?" In that moment I didn't think too much of it, but as we were parking the same man was wandering a few cars down from us. When we got out of the car, I asked him if he was looking for something.
"For the life of me, I can't remember where I parked!"
We started to help him look, first by asking what he drove; he couldn't quite remember, because he and his wife recently bought a new car. My wife deduced from his key fob that we were looking for a Hyundai. He said it was a little boxy. As we walked along trying the buttons on the fob, he started to remember a little more: it was silver, and he also remembered the license plate.
I suspect he knew this information but was flustered (and embarrassed) so wasn't able to recall it when we first talked to him. In any case, he remembered walking past two rows of cars and going to a staircase that said "B2". We kept looking around but couldn't find anything.
Eventually I went upstairs and walked over to the same place he described, and his car was there. He remembered the general area where he parked correctly, he just mistook B2 for B3. He was very grateful for the help, and immediately asked if he could give us some money for dinner.
We refused; we just wanted to help him. Who knows how long he had been wandering around trying to find his car? We sincerely hoped it wasn't very long, because otherwise that means most people driving through the parking garage ignored him.
We should always choose kindness in this life.