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Many strangers have been kind to me over the years, but one incident from decades ago is still vivid in my mind.
My husband and I had moved to Winnipeg, Canada where he found a job working as a teacher. Our son, Jamal, was a toddler. We are from California, so we weren’t prepared for the harsh prairie winters of Winnipeg. (When people ask me where Winnipeg is, I tell them it’s north of North Dakota; they immediately understand this means that it gets very very cold!)
The winter we spent in Winnipeg, it snowed from September through May. And it happened to be the year that an intense blizzard hit. It made transportation of all kinds impossible for two days. People were stuck wherever they happened to be. Downtown department stores were filled with people who had to sleep there for two nights.
As winter progressed, the snow in Winnipeg piled higher and higher. I remember walking down snow-plowed sidewalks where the “walls” of snow on each side of me were taller than I was. And the color of those walls were a combination of white and yellow, having been decorated by dogs being walked by their owners. The “walls” stayed that way until the spring melt.
Winnipeg is a wonderful city. It’s a cultural oasis—home to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and several terrific museums. There was so much to love about this city, but winter was more than this California girl could handle, especially with a small child. Even though the people were very friendly, I felt isolated and depressed at times.
When winter finally passed, we decided to return to California. In Winnipeg, we’d bought a Volvo on credit and had been making monthly payments. We bought it because the car we arrived in didn’t keep us remotely warm in winter. The Volvo was the fanciest car we’d ever had, but when we decided to move back to California, we had to sell it because we didn’t own it. In exchange, we bought an old Dodge Dart.
We packed the car with all our earthly goods. It was bulging at the seams. We said goodbye to Winnipeg and began the drive to San Francisco where we’d be staying with my husband’s parents until we decided our next move in life.
When we arrived at the border crossing, about 60 miles south of Winnipeg, we got out our U.S. passports, and everything seemed in order. But then one of the border guards asked where on the car he could find the emissions-control sticker. “What sticker?” we thought. He said that when people move to the U.S. and bring a car with them, the car has to meet U.S. emission standards. This had never occurred to us, so we had no sticker. He said, “You can enter the U.S., but your car can’t.”
So, there we were, sitting in a room at a fairly remote border crossing with all our goods in the car outside. Our toddler was squirming impatiently in my lap; we had very little money, and no dwelling to return to in Winnipeg. I had no idea what we were going to do. It felt as if my world was falling apart. Suddenly, I began to cry softly. I wasn't trying to garner sympathy from the guards. I knew they were just doing their jobs. But all I could do at that moment was cry.
Soon, the guard who'd told us we couldn't cross the border with the car said, “Let me go look at that car again.” We watched as he went outside and walked around the Dodge Dart three or four times, sometimes crouching down to look underneath. We had no idea why he was doing this. When he returned to the room, he told us that he must have missed the sticker on his first inspection, and that we were free to bring the car into the U.S.
I could see by his expression that he knew he was lying about having seen a sticker. It may have been the most compassionate lie he ever told.
This was a kindness so special that the memory of it is still vivid in my mind, decades later. (Memory is a funny thing because, once we got to California, we either brought the car up to emission standards or we got rid of it. Honestly, I can't remember!)
May you be kind to someone today…and every day.
