St. Martin's Cloak
The Cloak is a collection of audio vignettes—stories that reveal parishioners’ faith journeys. Share your thoughts by sending us an e-mail.
Those little bits of kindness – you realize how important those can be.
Andy Roberts
The experience of accepting kindness from a total stranger has stayed with Andy Roberts now for more than 30 years. Andy takes us back to that moment in New York’s Penn Station.
Susan and I got married in the summer of 1978 and immediately went to Australia for a year. It’s interesting when you live outside the country, especially at that time, the perception that Australians had of the United States is that there were bullets flying everywhere and that it was a dangerous place to live. We tried to persuade them somewhat that that really was not the truth, that that wasn’t our experience. But at least over the year, maybe some time over the year, I began to think there was more truth to that then I thought.
So we flew back to the United States. And when we came back we flew into New York and, of course, at the time coming from Australia, New York in the 70’s really wasn’t as welcoming a place as it was now. And we flew and we got into, I guess, JFK; we were flying in from England at about 10 o’clock or 9 o’clock at night. And we basically were traveling with everything that we owned at that time. We had no furniture; we had just gotten married, and really what Susan would point out is I decided to take a number of medical books with me because I was working as a registrar at the time, and as she pointed out to me any number of times, I probably could have bought those books in Australia, which might have been true. And that it was possible, also, I could leave them in Australia and get them again in the United States, which also probably was true. But I didn’t want to do that.
We were fairly heavily weighted down, and we got a cab from the airport to the train station and were trying to get across Penn Station to catch a train to come to Philadelphia. And we were fairly weighted down, and I suspect we looked more than a little bedraggled, although I thought we didn’t look bedraggled at all. And I thought I was carrying the load without any difficulty.
But this totally strange man whom I’d never seen before ... and at first I was fairly suspicious because any stranger that came up to you in Penn Station obviously wanted to rob you or to fleece you or to do something to you. And he looked at me and said: “Do you need a hand?”
And my first reaction was “no.”
And Susan said: “Of course he does, look at him! The damn fool he’s brought all his books come all the way from Australia!” So this man took our bags and took them to the train with us.
And I remember my first reaction was, “He’s going to run away with them.” Of course, why would he want to run away with my medical books was a whole other question. But he refused any payment and he disappeared into the crowd afterwards.
And it’s funny – it’s been 30 years since that happened, but I think so often of the little things that people do and how they impress you. And for those of us who have been blessed with a situation where, as I said, we didn’t need to worry about where the next meal was coming from or whether we’d have a roof over our head – those little bits of kindness, you realize, how important those can be.