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Pay It Forward

Today something happened to me that restored my faith in humanity. Maybe it's the Christmas spirit, or maybe some people just have kind hearts. All I know is that I was truly blessed today.

I always try to pay it forward. At the arcade last week my date and I let a little girl have our remaining tickets, maybe this was the universes way of returning the favor.

Today at the grocery store, my mom and I stocked up. We got all the essentials like bread and milk, some non-essentials like yogurt and nutella, and baking supplies so I can make peppermint fudge and double chocolate chip cookies for Christmas dinner. Our cart came to $114.81. No big deal, we have food stamps and most of our cart was food.

But when mom inserted the EBT card, it was declined. We panicked, it should have been renewed two days ago. So mom called the number on the back of the card to check the balance. $0, we had nothing. Mom only had $30 in her bank account and I only had $60. So we quickly started going through our cart, bickering about what was essential or not. We finally narrowed it down to a small number of items, I offered to be the one to pay. At this point my mom was nearly in tears, so she went to wait in the car.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting in line to check out a second time. That's when the lady in front of me turned to me and said, "Can you do me a favor? I forgot to get something. Can you get me a jar of salted peanuts and a jar of unsalted peanuts?" I said yes, I wasn't going to say no to a sweet old lady.

So I go to the nearest aisle, where I thought the nuts were. They weren't there. So I went to the next aisle, that's where I found them. But I never realized how many kinds of nuts there are. Cashews, almonds, pistachios. I finally found the peanuts and started searching through the variety to find what the lady had asked for. Once I found it I quickly ran back to the aisle and handed her the jars. She said thank you, grabbed my hand to shake it, and placed something in my palm.

When I looked down I saw a $100 bill. She had heard everything that happened when we tried to check out the first time. I tried to refuse, saying it was too much. She insisted I take it. After a couple hugs and some tears on my end, she left the store and I ran to get my old cart back before they put all the items away. I was able to check out with everything, I only had to pay $14.81.

I got back to the car and while I loaded the groceries I told mom what had happened. She burst into tears. It was after 5 on a Friday, we couldn't call to figure out what happened with her card until Monday. She had been afraid we'd have to go without food through the weekend, maybe longer. But thanks to this kind old lady, we got everything we needed. Including our nutella and baking supplies.

Moral of the story, kids: pay it forward. Give that little girl your tickets instead of throwing them away. Do an old lady a favor and get her some peanuts. What comes around comes around. You never know when you'll be the person in need.