The chicken restaurant has been on the receiving end of boycotts several times for its support of traditional marriage. But the chain’s political affiliations didn’t stop its employees from helping out the victims of the deadly attack at a gay nightclub.I'm choking up reading that. These are the people, Christians, being blamed for the attack.
A modest Christmastime gesture of kindness that a Georgia woman made to a man who'd forgotten his wallet has come full circle to reward her in a big way.
A couple of weeks before Christmas, Smyrna resident Tracy Warshal, 39, noticed the man behind her in line at an Aldi supermarket was shuffling around looking for his wallet, she told ABC News. Realizing he'd forgotten it, Warshal offered to pay for his $7 grocery bill.
"It would have been more of a headache for him to go out and find his wallet," Warshal said. Warshal called the act of kindness "instinctual" and said "anybody would have done it." When the man asked for her name, she gave him her first name only. Then she told him "Merry Christmas" and walked out of the store, she recalled.
A few weeks into January, Warshal found out the man was looking for her when two representatives for The Piedmont Foundation visited her at work to inform her that he would like to make a $10,000 donation in her name.
Warshal, who works as a scheduling coordinator for the Piedmont Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Piedmont Healthcare, just happened to be wearing a T-shirt with "Piedmont" emblazoned on it the day she stopped at Aldi on her way home from work. That, and her first name, were the only thing the man had to go on, she said.
The man then contacted the Piedmont Healthcare's Vice President of Philanthropy Mendal Bouknight to help track Warshal down and "thank her" for her gesture, Bouknight said in a statement. “Tracy is an angel and proof that kindness and compassion are always inside you,” Bouknight said.
Warshal hasn't interacted with the donor since the day she paid for his groceries, she said. He wished to remain anonymous, the foundation told her.
This happened in November 1961. I had arrived from Italy the evening before. My English was from shaky to nonexistent. I had a one-year modest job.NYT
My boss had checked me at the Barbizon for Women, a place way beyond my means: $10 a day! He gave me a token and instructed me to take the subway on Lexington Avenue the next morning and get off at Wall Street. So there I was on the train watching the stations go by. Eventually I turned to the young woman next to me and murmured: Wall Street?
She gasped, grabbed my hand and rushed to the door. We were in the Bronx. We crossed to the downtown platform, she got on the train with me, we exited at Wall Street a half-hour later and she deposited me at the entrance of my office building.
I begged her for her name and address so that I could thank her properly. She refused. Her work was in the Bronx, so she would be quite late that morning, all for an act of kindness to a befuddled foreigner who did not seem to know the difference between uptown and downtown.
That was my first encounter with New York. I fell madly in love with a contradictory city that could terrify a provincial girl and at the same time make her feel welcome thanks to its generous residents. I still hope that that young woman may read this and know how she transformed the life of a frightened, unhappy stranger.
Dairy, Day Two --
I was on my way home last night, and was mugged. WTF?
I lifted the hood and stood there. It was getting dark. Several truckers came over to help. Theories were suggested, but no one seemed to know what the trouble was. A petite and wiry man walked up, grim-faced, carrying one of those Igloo coolers for six beers that was filled with a jumble of greasy tools. The others nodded in his direction and someone said, “There’s your man.”
I’ll confess I was slightly disappointed by his junky-looking tools, but the others acted as if the messiah had arrived. He did not acknowledge me; he simply went to work as the rain fell on us. Among other things, my starter was bad. The wiry trucker was disconnecting the Impala’s custom headers to get to it when a tow-truck driver, a big, chubby man who told me to call him Snacker, got involved. Snacker had keys to a parts warehouse 60 miles east and offered to fetch the replacement starter and charge me only cost. The trucker and I went inside and drank sour coffee as we waited for him to return. He insisted on paying for my coffee. He never made eye contact. “You’re so kind to help me, and you won’t even let me buy your coffee,” I said. He replied, almost impatiently, “I have a daughter.” The thing is, he wasn’t nearly old enough to be my father.
When Snacker returned, it was around 10 p.m. The trucker proceeded to install the new starter and reconnect the exhaust, a task that — with no lift and in the rain in the middle of the night — was not enviable. When he was finished bolting the exhaust manifold, he had grease in his eyes. My car still would not start. After a lengthy diagnosis, he said the problem was a bad part in the electronic ignition, which had fried the original starter. Snacker, now part of our one-night team, agreed to go east once more to get the module. “I’ll get everything ready for when he returns,” the trucker told me. “You go sleep in my rig.” I protested. He insisted. “You have to drive to California tomorrow, and that’s a long ways. Get some sleep.” I thought it would bother him less if I complied, instead of pointing out that he had a tanker of chemicals that surely needed to be delivered someplace.
If you haven’t slept in a trucker’s cab, I can tell you that the interior is fancier than you might imagine. His special trucker alarm (almost impossible to turn off) blared at 5 a.m. The trucker himself was on the floor, below the slim bed. He was shirtless, a hand towel draped over him like a sad little blanket. As we both got up, we said nothing, made no eye contact, just like the night before. The rain had stopped, and the sun was coming up when Snacker returned with the magical part. The trucker installed it. The car rumbled to life when I turned the key. Snacker whooped. “Go, you’re set — that’s it,” the trucker said to me. I stayed there. I could not leave. “I must pay you. You worked all night on my car.” But I had given all I had besides gas money to Snacker for parts. “No,” he said. “No way.” I begged him to give me his address. I was crying. It could have been lack of sleep, but it was also a moment when I understood what it means to be overwhelmed by kindness. He refused and mentioned his daughter again, and it felt as if my insistence would disrupt the entire system by which he was operating. READ MORE
