Small Acts of Kindness

Photo by Alaric Duan on Unsplash

Yesterday I braved a trip to the grocery store for some basic provisions—hamburger meat, hand soap, pasta, peanut butter, bananas. Of these, only the hamburger meat was available.

“Can you believe this?” a woman asked me in the dairy aisle. She was holding a paper grocery list and looking a bit shell-shocked.

“They bought out all the peanut butter,” I said resentfully. “That’s a staple for me.”

“Oh no! I’m sorry to hear it,” she said.

I smiled. “At least there’s milk.” Earlier in the week, there hadn’t been. Not milk, not eggs, not bread.

It had taken three trips over a two-day period to find toilet paper, ending with me in line at Target with about seventy people, several who’d been there an hour before opening. One of them, a young mother, needed baby wipes.

I thought of her as I passed by the baby aisle in the grocery store, where the shelves were bare.

At the checkout I grabbed candy bars for my kids, who have been spending their extended vacation working on creative projects. My son’s built an impressive version of the Queen Mary in Minecraft, my daughter’s printed her novel-in-progress and begun editing it, along with crocheting miniature shirts for her make-believe characters.

So far, I’ve ignored the steady stream of emails from well-meaning teachers offering enrichment activities for at-home learning. Maybe next week. Not this week.

We’re lucky. I know that. My husband and I both work in the medical industry; we won’t be hurting for hours. I have a second job with the school district, and my time off so far has been paid. The largest source of stress for us has been panic buyers causing shortages at the grocery stores, and as I thought again of the young mother in need of baby wipes, I felt discouraged at the selfishness of others.

After inching my cart forward, I looked around and noticed someone approaching fast, her eyes locked on mine, her face animated. At first I didn’t recognize her, and was a little alarmed at the way she was barreling toward me, waving her arm.

“I don’t know if this is the kind you like,” she said breathlessly. “But I found it on a clearance shelf.”

It was the woman from the dairy aisle. She was handing me a jar of peanut butter. I took the jar and stared at it, momentarily speechless.

“Thank you,” I managed to say. “That was so thoughtful of you.” How long had she been searching the store for me, I wondered, clutching this jar of peanut butter?

The woman beamed.

“It’s exactly the kind I like,” I assured her.

It wasn’t. It was the crunchy kind and had added sugar, but of course I didn’t care, of course I bought it, feeling overwhelmed, feeling grateful, feeling like it’s these small acts of kindness that are going to help us get through this, together.