Two points of light

Monday editions of the Baltimore Sun often carry the roundup of the weekend's crime stories. One can often catch up on accounts of murders over the weekend that did not make it into the papers. Monday last week was no different. It painted a grim picture of the city's life.

I witnessed two events on the way to work that week which tilted the city's civility meter a few more degrees to the positive end.

Walking south on Charles Street (south of Lombard) on Tuesday morning, I saw this Honda sedan swerve round the corner from Pratt charging northbound in the center lane. About fifty yards into Charles and after straightening out its course after a couple of wags of the tail-end, the car swerved to the left lane and pulled up abruptly in front of a man in a wheelchair and holding a cup in his hand. This man is a regular downtown and I had seen him a number of times before. He was an amputee. As the car pulled to a stop and the driver-side window and an hand reached out to the wheelchair bound man and dropped in a couple of bills into the cup. He then pulled away from the curb and tore away. (I got a feeling that this is the way he normally drives.) I wondered what prompted his act of charity.

A couple of mornings later, walking down Light Street towards my office, I decided to stop by the Dunkin Donuts to pick up a bagel.
this is the store that frequently has a line of customers stretching out onto the side walk but not this morning. As I stepped into the store, the young lady behind the counter beamed me the widest and brightest smile I had seen in a long time. In fact, the two counter crew(I think they were from India or the Middle East) seemed determined to spread good cheer to everyone who stepped into the store. They were engaged in a friendly rivalry of being the first to snag any customer who entered. "I got him!" punctuated the store lending it a definite festive ambiance. I just stood there, jaw just about hanging, marveling at the sight of such enthusiasm behind a counter I had, until then, not seen in Baltimore. You could tell by the greetings that many were regular customers and I wondered how many of them were there for a regular dose of morning cheer as much as the coffee.

That reminded me of George H W Bush's thousands points of light. Hokey as it sounded when he uttered it, I nevertheless wonder what would happen to Baltimore when these two encapsulations of positivity were repeated five hundred times daily across the city.