Img: Paper Girl
Welcome to the first installation of Doe Deere’s Box of Delights! This one’s for all the pink lovers. In a typical Sphinx-like fashion, I shall present you with a question which you must answer in order to be entered. Winner will be picked randomly on June 9th.
What is the most memorable, no matter how small, good deed that you’ve done?
When I was 12 I spent my entire afternoon on my birthday cleaning up the local park. It wasn’t for community service, or personal gain, I just noticed that there was garbage everywhere and was worried about the dogs accidentally choking on a piece (like in the Arthur episode). I got my dad’s pokey stick and cleaned for three or four hours that day before going out for supper with my family to celebrate my special day.
I’ve wanted to do it again, but the park is closed now.
The most recent deed, was saving this kitten about 3 weeks ago from the street, I had to bottle feed her and now she’s getting bigger. She’s now the boss of me O.O I get pawed in the face and get scratched but she’s adorable, helping stray animals and finding them a good home is always something special to me.
Check her out :)
http://twitpic.com/6ly4p
My grandpa passed about a year ago, so all my cousins and I go over to her house and clean for her, do her yard work, etc., anything to help out. She always tries to pay us, but that’s not what we’re doing it for! We learn new stories from her all the time, and, at the risk of sounding corny, it feels good to help make her life easier. She’s done so much for all of us, and now it’s our turn to help her. I don’t know why we all waited so long.
We have this stray cat that gave birth in our garden and then took off. Of her kittens, only one survived and we fed and took care of her until she grew and now she has her own kittens! I regularly feed her and her kittens everyday. I lovingly call her Kitty (how original! LOL)
When I was in sixth grade my whole class went to volunteer for the Oregon School for the Blind. We helped disabled kids learn how to have fun! We played kickball with them, showed them the fun of bubbles, and pushed them on the swings. It was a lot of fun getting to know them, they really aren’t so different after all. They are just normal people that need love to. That was very memorable to me.
Today my mum and I were getting in the car at the local polling station as we’d just voted in the election. Just as she’d started up the car, I saw a tiny vole squirming around amongst the chunky gravel stones outside and jumped out of the car. We tried to pick him up with a pink cloth but he was so scared at first he refused to be picked up even though he was struggling so hard. Finally we managed to get him around the belly and let him out in some bushes, saving him from being run over! That’s my ‘good deed’ for today, haha.
When my sister was in the hospital to give birth to her son, she was terrified. So I stayed with her for three days without hardly any sleep and no shower. But when she finally gave birth and I got to be in the room with her, it was well worth all the sleepless nights.
One night when my boyfriend was really really drunk, a few days after we’d gotten together, we got into a fight. At the end of the night I wound up carrying him to my dorm room and putting him to sleep on the floor. When we woke up in the morning I had to tell him everything that happened.
He told me that waking up next to me was one of the best things that’s ever happened to him, having someone who cared enough to take care of him.
The most memorable good deed that I have done was when I babysat my cousins’ little girl and one of them got completely sick and threw up everywhere and I got her all cleaned up and cleaned the house up for her so she didn’t have to bother with it.
A good deed I like to do any time I go out is to tell at least one random person something nice about what they’re wearing or how they look. I know it would make me happy if someone did that, so I feel good knowing that I’ve brightened up someone’s day a little bit.
A few years ago, one of my roommates broke up with her boyfriend. Since she was convinced they were going to get married, she was absolutely devastated. To cheer her up, all of us roomies dragged her out of her nest of blankets in the closet and bought her a massage at the best hotel in town. I was her chauffeur, and we ended up having to call Triple A for car assistance (I drove her car, and wasn’t used to driving an automatic). It’s definitely a day I won’t forget.
The most memorable good deed I have done.. would have to be when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. My mom came down with a really bad cause of the flu, and I was really looking forward to going to school, but it was so bad, she couldn’t drive. So I stayed home and took care of her. :)
*case. I’m so awesome I misspell words! LOL
It’s maybe a bit silly… and small, and nobody knows that I do it, but whenever I walk through the churchyard that I live next to, and I see some of the flowers have fallen or blown over, I make sure I go on over to pick them up no matter how far away they are and put them back in their place. I just don’t like to see them a mess, and I like to think that it’d be appreciated if the people knew.
xx
Not the last good deed but the one I certainly will always remember was when my great-aunt was in hospital after her husband died and I went to help her eat. The nurses always do it quickly quickly so me, my mum and my grandma took turns. It was lovely to be able to do something nice for her even though she didn’t always recognise me.
Feels a little odd trying to get something out of a goo deed… but OH WELL; I’m curious.
