I sat in my car at a painfully long red light, waiting to turn left. To the far right of the lanes of cars beside me, I noticed an older man stumble off the curb. He fell to the ground, and his walker crashed on top of him as he tried in vain to get himself out of the street. Like a desperate game of Frogger.

The signals turned green. The vehicles dodged around and sped past the fallen man. I considered jumping out of my car and into the traffic fray, but similar impulses in the past had not gone well. After multiple honked horns, I reluctantly turned left and made an ill-advised u-turn before another red light interfered. I finally pulled into the parking lot behind the intersection, and by then, I was sure someone had already helped the struggling man in the street.

I was wrong.

I ran over and asked him if I could help. When he agreed, I crouched behind him, put my arms under his, and tried to lift him to his feet. He was heavy and fell back onto me, spraining my wrist. (Which I deserved, due to my extreme lack of weight-bearing exercises.) At that moment, two young men rushed to help ME, the woman having a difficult time with the dirty, homeless man.

I thanked them for helping the man to safety, wished the older man well, and went on with my day sporting a permanent sigh. Previous to this incident, I would have sworn most people would stop and help anyone who had fallen from a walker into the heavily trafficked street. And then I watched at least two dozen carloads of people, and more standing on the curb, do NOTHING.

Reading about bystanders thinking someone else will help, so no one helps, is not the same as experiencing this disheartening phenomenon. The Internet claims nonintervention is an ordinary reaction. In Sweden, 53 people watched a man abusing his girlfriend in an elevator, and exactly 1 person spoke up to stop the man. ONE. Out of 53. http://mic.com/articles/104366/this-m...

And still, we can find a way to believe this is not, in fact, ordinary... until we see it ourselves. Shortly after the homeless man fell on me in the street, I was checking out at the grocery store. The Tidy Cat was overpriced and since I didn’t actually need litter, I decided not to buy it. A lady behind me in line asked if I wanted to follow her home because she no longer had a cat, was a widow with a bad back, couldn't remove the buckets of litter by herself... So I agreed to take the litter.

The litter I didn’t need.

On the short drive, scenes from murder porn on the Investigation Discovery Network played in my head. Particularly, a recent trial convicting an elderly woman who lured young girls to her house at the behest of a murderous boyfriend. I wondered if extraneous cat litter was worth the risk but then remembered "young" didn't necessarily apply to me.

Seventy-six pounds of litter later, sprained wrist significantly worse, I drove away from the nice widow’s neighborhood. I stopped by a friend’s house and when her son worried their cat was out of litter, Christmas came early courtesy of my sudden status as Miss Kitty Litter Kringle. In one hour, my day had gone from heartless bystanders to grateful friends.

Perfect days are filled with love and kindness. Average days are when we are fortunate to find the balance between kind and unkind. The worst days are when the scales tip toward an abundance of behavior lacking entirely in compassion. Today was an average day.

https://twitter.com/webmistressJH