Marcus Reid writes about kindness that comes back around: a stranger who covered a bill, a coworker who stepped in, a favor someone remembered twenty years later.
He is based in the US and also covers travel, work, money, and families.
My grandfather didn’t fly until he was 71, so every vacation of my childhood was a road trip in his car with the windows down and a paper map he never folded back the right way. At home the thermostat stayed at 68, and in the car it was whatever the weather decided. These 15 family road trips happened long before GPS.
For six years of night shifts at the warehouse, I ate breakfast at the same diner at 6:10 a.m. By the second month, the waitress started my two eggs when my truck pulled into the lot, and she never once wrote my order down. These 12 regulars and the people behind the counter learned each other’s lives one order at a time.
My grandfather took his first flight at 71, and before takeoff he asked the flight attendant what temperature the cabin was set to. She said 72, which he considered outrageous for a man who had taped 68 over our thermostat. These 11 seniors took to the skies late in life, most of them for the very first time, and almost none of them looked at a phone.
At twenty-two I left my wallet on a city bus with $61, my license and a library card inside. Two weeks later it came back in the mail with every dollar and a note that said, check your back pocket next time. These 13 acts of kindness brought lost things home, some of them decades after anyone expected to see them again.
