Strangers you meet for a minute but often think about

[AbbyGal]

Gatwick Airport morning of 9/1/01, we were flying to Greece on holiday and were next to a Gate for a New York flight. Young woman, in tears, travelling alone with a baby and a grizzly toddler who was playing up. I played peekaboo with him for a while until our flight was called.
The atrocity happened while we were in the air and i assume she ended up being grounded somewhere with her children.

I flew to relatives abroad a lot when mine were little and often think of her.

I have a few:

When I was about 16 I was on a train into the local city and opposite me was a beautiful boy who must have been 18 or so. He was crying quietly and had a binbag with him with what I assume were his belongings. I wanted to go and ask if he was OK but was so shy I didn't dare. I often think of him and wonder what happened and whether he was OK.

Last summer my dad died. A few weeks after I went out with my friend for her birthday and we had a few daytime drinks. When it came to getting the train home I said goodbye but then for some reason I just couldn't bring myself to get on my train. I sat on the floor in the station and was crying uncontrollably. Various people stopped to ask if I was OK but one couple with a little boy appeared with a bottle of water and a mint aero bar for me which was so lovely. Not long after that a woman came and sat next to me. We chatted for ages and she just stayed talking to me. She turned out to be a grief counsellor and just knew all the right things to say. She stayed with me until I was calm and then just melted away into the crowd. I wouldn't recognise her if I saw her now but it was such a kind thing at such an awful time.

A few weeks ago I was out on the local canal and started feeling faint. I was seeing stars but wasn't far from home so tried to keep going. A lovely man on a bike stopped to ask if I was OK and if he could walk me home. As soon as we got there he just said goodbye, got on his bike and rode off.

When I was a teenager I went to a Bowie gig in Soho, met another girl there and we ran back to Charing X together after but I'd missed my last train home. She took me to her family home, gave me her Sisters bed for the night and took me back to the train station in the morning. I think of her often and what might have happened if she hadn't rescued me

A homeless foreign guy I met once when in town. He was sobbing and I bought him tea and a sandwich. He was so grateful and I just hope he found his way to a better life somehow.

A man who got on the bus once. Just something about him which I can't explain. Wasn't particularly good looking, just gave off such a lovely vibe that I felt I just knew him. Weird feeling and happened years ago but still pops into my head here and there.

The mention of canals has reminded me to acknowledge all the kindly middle aged and elderly men who have got me and DH out of various messes on the canal network!

The most memorable was the gent who leapt up from his canalside pint after watching us fail to open a swing bridge. And then leapt up again to help us coming back later, slightly the worse for wear but still more skilled than us.

When we are more competent one day, we will pay the help forward.

Mine is a 9/11 one. I was in New York in August 2001 with a friend for a ‘SATC’ style girls trip (we were young and just wanted to drink, shop and have fun).

On our first day we had a cocktail in the bar at the top of the World Trade Center. There was a lovely Scottish barman who chatted away to us. I often wonder whether he was at work on the 9/11 and whether he survived.

I was young, in London and my so called friends had purposely abandoned me (I'd popped into a shop with the plan to meet them at another shop because they didn't want to wait or come in. When I went to the other shop they had already gone). I wandered London by myself to use the time before I had to meet everyone at a pub for the bus home.

I ended up chatting to some cabbies who were my DFs age and sweet. A car pulled up to offer me a lift and a cabbie said I was his niece and for the men to go. He then gave me a lift free of charge to the pub. Bolstered by his kindness and protectiveness I went into the pub, told the friends straight what I thought and never spoke to them again. That man, that lovely man saved me from something awful.

When my DS was a baby, my ex had left and I was pushing him in his stroller, an elderly lady stopped me in the street to tell me how lovely I looked and what a good job I was doing.

I think of them both alot.

We are so lucky to have met these lovely people.

As a young lawyer I represented a heroin addict who was in court for commercial burglary.

He was about the same age as me (early 20s) and although his addiction was advanced was absolutely gorgeous, with beautiful blue eyes.

I took instructions from him through the hatch in the cell door at Ct. and as we wrapped up he said “I wished I’d met a girl like you a few years ago, I think my life would have been very different”.

I don’t recall his name or anything else but I think about him often in terms of the different paths our lives can take.

