"Hate When That Happens!"

Maybe you really can count on people to help you out.  I was crossing the supermarket parking lot yesterday when an entire quart of God’s most fragile fruit spilled from my cart. Picture it: a hundred raspberries rolling their sweet fuzzy-tender little bodies around in the gritty asphalt. (The waste!) I bent to see if I could salvage a few. That’s when this one guy rolled past me in his car and called “Hate when that happens ha ha!” Then an older gent  passed right after him. “Go back inside and tell them!” he shouted, gesturing earnestly toward the store but how could I do that? What would I try and say,  that it was their fault for placing that top-heavy bag in just that precarious place?I couldn’t do that and so remained bent to my task,  trying to judge whether I could salvage any of them at all and mentally listing the kinds of materials contained in that grit: salt from winter storms, engine oil, pigeon guano, droplets of gasoline,... Where did it end? And you can’t exactly scour a raspberry the way you can an apple.I was still sadly picking through them in my peasant’s crouch when the lowliest employee of all, the kid who brings in the shopping carts, appeared at my side.  "I’ll get you another," he said . "I don’t need the slip," he said . "You wait right here," he said and in I did and 60 seconds later he was back with a fresh treasure-chest of this heavenly fruit.I could have kissed him. I could also have tipped him but that would seem to me to put him in a one-down position somehow. Anyway this wasn’t a service; this was piece of pure gallantry. And I think I’ll remember that boy’s kind helping face pretty much forever.  (Maybe I'll go back tomorrow and ask I can take his picture so you can see and remember it too. :-))