Good News

Yesterday was a bit of an oddball day. I'm still not sure what to make of it other than it seemed to impart a lot of good news in round about ways.

Early in the morning on my way to work, I got off the subway and in the corridor lay a homeless man, sleeping. Someone before me had taken the sandwich they had made and brought for their own lunch, nicely packaged in a tupperware style container, and left it beside his head. It was so touching. If I had had my camera I would have wanted to take a picture but in a crowd of people it probably would have looked crass. Not that I would have cared. But I thought what a wonderful testimony to the kindness of strangers.

Later that night I was out walking my dog. I heard someone calling behind me and I stopped to turn around. On the other side of the street was a teenager, running and beside me was his dog. Not leashed and obviously not very obedient. I reached down to grab the dog's collar so its owner could reclaim it but it jumped away from me and ran into the street - right into an oncoming car. I screamed and screamed like a freaking banshee, as if it was my own dog. The crunching sound of the impact is something I'll never forget, the sound that kept me waking up last night over and over again. But this is a good news story so I will hasten to finish it. The driver of the car stopped immediately to make sure that the dog had not gone under the wheels (it hadn't), but had been kind of blind-sided. The dog kept running across the street and its owner was able to grab it. I crossed the street, realized the guy was pretty young, so I checked the dog over, making sure it wasn't bleeding (it wasn't) and that it didn't have any broken bones (it didn't). I was worried it might have internal injuries but there wasn't anything concrete I could do about that unless the owner took it to the vet. And it seemed spirited enough - it took off down the street again with the owner chasing it.

What a day.