A Love Letter to Human Kindness By Mariah Manny The year is 2016. I am 21 years old. It is sum- Before that day, when I am upset, he walks mer in Searcy, Arkansas, a place far from with me through the neighborhood and talks my hometown and everyone I know in Tex- to me until 3 AM, until I am tired and my feet as. One day I cry for the entire morning are sore and I have forgotten my anger. When drive to my workplace, where I am a ca- he visits a friend’s house, he takes pictures of shier for a small grocery store. When I ar- their kittens to share with me, knowing that rive, I visit the store manager in her office. they will make me smile. When he is driv“I don’t think I can work today,” I tell ing me to school and the car tire goes flat, he her. “I’m struggling.”
puts his coat over me in the car so I will be
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warm while he walks to the nearest car ga-
Less than six months earlier, on January 24th rage. He is the kind of person who picks up a of 2016, my father died of stomach cancer. A wallet in the road and spends the rest of his career truck driver who was injured several day finding who it belongs to so that he can months after I was born, my father was the return it. He is the kind of person who tells one who took care of me the most as a child, me that if I ever feel unsafe, he will come get making my everyday meals and picking me me, no matter where I am or what time it is. up from school while my mother worked as a network engineer. A man who loved photog- I was 20 years old when I watched him stop raphy, he imparted a boundless appreciation breathing. As I sat in the garage where we for plants and animals and the natural world talked the day before, I thought to myself: no around me, showing me lizards and rabbits one else will ever show me kindness like his. and blue bonnets every time he found them. I believed that then, but it is later at that 82
