But I wanted to share a thrill I got on Saturday morning on my way from my sister's house to the nursing home. There's a Dunkin Donuts on the way there, one of the few places you can stop on the Cape at this time of year where making a lefthand turn out of the parking lot isn't impossible.
My Mom loves good, black coffee. No lattes, no espressos, no flavors, just good black coffee. So I stopped to get her a small cup and a hot tea for me. As I started to pull money from my wallet, the man who had been waited on before me handed his debit card to the cashier to pay for his purchases and said "Add hers to mine."
I was surprised and immediately thought of doing that genteel refusal thing we all know so well: "Oh, no, that's OK. But thanks."
But then I stopped because a sweet, spontaneous gesture like that would die if questioned. My son, when he was a little boy, coined a great expression for times when something upsets an otherwise good day: "You broke my day."
Somehow, I knew that turning this man down would have broken his day--so I immediately accepted. The cashier and I looked at one another as he turned away to get his food and she mouthed the words "Do you know him?"
I shook my head and then she said "Isn't it a shame that when someone does something nice, we think it's weird or bad?"
I agreed but then said "Let's just appreciate this as nice."
When I told my sister the story, she related how a friend of theirs always pays the toll for the car behind him whenever he travels, just to do it. Now my sister and her husband do the same. So on the way home, at the NH toll booth in Manchester, I handed the cashier two dollars, one for me and one for the guy behind me.
In return, I got a smile on my face that lasted for several miles.
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