To the Editor:
It was a Friday like most others. On the schedule, a trip to Bayonne for 7-Eleven, Senerchia’s famed Crabby cake hero, and Judicke’s Bakery for dessert. While I hope you won’t share that agenda with my nutritionist it was business as usual until I got out of the car. As I stood up the phone fell. My often vilified antique of a flip phone had again hit the ground or so I thought. Well it did hit the ground but it bounced through a grate and into a sewer. Yikes, flipper was lost and with it pictures, messages and numbers. Who remembers a phone number these days anyway?
It was then that some encounters happened that could reaffirm one’s faith in their fellow man and people’s willingness to help when someone needs assistance. Jeff the regional manager at 7–Eleven , a Waste Management employee, who went back to work before I could get his name, and Patrick Sweeney a social worker at the Jersey City Medical Center got together and devised a plan. Patrick called the phone to see if was sunk, the WM employee had the car moved that was near the sewer so Flipper could be spotted and Jeff looked for a device in the store that could hook the errant phone. While the hook was nowhere to be found, these enterprising men who were smarter and stronger than I located a crowbar and raised the sewer which allowed me to reach it and bring the phone, still operative, to the surface.
While this may seem like much ado about nothing, it brought to mind two interesting thoughts. The first concept is simple. Secure the phone and /or don’t drop it. The second is perhaps much more valuable. Three people, strangers to each other and me, pitched in to help with nothing to gain and out of the spotlight. It seemed to me each was vastly different but with no regard for time or consequence, made the effort to help. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all just pitched in without fanfare and helped each other without harping on our differences? I left that parking lot with my flip phone intact and a valuable reaffirmation in the selflessness and goodness that people genuinely possess.
JOHN E. NAGEL