Kindness: A Dropped Glove

It's been bitterly cold here this past week. Like, in the teens and twenties with negative wind chills. Accordingly, people have piled on the layers, the scarves, the hats, the gloves...the gloves. There are hundreds, thousands of single gloves and mittens all over the city, all separated from their other half (see my other blog). There was a close call on the bus the other day.

I use my commute time to read. A lot. I'm usually totally zoned out until I look up and am surprised to see that we're at my stop. Such was the case last week. I was on the second leg of my commute home after a long day at work. The bus had just pulled up at the station, and I was lucky enough to grab a single seat. I was back into my tome, Vanity Fair, an 800-page serial collection that my book club decided to read (we were on a literature kick and may have been overly ambitious in our epic selection).

So I was getting back to it, trying to pay close attention to all the crazy characters and events in the book, trying to keep everything straight and keep up with the story, when a cute family got on the bus. Two little kids with their mom, and, by little I don't mean baby-young, but elementary-aged kids that were just super-petite, small. Cute stuff. They sat in the double-row across from me, tired after, presumably, a day at school and an after-school program. Shortly thereafter, a woman took the seat in front of me. All this I was vaguely aware of out of the corner of my eye as the other eye continued to read. As the woman got settled, I saw something flash by. maybe drop. But maybe it was just her arm, going up and down, adjusting her hat. So I kept on reading.

Nothing happened for a little while. I kept reading. Slowly, quietly, the little girl from across the row got up. In her slightly-too-big pink coat, she walked up to the woman and tapped her on the shoulder. "Excuse me," she said and, pointing to the ground beside her, "your glove." Hardly even a sentence. But, out of all the people sitting around the woman on the bus, the little girl was the only one who bothered to say something to her. To help her stay warm. To make sure that her gloves were not half-a-pair, but a full one.

It was almost a tan leather glove entry for my other blog. But with the help of a soft little voice, it wasn't.