The Kindness of Strangers: IV

To conclude this little theme, I’ll share the next two stories together. 

 

BALI: By June, 1979, Karen and I were visiting Bali and went by bus from Ubud where we were staying to Denpasar to see some powerful performances at a cultural center. Near the end, it started raining hard and it was getting late, so we decided we better start heading back to Ubud, but had missed the last bus. Some teenagers gathered around us and tried to help us flag down some of the occasional cars that came by, to no avail. (Again, note: Teenagers! Instead or threatening us strangers or taunting us, they were actually trying to help us!) Finally, a man on a motorcycle stopped. He agreed to take us the 30-plus-minute trip, but could only take one of us at a time. So we agreed he would take Karen and come back to get me. 

 

If this was an American movie, you can guess what would have happened next. A man alone with a young tourist women on a dark and rainy night in a remote area. Her soon-to-be-husband wondering what he had just agreed to and what would happen if the man never came back to get him. Enter all the danger music. 

 

But given the theme of these stories, you can predict that the man would deliver Karen to our hotel, come back and get me and not even ask for a penny. And of course, that’s exactly what happened. (I believe I did give him some money, as was appropriate).

JAPAN: We spent our final two weeks in Kyoto and Tokyo, back to picnic lunches with the prices of restaurants far beyond our means. After witnessing a wonderful festival (Gion Matsuri), we found a store and bought some cheese, crackers and sprouts. There was a bench overlooking a small canal, a perfect lunch spot. Across the street, a woman was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house and started gesturing to us. We wondered if she was telling us we couldn’t sit there, but then she disappeared into her house, came out and crossed the street with two milk bottles filled with green tea. “How could we even think of having lunch without some tea?” she must have thought and without a second thought, brought us some. She then gestured for us to return the empty bottles when we were done and went back to her sweeping. 

 

And so these stories, that began with being invited to “tea” in a small town in England and ended with green tea in a milk bottle delivered by a kind woman, come full circle. And of course, there were many, many other examples in that marvelous year. But the dinners in England, the coffee and ride in Italy, the invitation to live with my teacher in India, the motorcycle “taxi” in Bali and the woman in Japan offering tea with our lunch all became these small and memorable icons of the beauty and power of kind strangers. 

 

In her lovely anthology of poems titled: The Path to Kindness, editor and poet Danusha Lameris writes her foreword:

 

“Kindness is not sugar, but salt. A dash of it gives the whole dish flavor. I want to keep remembering, to keep living into these moments and the worlds they contain.”

So I hope these stories help you feel the flavor of life restored in these cruel times when the simple act of breaking bread and drinking tea offered by strangers feels far away. Where the world where people offer their homes, their hospitality, their hearts, feels like a forgotten place that was “once upon a time.” It all is still here, but we are the ones that need to remember it and pay attention to it and create it in our each and every interaction. 

 

Today my wife who was 29 when we first lived these stories is now celebrating her 75^th birthday. We are still here and intend to keep on savoring each gifted moment of life, with gratitude, appreciation and our own small efforts of helping, from cleaning the street to playing piano at the elder’s home. May it be so for all of us. 

PS And for anyone intrigued by that one-year trip around the world, I wrote a whole first-draft back going back and forth between my memories and actual journal entries. Too busy at the moment to search out a publisher, but if anyone has a lead and wants to share it with me, by all means do! That would be a great act of kindness!