Jillian’s August 1 Post: Hope on the Road

Have you experienced an act of kindness from a stranger on the road? Have you offered one? Has travel provided you hope when you needed it? Restored your faith in humanity? Share your memories -- or your hopes and dreams.

The following is one of mine:

Minutes earlier, my friend had hung up with me abruptly on the phone. Sitting in his car, in 110 degree Phoenix summer heat, he’d seen a homeless man picking through a garbage can. The man had found a hamburger remnant. My friend walked up to the homeless man, who still had “the lettuce hanging from his lip” and said, “I’d like to buy you a sandwich.” The homeless man said, “You’d do this for me?” My friend said, “Yes.”

“I took him to Subway and bought him two big cookies, a sandwich and a Coke,” my friend told me when he called me back. “He just kept thanking me. This poor guy….Who knows what happened in his life to get him there. I just felt so uncomfortable, and badly,” he continued. I remembered something my friend had told me years before. Now an established real estate investor, he, too, once had been broke and close to living on the street.

I tried to uplift my friend, telling him that he had done something good. Who knew how his gesture would impact this man’s day, month or life? My friend still sounded unsettled. Finally I said, “Hang on,” and dug out my travel journal from my last trip – swimming with dolphins in the Bahamas.

I told him about my first day of the trip. I had flown to Ft. Lauderdale and had walked a mile from my motel to a local Salvadoran restaurant. I didn’t have a car and I was eager to start experiencing some of the local culture.

After dinner, I saw a woman walking through an empty parking lot alone, at dusk.

The woman wore a navy, hooded sweatshirt, soiled khaki cropped pants, and worn black loafers, with the sides stretched thin. Her clothes and long, tangled hair looked unwashed for weeks or more. She walked away from me. She had not seen me. I watched her shuffle through the parking lot, and pull at her hair with a tug of despair. I felt her despair. I reached into my travel wallet and approached her from behind. “I hope you don’t mind, I have something for you,” I said. Her smile revealed four teeth – two canines and two twisted ones below. The woman told me her name was Judy. She was about my age.

She asked my name and where I lived and we talked for a few minutes. Then she asked what she could do in return. “Nothing, nothing,” I said.

After I had turned and begun to walk away, Judy said to me, “You’ve restored my faith in humanity.”

My heart soared. In that moment, Judy’s comment also had confirmed mine: My hope that my small gesture might positively affect her life. My hope that she might someday “pay it forward” to someone who needed a kindness in their life: to perhaps re-connect with their own hope.

Meeting Judy remains one of my most vivid memories of my week-long trip.

When I told this story to my friend, he said, “You need to tell this story to other people.” After all, it was a travel story that also had enriched my life.

Have you found hope on the road? Share your tale.