My mother-in-law’s oldest son passed-away after years of illness when he was 10years old. She has never really “recovered”, so this year for her birthday I am compiling stories from all of her other children, and cousins and aunts and uncles, and grandparents who knew that oldest son; and putting together a coffee table book with pictures and stories of him.
Sorry about my terrible spelling and grammar.
- Jess
I went to Africa the winter of my Junior year in high school with my family. While we were there, we gave shoes that we had collected from our friends and family to children “without feet” meaning those that had been born with severe foot issues, such as facing the wrong way, bowl-legged, etc. The looks on these kids faces when we brought them their shoes… Now, I’ve always been a fan of shoes, but I don’t think I’ll ever love a pair as much as those kids loved theirs.
The most memorable was when someone at the self checkout line walked away and there was a ten dollar bill stuck in the dispenser thing. I noticed it and ran after him. He seemed really surprised I didn’t keep it.
I seem to see people dropping money a lot, and I always tell them/give it to them/chase them down lol
The most memorable would have to be sorting diapers into packages at the food bank with a guy friend of mine during an afternoon volunteering.
My most memorable good deed is memorable not because of the deed, I was just doing my job. What made it memorable was that the girl came in the next day and gave me a thank you card.
What happened was this girl had slipped in one of the slides and twisted her ankle. As I was patching her up I chatted to her and her brother and friend. And the next day while sitting in the office on my break she came in with a thank you note for me. It hangs in my locker at work and makes me smile when I see it.
Living in Virginia Beach for a while, you see a lot of wild animals on and around “people areas”.
One day we saw what looked to be a giant accident with cars all coming to a stop around a four way intersection. Stopping to see if we could help, we found no accident but rather a VERY large, very angry snapping turtle in the middle of the intersection.
The poor thing saw the cars as adversaries, was positively rageful and no one was trying to do a damn thing, just watching it with a laugh and taking pictures of it’s hissing and snapping.
Risking a chance, I got one of the tubs out of my car and an umbrella and my roommate and I rushed forward to try desperately to save the turtle before someone did something cruel and stupid.
The plan was to herd him into the tub with the umbrella and then carrying him off the road.
The reality was that it snapped onto my umbrella with enough force to destroy it, bending the metal in the process, and me carrying him hissing from the end of the umbrella, to the side of the road.
Drivers hated us, the turtle was deprived of tasty human fingers, and we drove home with a broken umbrella, giggling.
I found a pregnant cat wandering the streets in the city in the middle of January. She was freezing and starving so I took her in and nursed her back to health so she could give birth. We fell in love with her kittens and ended up keeping all of them!
About 2 years ago, just before moving out of Oregon and quitting my job where i had alot of great friends – one of our coworkers was wheelchair-bound, and his wheelchair was in really bad shape. He had resorted to pushing himself backwards in his chair to avoid a busted wheel. I decided we were going to collect some money for a new chair for him. Alot of people at the office chipped in and we got him an amazing, light, smooth new wheelchair. It was delivered to work, where it was set up at his desk. He was overwhelmed when he found our surprise, and so very happy. He did some ‘wheelies’ for us, and it was wonderful to see him so cheered up!
I was a hospital volunteer for three years when I was a teenager. I would say that’s the most memorable!
In high school, two of my favorite teachers were in a nasty car accident. As soon as I heard, I spent my last period art class making get well cards for them both, and sent them around to as many students as I could before school was out that day. Anyone who didn’t get a chance to sign them could do so in the cafeteria the next morning before first period. Once every inch was pretty much covered in signatures and messages, I brought them to the front desk and asked the receptionist to please put the cards in their mailboxes for when they got back.
They sure did appreciate all the messages they got from students once they got back to school :)
I gave $800 to my friend when she was down on her luck to pay her rent.. she said thank-you. Meanwhile I only had $300 in my bank, so i went into debt for about a year.
My high school youth group goes on a service project trip every year. Now this may not be small but was certainly memorable. One year my church went to the Dominican Republic. One of the members in our church did PeaceCor for a year in the DR and lived in a remote village. The town not too far away needed help building a Chocolate Factory. Since chocolate is the biggest produce in the DR. The DR is very moist and if the beans get moist they are rotten. So this Chocolate Factory helped dry the beans easier and quicker. Basically the factory was a long tunnel that we built from scratch. Mixing the cement, building the foundation, putting in the supports. The only thing we didn’t get to do was put the plastic covering over it. Without this factory a pound of beans was around .80c and the price nearly doubled ($1.50ish) with the factory. These beans are then fermented and sent to the major chocolate factories in the USA and around the world.
