$0.62 of Inflation...still worth it

When I was about seven years old my Mom was able to give me $1.00 once when we went to K-Mart. This was quite a treat for me. We were pretty poor, and it was rare my mom had anything extra to give us. After searching through the toy aisles I found something I wanted that cost ninety-eight cents. It was a matchbox car copy of the Pontiac Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit. When we weren't playing Star Wars, every kid my age was playing that they were The Bandit...driving fast cars and outrunning the police was cool (hmmm...now I'm on the other side...weird, huh?).

I proudly took my shiny new find up to the counter, and the nice young lady rang me up. Ninety-eight cents plus four cents of tax came to a grand total of $1.02...two more cents than I had to my name. I remember being very downcast about it, looking up at the lady with tears in my eyes and saying, "Two cents? I don't have two more cents." She replied, "I'm sorry, but with tax it comes to one dollar and two cents." I reached for the car and sadly said, "I'll put it back." I was despondent. It's a pretty crushing blow for a seven-year-old to not get a treat, especially when he doesn't get them nearly as often as the neighbor kids whose families weren't quite so poor.

Just as I began to leave the checkout aisle, a little old lady who had been in front of me says, "I'll pay the two cents. I know how much this means to you." She took two pennies out of her wallet and gave them to the clerk. I told the old gal "Thank you!" as I walked away with a smile on my face and the matchbox car of my dreams in my hot little hands. I told my Mom what had happened, and she made sure that I thanked the lady, which I had. (I was always a mostly good kid...until junior high school, but that's pretty normal, I think...the hormones rage and the stupidity starts creeping in. Anyway...)

The two cents that nice old lady gave me really changed my life. How often does someone do something nice like that for a total stranger? More often than we know, probably, but not often enough to be reported on the nightly news. Being nice just isn't interesting enough for the American public, I think. The movie "Pay It Forward" does a good job of enforcing the idea of just being nice, and how much it can change the world. Good rental, if you haven't seen it. Again, I digress...

A couple of weeks ago I was on vacation in Reno. I had stopped into a bookstore to just browse around. As I got up to the checkout line to purchase my new novel there were about four people behind me, and one ahead of me. The gal ahead of me was a woman in her late forties who looked not-so-well-to-do. She put her book on the counter and presented a gift card for payment. It was a fifteen-dollar gift card, and her book, after tax of course, came to fifteen dollars, and sixty-four cents.

The gal started fishing through her wallet for cash or change. She looked very embarrassed and was nervously saying, "I'm sure I have something in here...hang on a second." The people behind me in line started getting irritated as often people do when they feel that extra sixty seconds of their lives would somehow be better spent watching "American Idol" or some such thing. The gal ahead of me looked despondently down and said, "I'll have to come back some other time."

The image of a Smokey and the Bandit matchbox car flashed into my mind.

I stepped forward and put a dollar on the counter. I said, "I'll take care of it, ma'am." The lady looked up at me like I was her knight in shining armor. The clerk looked at me like I had lost my mind. She finished the transaction, and bagged the book for the lady. The gal looked up at me and said, "Thank you, sir. I don't know what to say." I replied, "You're welcome. I'll just call this my good deed for the day, if that's alright by you." She smiled and said, "It sure is. You take care," and she walked out of the bookstore.

The clerk said to me, "I've never seen anyone do something like that before." I replied, "Yes, and that's too bad. Sometimes it just the little things we can do to help make someone else's day, y'know?"

More than 30 years later I am still paying back that little old lady who spent two cents at the neighborhood K-Mart to help make a little boy happy, but it's not so much "paying it back" as it is "paying it forward." You should really watch the movie to see what I mean by that, but the jist of it is this: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Such a simple axiom, that old Golden Rule, but one that, if everyone in the world would practice it, would make our world a nicer place.