“The Kindnesses of Strangers,” column for March 10, 2015

My P.O. box for reader mail held a card telling me to call at the window. Never a good sign. I’d been away for a month. I expected a lot of mail. Then the clerk at the window raised his eyebrows and handed me not one, but two, very full boxes.

Long ago, I started a ritual. Each week I pick up my mail from readers. (It varies in volume depending on holidays or column topics or phases of the moon.) Then I take it to a restaurant, order lunch and spend an hour or so reading what readers have to say.

It’s fun. Usually I can read a week’s mail in one long lunch. A month’s might take longer. Maybe the rest of my life. I was going to wait to open it all later. Then I spotted in the pile a package from Susan Bartholow, a sales representative and columnist at the Times West Virginian in Fairmont, W.V.

Susan and I connected years ago when she decided (after reading a column in which I shamelessly solicited birthday cards) to send me a cake. I was out of town. It sat in the post office two weeks. The next year she sent me a “make-your-own-cake” kit. I made it. It was good. This time she sent not a cake, but a pile of birthday cards she somehow got readers to bring to the newspaper (in subzero weather) for her to send to me.

(Note: Susan also gets readers to donate teddy bears at Christmas for young patients at West Virginia University Children’s Hospital. You can send her a bear, if you like, in care of The Times West Virginian, 300 Quincy St., Fairmont, WV 26555.)

I pulled Susan’s package out of the box, went to a restaurant, ordered a big salad and started opening birthday cards.

If I live forever, I will never cease to marvel at the human capacity for kindness. Especially when it’s offered to a stranger and, most especially, when the stranger is me. People wrote the nicest things in those cards.

I wish you could read them.

One of them even quoted a birthday wish I’ve used since my children were born. Apparently, I’d mentioned it in a column: “So glad you were born.”

Suddenly I sensed I was being watched. Two tables away, a little girl with big eyes stared at me without blinking. Let’s call her Stacy. That’s not her real name, but it will do. She was sitting with her parents, I presumed, who appeared to be arguing quietly, one angry, the other weary. Nobody seemed to be having fun, least of all Stacy.

I gave her my best smile, a cross, more or less, between Julia Roberts getting an Oscar and a mule eating briars. Stacy stared back, no smile. I took it as a challenge. Rare is the kid I can’t make grin.

Just then, the restaurant staff showed up with a piece of cake and a candle to sing, “Happy birthday, dear Stacy!” She stopped staring and blew out the candle. For a while I lost her to the cake. When the cake was gone, her parents went back to whisper fighting and Stacy went back to eyeballing me.

I made faces. Crossed my eyes. Hung a spoon on my nose. You would laugh. She just stared.

So I opened the rest of the cards, savoring the good feelings they gave me. I wished I could give those feelings to Stacy.

There were birthdays when I was growing up, times when I, too, found it hard to smile. I wanted to tell her what I’ve learned: Life might not always seem happy, but it always holds a hope for happier days ahead, for birthdays to celebrate with family and friends, and chances to bask in the unexpected kindnesses of strangers.

I wanted Stacy to know that. But all I could give her was a smile. Sometimes it’s the best and the least that we can do.

As they were leaving, she and her parents passed my table.

“Happy birthday, Stacy,” I said. “So glad you were born.”

She looked back at me over her shoulder.

Then she smiled.

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