Okay, this one was kind of my fault for staying out too late and not watching the weather, but still.
I have never been able to learn to drive, but usually I get around on buses pretty well. One particular time, I had taken the bus out to a little strip mall and I had been browsing in the shops, and I ate some dinner in a little restaurant, blah blah blah.
While I was eating, a huge storm blew up and the sky turned black. By the time I got finished eating and could leave, it was raining so hard that even had it been light out, you couldn't have seen your hand in front of your face, and also there was thunder and lightening.
I, of course, did not have an umbrella or anything, and by this time, most of the stores had closed, besides the restaurant and a Jo Ann Fabrics. I went into the Jo Ann Fabrics and looked around, basically to get any possible idea to cover my head, because the actual place the bus would stop was a few blocks away (an easy walk in decent weather-almost impossible in the weather of that moment).
This was the end of September, so I was lucky enough to be able to find, for a dollar...a plastic witch costume hat. So, I bought it, and though I felt foolish, I put it on and held on to it tightly, then headed out across the parking lot to the main road, and then...
I proceeded to fall in a puddle. It was so dark, I had no idea it was even there. But this was a really serious, crater-like puddle that would have been at least ankle-deep had I just stepped into it.
And then the good part happened! A car pulled up and they rolled down the window and asked if I needed a ride somewhere! They were all total strangers in the car, and maybe I shouldn't have gone with them, but they looked like students from the local university. Total strangers offered me a ride, not only a total stranger to them, but a soaking wet total stranger. A soaking wet total stranger wearing a witch hat, in September.
I thanked them very profusely after we got back to my place, and they just said, "No problem, glad to do it!". I seriously don't know what I would have done had they not offered me a ride. What with the hidden puddles and the darkness and the lightening, I could have been really badly hurt by the time that was all over.
I try to "pay it forward", for that and all the other times people have driven me places or back from places, by doing little things like when I am walking and I see a nail or a glass bottle in a parking lot, for example, I pick it up and throw it away so it can't get anybody's tire. Once, after a big windstorm, a giant branch had fallen right into the lane of traffic and people were stopping and driving around it, and I thought that was probably an accident waiting to happen, so I dragged it up onto the curb. Whenever I see things in the bike path, I pick them up so bicycles don't hit them and get hurt and cause bigger accidents by falling into the main road. Once, I even called the police non-emergency number because of a pile of random huge branches in the bike lane that spilled out into the road itself so they could get rid of the traffic hazard. (Too many and too big of branches, I couldn't do it myself.) So, that might not be very much, but it is a little bit, and maybe one day I'll be able to do something that's actually big.
