Thursday, March 13, 2008

Karma Car

Our family has a little game we like to play at toll booths: we pay for the car behind us. There are several reasons for this:

 

     There’s nothing wrong with a random act of kindness

     You never know when someone is having a bad day and this could change that person’s attitude instantly

     It teaches our children something about doing good deeds for strangers

     There’s always the possibility that the person behind us will pass the kindness along

     It’s cheap entertainment

 

People will sometimes go nuts trying to catch up to us to see if they know us (they don’t) and find out who would do such a thing. Our children eagerly watch out the back window as we pull away from the toll booth and have names for all the actions the person behind us takes with his or her now unneeded toll money (the Hesitation, the Snatch Back, etc.).

 

Our hope is always that the person behind us will think “What a nice thing to do. I’ll do it for the person behind me.” In several years and probably a hundred toll booths, we’ve seen the person behind us pay for the person behind him/her three times.

 

Once was Christmas, going over the Bay Bridge, so we sort of don’t count that since it was Christmas. Once was going over the Bay Bridge last summer, which we considered a great triumph. And the third was going over the Key Bridge to a soccer game on Saturday, October 16, of this year. (This last one was in dispute: two children and I believe the person behind us paid, one child doesn’t, one wasn’t sure.)

 

The real success, we believe, will come when someone does it to us. So far that’s never happened. And, yes, if it ever does happen, we’ll pay for the car behind us.

 

It never hurts to put a deposit in the karma bank.

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