Late last night, on my way home from the lab, I decided to pick up a few groceries at my favorite corner market, and I got a little carried away. By the time I arrived at the checkout counter, I had a basket full of things to buy.<\/p>\n
At the checkout counter I saw a disheveled and very lost looking man, clearly homeless. Sitting on the counter before him was a packaged snack and a can of beer. He just stood there stoically, as though waiting patiently for his turn to be served.<\/p>\n
The proprietor, ignoring the homeless man entirely, asked me if I was ready to be served. I thought to myself that this homeless guy’s life is clearly hard enough, so maybe I could help a little.<\/p>\n
“He has a lot fewer items than I do,” I told the proprietor. “I can go after him.”<\/p>\n
Just then a young man, maybe twenty years old, stepped in front of me and put two items down on the counter for purchase.<\/p>\n
Now that seemed just plain rude. “OK,” I siged, trying to stay civil, “I guess I will go after everybody else.”<\/p>\n
The young man looked at me sheepishly, then gestured toward the homeless man. “I’m paying for him.”<\/p>\n
And so he was. I felt very embarrassed, but I guess I learned one good lesson from this awkward episode:<\/p>\n
When you find yourself feeling all puffed up and proud after being kind to a stranger, just remember that there are people in this world who are kinder than you are. I think that’s a good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Late last night, on my way home from the lab, I decided to pick up a few groceries at my favorite corner market, and I got a little carried away. By the time I arrived at the checkout counter, I had a basket full of things to buy. At the checkout counter I saw a … Continue reading “At the corner market”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17528"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17530,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17528\/revisions\/17530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}