I hope he got clean and life worked out.

I love meeting people from all walks of life. There are many people I often think about, no doubt more will come to be, but here are two for now.

In a small village cafe farm shop place in the West Country, a man around 30 years of age was finishing up buying sone produce and ready to leave with his grandmother. He had this demeanour about him, as another upthread has said, almost unworldly, messiah like. A smile like he knew everything about you, the world and everything was in his head but also nothing was on his mind.

Another person was the Libyan businessman I met in London in the 1990’s. He was a representative of a joint venture between Libyan companies and a consortium of western companies. There were some major problems and basically the western companies had sent a couple of people each with a rehearsed plan to strong arm him into providing more money. I was there as a new hire, to sit along and observe and “see how things get done”. Apparently the Libyan people were “basic, greedy and uneducated” so it would be easy “drive a deal” out of them. This was on the basis oil prices were high and they needed us. As we were travelling up, I felt the whole thing wasn’t right. The approach was just wrong and not the way to build relationships or understand your customer.

We get to the meeting in an amazing office in London and the Libyan is there on his own. Tall, conservatively dressed in a navy tailored suit, very calm and a warm manner. I am clearly the youngest there, not a player on the day and he gets that. Around him are 7 executives from various U.K. companies, who start their rehearsed plan. After some 30 minutes of listening to their tirade, he caps his pen closes his notebook and in perfect English explains where each and every one of the executives is wrong. As they try to challenge him he shuts each one down, with a calm steady voice and a perfect technical analysis of why they are wrong on everything from financial principle, to how staff behave to the physical properties of hydrocarbons. He dissembled all of them and they left the meeting with net zero gains.

I never found out how he rose to the position he did, but clearly had managed to have a good education in a Swiss or US business school at sone point. I often wonder how he and his family fared during the Libyan revolution.

I met an old homeless man in Dublin once and I went over to him and said ‘you remind me of my dad’ and he looked at me and said ‘ah but your dad wasn’t a beggar man’ and the tears just came into both of our eyes.

The lovely teenagers/young men who appeared when my car needed pushing to start the engine.

We booked a short break to Euro Disney in December 2003 and were supposed to travel on the Eurostar straight through from Paddington.

Due to heavy traffic travelling to London and then all trains from Purley cancelled, due to a fire, we ended up missing the booked Eurostar train. We decided to continue our journey but had to book the next Eurostar which went to Paris and then use the Metro to Disneyland.

Due to all the delays we ended up on the Metro at peak time, the train was absolutely packed and we had to stand. My two year old son was tired and cranky, and with all the noise and being jostled would not stop crying.

Suddenly the door to the driver's cab opened and the train driver told me to come into the cab and take a seat with him. My son stopped crying and it was fantastic sitting up front whizzing along the Paris Metro. At each stop, different people joined the driver in the cab for a chat. This was a perfectly normal thing to do. Will always be grateful to the train driver for his thoughtfulness.

I do think of this woman at times and hope she's OK.

In a pub watching a band and a couple were arguing, well the man was getting angry and she was shrinking and trying to placate him. He then grabbed her arm and pulled her outside. DP and I looked at each other and both said 'let's go for a fag break' and followed. He had her against the wall hissing at her. Another woman had also come outside because she was concerned. DP started a blokey conversation with the man to interrupt. Me and the other woman started chatting with the woman, gradually moving her away a bit. She started crying and admitted he regularly hit her. We tried to convince her she didn't have to stay with him and to get in touch with Women's Aid, she kept hugging us and saying she knew she should but couldn't, and they went back inside together. While trying to pretend to be having a normal conversation as DP tried to keep the man distracted.

I think about whether there was more we could have done, whether we made things worse that particular night, and what happened to her.

postsecret.com

This is a great website for things like this, the postcards are updated every Sunday

Bristol, July 2018. A silver Renault was stopped in traffic briefly with the front windows down. (I was walking past pushing a pram). Bloke driving, young woman cowering in the passenger seat with baby/ toddler in the back. Bloke screaming his head off at the woman.

I wonder what happened and hope she got away. No-one should be screamed at like that.

This thread is restoring my faith in human nature. It is very easy to forget these days that basically there is a lot of goodness and kindness in the world and this will always outweigh the evil.

