During a snowstorm, you can always count on certain things happening: A mirror knocked off by a snow plow, wipers stuck to windshields, consumers losing power. What also always seems to happen during blizzards, snowstorms and public emergencies of every sort are acts of kindness — random and otherwise.
In Roslindale on Wednesday, Steve McGaff stepped out of his house into two feet of snow. But before trying to clear it, he checked in on the people next door.
“We have two elderly neighbors, and my boys go shovel their car out and help them with their walk," McGaff said. "We actually have a great little community and we help each other out. So we did that first.”
In the Back Bay on Tuesday at 6 a.m., four men bent their knees, shifted their bodies and shoveled snow away from the entrance of a four-star hotel. Temperatures had sunk into the teens and the wind made it feel much colder. Suddenly a young woman appeared with steaming cups of hot chocolate that she handed out — unprompted — to the workmen who thanked her in English and Spanish. I also thanked her. Her name is Kelly Broff and she works at the Lennox Hotel.
In the glow of a January sun on Beacon Hill, Richard Johnson made his way toward Government Center. He leaned down just slightly to talk to a homeless man, and they exchanged smiles. This was not incidental it seems.
“Oh, I gave someone a hand," Johnson said. "I usually volunteer at St. Francis House and I volunteered on Monday just before the storm.”
Johnson says he gave out clothing.
“I do that every week whether there is a storm or not," he said. "A lot of people coming in for the gloves and and hats and boots. We had a shortage of boots, so if anyone is interesting in contributing boots than that’s a place where you’d want to drop it off.”
I was on the receiving end of a kind gesture during the storm. Walking from the Back Bay to South Boston in heavy snow on Tuesday, a cop who I’ve never met while reporting stopped to offer me a ride. I was heading over to the DPW depot on Frontage Road, which is a walk that would probably take me no more than 25 minutes.
But trudging a mile through 24 inches of snow with recording equipment and a computer is not easy. So Officer Frank Keolla’s offer of a ride was a relief.
Unheralded, unacknowledged generosity was observed all over the state during and immediately after the storm: the strangers in Brighton who helped a driver get her car out of a snow bank, neighbors everywhere shoveling snow for those who couldn’t, and in Falmouth, 17-year-old Jack Moran’s rescue of an elderly man next door who had collapsed in the snow, and who, up until that moment, had only been an acquaintance.
A new storm is predicted in the coming days and with it, no doubt, will come new acts of kindness.
