I went looking for acts of kindness. I found this gem.

I mentioned that I would be keeping an eye out for acts of kindness.  Well, here's one.

Two weeks ago, a man of about seventy struck up a conversation with an older man of about eighty-five in an eye doctor's waiting room. 

He must have seemed to the younger man to be lonely and in want of conversation, or maybe the younger man himself was. Maybe the older man looked like someone the younger man loved, or missed.

I know this happens to many of us. When I see someone bagging groceries who looks like one of my children when they were teenagers, I can’t help but mother-smile at them.  If I see someone who looks like the brother I lost a few years ago, I sister-smile at them, and enjoy the seconds when they consider whether or not to smile back, but then do. Some offer a little wave with the smile. One guy saluted.

The younger man in the waiting room started the conversation by pointing at a headline and bemoaning the political climate that has polarized even “some of my best friends,” as he put it. Citing younger years and earlier times, he recalled when "it wasn't like this."

The older man listened politely, but didn't say much. But at some point, the younger man must have landed on a favorite memory or time in the older man's life, because now, he began to tell stories of his own. A lot of them. A very large number of stories.

Fishing with his grandsons.
Hunting pheasant with his partner and dog, both gone now.
The childhood years when all the families vacationed together and "the kids" walked home from the lake at night, guided by porch lights.

For nearly an hour he described his life and times, while the younger man encouraged him with questions ("So, what does your son do? Does he have children? What are they like?") 

Positive connections with strangers happen all the time in a normal world; you talk to people in line at the grocery store, or laugh with a stranger over something weird that you've both witnessed. You connect with another audience member before a show starts. You smile at young couples in a restaurant and they smile back. 

For all the times that strangers have annoyed me - oblivious drivers, slow-walkers on sidewalks, space-takers in general - I am thinking  lately of the ones who have made me laugh, or pause with respect, or taken me down a peg with just a look when I've been a jerk.  

Strangers educate us, make us reflect, show us how we affect others, and how we can do better.  

My brother used to chat up strangers as if they’d grown up next door to each other and gone to school together. It could have been sports or politics, if something was on his mind, or made him happy, he assumed others felt the same way and needed to share like he did. 

It might have been a little of him that I saw in the younger man’s behavior at the eye doctor’s.

I stopped that man as he left the waiting room and told him that the conversation between him and the older man had made my day. 

“You mean just because I talked to him?” he said.

“No, because you listened to him,” I said.

“I’m seventy-one,” he responded, “I like it when I still get to hear stories from older folks.”

We laughed, and then more seriously, he said, “I could tell from looking at him that he had a lot to say.”

Later that afternoon, I turned  around in line at the grocery store and began to unload the cart of an elderly woman in back of me who couldn’t reach the belt, or move easily around her cart. "I'll do that for you," I said. She smiled and started handing me things. "Thank you," she said.

One day later in the week I saw a woman slow her pace to allow her toddler to walk by her side, while they talked in the simple language they'd forged. I told her how much I loved seeing people respect children that way.  If you could have seen the look on her face before I said anything, and the one immediately after, you would run right out, this minute, and find a chaotic young parent to compliment. 

The times will try to tell us who we are, and how we've changed, and how our differences have proved that humanity has limits. If we’re not careful, we might believe the times and forget that it is always possible to see ourselves or the people we love in people we've never met,  but might like to know better.   

So, here's something to try:  find someone who needs to be told they’re doing something right, or could use a little praise or a sudden conversation, and then offer it. 

And then, enjoy the effect it has on both of you.