We got married outside the U.K. in a country where we didn’t speak the language. It was 2002 so although we had email and internet it wasn’t really like we know it today.

We turned up at the office the day before and filled out all the forms. We were then told that we needed to go to ‘police for foreigners’ and fill out some forms there. We asked of there would be help with translation and were told it would be fine. We got a cab there and the cab driver said he would wait. We told him not to as we didn’t know how long we would be but he said he’d turn the meter off. We were hours, literally hours, waiting in a queue. When we got to the front of the queue they shut for lunch for an hour. He still insisted on waiting, with the meter off!
Eventually we got the form we needed. It was all in the local language and we didn’t have a clue. No help was given. If we didn’t fill out the form and return it then we couldn’t get married. We were panicking in a corridor when a lovely lady came by helped us. Without her we wouldn’t have got married.

I was taking a visitor around Windsor castle and it was hot and crowded. The queue sort of snaked around and you were passing very closely to the people going the other way.
I came face to face with a woman who I guessed was having chemo-no hair and a head scarf and looked pretty unwell. She was with her son-aged about 12 and was wearing a Dame Deborah James "Rebellious Hope" t-shirt. I said that my Rebellious Hope t-shirt was at home.
She looked me in the eye and said "I am just rebelliously hoping" and my heart ached for her.
I still well up when I think about it and wonder how she is.

I was very lucky to be allowed to hand it in the next day.

Of course both my teacher and the lady who helped me thought I was very unwell, as opposed to being horrendously hungover 😬

Bless you, much appreciated.

When I was pregnant with DD1 I was waiting for a scan when I heard what I thought was a childs voice saying that the baby was coming today and how excited they were.
I looked over and it was a young woman with Downs Syndrome and it was her that was pregnant.
Her elderly mum was with her and the look of sadness on her face was heartbreaking.
My DD is 25 now and every birthday I wonder what happened to the young woman and her baby.

The older midwife who was doing all her night rounds after birth of DS. I could hear her talking to other patients all standard stuff.. then she opens my curtain and I'm just laid there with DS attached to my boob. She just stares at me shocked in the dark.. I'm starting to freak out a bit as she isn't saying anything.. then she says "you have the gift don't you" grabs my hand and starts feeling "stuff" and talks to me for half an hour about how I need to use my powers etc, I've often been told I have an aura and something psychic etc but it was honestly the weirdest experience of my life. All the while she was getting behind on her jobs, people buzzing because she just had to tell me all this. All through her shift she kept popping in. I still think about her and wonder WTF..

My phone battery died when I was on a bus in Cairo, after a 12 hour journey through the desert. The woman in front of me (her name was Maryam) lent me her phone so I could contact my friend who was meeting me. The bus broke down a few minutes later. I asked the woman what i should do, and she said I needed to get a taxi, and I could get one with her. We had to get off the bus in the middle of the mad Cairo traffic and she stopped a taxi which looked like it was about to mow her down. She shouted at me to just jump in (I was dithering about in a panic!) which I did. The taxi driver took us to the bus station, which is where my friend was meeting me. Maryam told me she was going there anyway, and didn't want me to pay my half. When we got there, as I was getting out, she said 'Welcome to my country' and went away in the taxi back the way we had come - so she wasn't going to the bus station, but didn't want me to think she was going out of her way. She was just a lovely person.

In a pub in Glastonbury with XH, my toddler and baby DS. Toddler was gawping at a lady wearing an eye patch. I caught her glancing over, smiled at her and whispered to my toddler that it was rude to stare.

I have every admiration for that lady - she came over, crouched down next to my toddler and said 'I'm not a real pirate, I just have a poorly eye with a plaster on it'.

She left just after. I thanked her for being so thoughtful but regret not saying more. She was amazing and I wish I'd had the chance to properly thank her because she answered every question my toddler had that I didn't know how to answer.

Love you, that lady! That was 21yrs ago now.

Not thoughtful, understanding.

@QuintanaRoo
Was this around 2013/14. I know Brad Pitt was filming Fury near Watlington, Oxfordshire then. We went to Legoland with friends, we left and they told us afterwards Brad Pitt was there with his kids, I googled that he was filming Fury at the time.