Pay it Forward...

The story begins with my daughter's 106 temperature and grumpy, grumpy attitude. She wanted to go to the store with her dad. Of course he said yes, even though I was sending him with a huge list. But anything to keep his princess happy.

Then the phone calls started coming in. Lilly was having a meltdown in each aisle at the store, throwing things into the basket and crying over every little thing. This must have been when it set in to Gerardo that it was not such a good idea to take a sick 3 year old to wal mart.

Every aisle another desperate phone call from Gerardo for advice on what do in each situation. At one point my husband asked me to go to wal mart and pick her up, well I would have but he took the keys to his car with him by accident so I had no vehicle!

Finally after 1 & 1/2 hours of shopping/crying Gerardo finally got to the counter to pay. Lilly decided to throw another fit at the register so my husband had to hold Lilly with one hand and very slowly put all of his items on the register one by one...much to the dismay of the customers behind him.

The cashier rings him up and asks for $76, my husband reaches into his pocket for his wallet. Right about this time I am sitting at the computer and I look up on the shelf and see my husband's wallet sitting neatly on the shelf! You can only imagine how I felt when I saw it knowing he had no other money and he was going to be stuck. So I call him and he tells me of an act of kindness that many of us can't even fathom.

When the cashier asked for the money, he reached in his pocket and found no wallet. He realized that he had left it at home. He apologized to the cashier and asked if she could please set his things aside and he would return for them later. He explained that his daughter had been really fussy with a high fever and bladder infection & that we had stayed up with her all night watching Dora the Explorer and were pretty sleep deprived. Just then an older woman behind him (who he thought was getting mad) told him that she would pay for him.

Gerardo says he could not believe that someone now-a-days would do this. He told her no, that it was a lot of money. But before he knew it, she had swiped her card in the ATM machine at the register. She did not want to give him her information because she did not want the money back, she only wanted to show kindness and do something for someone in need. Gerardo thanked her and convinced her to give him her address. He later went to her home to pay her.

This makes me think about how we treat other people sometimes. How many times have I been behind someone that didn't have enough money and all I could think was that person was making me late. I guess sometimes we have to go through something like this to realize that there are still good people in the world. It has given our family a little more faith in humanity.