A few good men – and women, of course
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Sean of the South
Sean Dietrich
Dallas. The mid-1980s. There were three Mexican boys in the supermarket. The meat department. They were covered in sawdust and drywall mud. They were eyeing the beef, looking for the cheapest cuts. Counting their nickels and dimes.
But they came up short. They were about to walk away when the butcher came from behind the counter and handed them 25 pounds of ground beef.
That’s a lot of meat.
“The expiration dates are technically past due,” said the butcher, “but this is still perfectly good meat if you freeze it. And it’s just going to go to waste if you don’t take it.”
“How much do we owe you?” asked one of the boys.
“On the house” said the butcher.
The three young men looked at each other. No words were said. One of the boys looked like he was about to start crying.
“God bless joo,” was their response.
“God bless j’all, too,” said the Texan butcher.
Rural Kansas. The man was walking his dog in the neighborhood when it happened. A car wreck took place in front of him. On the street. The Ford Contour plowed into a telephone pole. Nose first. Game over.
Soon, the vehicle was on fire. Someone inside the automobile was screaming.
“They were horrible screams,” the dog-walker remembers.
He didn’t know what to do, so he plunged into the burning car and dragged the driver from the inferno. There was a baby in the back seat. He saved the infant, too.
Today, the baby is a grown woman who drives a truck for a living. A few months ago, that truck driver visited a nursing home.
“You don’t know me,” she said, as she sidled up to the elderly man’s bedside. “But you saved my life when I was a baby. I just wanted to thank you.”
The truck driver told this same story at that man’s funeral.
Atlanta. The homeless guy was seated in the parking lot of an old gas station, cradling a paper bag, from which he kept taking sips. He had reached the point of not caring. He was done asking for money. He was done trying to find enough food and booze to stay alive.
He went to an overpass bridge. He was going to jump into traffic. He really wanted to. But someone stopped him. It was a man with a strange accent. The stranger was Russian, maybe.
“Don’t do it,” the stranger said.
“Why not?”
“Because your life means more than you think it does.”
Then the homeless man was wrestled to the ground. That was the last thing he remembers. Being pinned to the pavement.
The next morning he awoke with a stiff hangover. But thankfully, he WAS awake.
Today the former homeless man oversees a community homeless program in an inner city. He owns an apartment. He has a girlfriend. A car. He has been sober for 32 years.
“A lot of people might think the world is falling apart,” he wrote to me. “But they’re wrong. I’ve been on the other side. There’s lots of good people out there.”
And if you don’t believe him, just visit the meat department.
