Kindness of strangers / Freundlichkeit von Fremden

So the camera never lies. Let’s just say that these two weren’t quite as angelic in the few hours before this shot...

Firstly, my boy threw his bike in the road outside a bakery and had a no cake no ride meltdown. And when we eventually reached the playground the two of them decided to fight each other - plus some innocent girl who got in their way :-(.

But what I’ll take away was the reaction of two strangers.

Firstly an old guy pulled over his Mercedes and I braced for a lecture on the inadvisability of highway tantrums. Instead, he gently asked if they might be a bit tired, and pressed a bag of emergency sweets into my hand before gliding off.

And then when I approached the girl’s father to apologise, again expecting an admonishment for poor parenting, he instead noticed I was having a wobble, sat me down on the bench and gave me a talking to about how all kids act up and all parents are doing their best in sometimes challenging circumstances. It turned out he was kind of a colleague from the hospital - but he had just come off a long shift in intensive care, yet was still finding the emotional energy to comfort me, which was pretty humbling.

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”
(Tennessee Williams).