Story 31: Driving home from SUNY

     

    
  My brother Bruce and I both attended SUNY Albany in the late 1980's.  Bruce was a junior and was living with the heads of the black fraternities on campus. How he got to live with those guys I don’t know, but he said that they got along pretty well. 

     Getting to and from Albany was always an adventure. I remember driving with a guy I met on the ride board (a ride share program) who had the habit of putting his car into neutral when going down hill to save gas. Another time my mother drove all the way up to Albany just to pick me up.  That was once of the nicest/most generous things she ever did. It was worth more than any gift of money. I didn’t even mind waiting in the cold with all my stuff.  This was before there were cell phones to see where she was.

  I recall another fateful day during my freshman year. How our car a white Toyota Corolla (not the biggest car but one of the most reliable) was filled completely with a year's worth of both Bruce’s and my clothes and furniture.  We put things under seats and all the way up to the ceiling. There was barely enough room to see out the back window, and whoever sat in the passenger seat had to rest their feet on books.  Our car may have qualified as a low-rider considering how low we were with all the weight. Good thing we weren’t a boat.

    Back then neither of us had a lot of money, and we really didn’t think too much of it.  I remember calling home on many an occasion and asking my parents for fifty dollars.  I probably spent a lot of that of it on beer, flowers for my girlfriend, or simply eating pizza.

  Anyway, the trip proceeded uneventfully until we got to our last hurdle The Throgs Neck Bridge.  In those days there was no EZ pass and suddenly we realized that we didn’t have enough money for the bridge.  So we pulled over and started to look inside the car. We looked everywhere. Not an easy feat when your car is packed with stuff.  We found some change but quickly realized we were fifty cents short.

“Damn,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

Bruce suggested we ask a stranger if he could help us. and fortunately they gave us the change we needed and we were able to make it across the bridge to Queens and eventually home. I never forgot that lesson of the importance of the kindness of strangers.

  Many years later Bruce and I were driving again to Syracuse to visit our brother Dan, and we stopped at a well-known rest stop.  As soon as we got out of car we were set upon by a guy with several piercings and tattoos who asked for money for gas.

  I looked at bruce and then gave the hippyish guy several dollars.  He seem pleased and went back to his friends. 

“Full circle.” I said to Bruce.

“Agree.” he replied with a nod, and cheerfully we got back into our car knowing our debt was probably now paid in full.

  Life Lesson 31: They say in life that what you give out you get back times three.  Karma they call it.  I think the life lesson is to be be kind to strangers without expectation of anything in return, because “What goes around comes around.” especially on life’s road, and sometimes even on the New York State Thruway.