Every morning, I take the elevator to the third floor of my building. On the way up, I hit the button to take the elevator back to the first floor for the next person that comes in for work.
If I take the elevator down in the evening, then I press the button to go back to the third floor (we only have three levels).
It’s nothing big, but people always appreciate the doors opening the moment they press the button. And it’s one way I can be sure to think of others every day.
Well, once i met a boy about my age and we really clicked and started becoming friends really quickly. He told me he live alone (allthough by the time he was barely 18), and that he didn’t have much contact with his familly and he had to support himself.
One day during summer vacations i was at home, having lunch with my familly and we were texting each other. When i asked him how he was doing, he told me he was at a random mall of the city and that he was starving because they didn’t pay him until next week, and he had run out of money too early.
I inmideatly got up, grabbed a topperware put all the left overs of the lunch (which were quite a lot), and asked my aunt to drive me to where he was. I didn’t tell him i was bringing him food, nor he expeted it, i just told him to wait for me, that i would be there in half an hour.
When i gave him the topperware, i could swear his eyes widdened with a mix of shock, surprise and gratitude.
after that, our friendship was unstopable, and we became best friends =)
The end.
One of my friends had moved out of her house with her boyfriend because her family didn’t have enough room for her and her siblings. When she and her boyfriend broke up, she didn’t want to move back into her family’s home because her siblings had their own rooms and were getting along for the first time, and she didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I offered my house to her and let her move in with me for 6 months while she got on her feet. It was tough because we have very different lifestyles, but it really helped her out- I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I realize that my good deed might be very small in comparison to some of the other ones here – but my most memorable was from last winter.
An old man was trying to walk down a very very slippy staircase with lots of ice on it. (It was outdoors, of course. And I do live in cold Norway!)
When I noticed him, he didn’t have that much longer to go, but he had sort of frozen in the middle, and weren’t sure how to step to not fall. I ran over to the staircase and gave him a hand, helping him down the rest of the stairs. :)
On Easter weekend my brother brought his daughter down to see her auntie (myself) and grandparents on Friday night, but he had to return her to his ex-wife Saturday night, causing him to miss the family dinner my parents had planned. Because I knew how hard it was for him to hand off my niece like he had to, I went with him, and took my car instead of his, so he’d have company and someone to talk to for the 2 hour drive back to our parents’ house after dropping her off with his ex-wife.
My high school youth group goes on a service project trip every year. Now this may not be small but was certainly memorable. One year my church went to the Dominican Republic. One of the members in our church did PeaceCor for a year in the DR and lived in a remote village. The town not too far away needed help building a Chocolate Factory. Since chocolate is the biggest produce in the DR. The DR is very moist and if the beans get moist they are rotten. So this Chocolate Factory helped dry the beans easier and quicker. Basically the factory was a long tunnel that we built from scratch. Mixing the cement, building the foundation, putting in the supports. The only thing we didn’t get to do was put the plastic covering over it. Without this factory a pound of beans was around .80c and the price nearly doubled ($1.50ish) with the factory. These beans are then fermented and sent to the major chocolate factories in the USA and around the world.
This story starts out odd, but ends well. I was in the restroom of the Chicago airport and noticed a passport resting on top of the TP dispenser. Not trying to be nosey, but completely curious, I opened it up and saw that it belonged to a woman. What struck me most about the ID, however, was her hair. She had the creamiest, most shimmery blonde hair I had ever seen. I assumed the women would come back for it when she realized it was missing, so I left it there. Leaving the restroom, however, I felt that maybe I had made the wrong choice and should have taken the passport to the lost and found. This is where things take a funny twist. As I was walking down the terminal, there – in front of me – was the long, creamy blonde hair glistening over a woman’s shoulders. The woman was about 15 feet in front of me and all of a sudden I noticed her grab her purse and start rummaging through it, all panicked. I ran up to her and said, ” I know this sounds odd, but did you just lose your passport?” She looked at me in disbelief and then I grabbed her hand and said, “I think I know exactly where you left it!”
Last winter, one of my close friends and I hadn’t been getting along very well lately, so things were a little tense between us. We were both in the computer lab around 1 am finishing up our projects. On her way out, my friend slipped and dislocated her knee.
She screamed my name, and I ran over and saw what happened. I called the ambulance and her mother, and me and a few other students who were there helped her and talked to her until the paramedics arrived. I went with her in the ambulance, and waited with her in the hospital until her mother arrived. Until she was signed out, her mom and I did lots of little things to cheer her up: treating her to Coke, drawing silly characters on the brace and medical tape, and just talking about things that made her happy. When she got worried the teacher would fail her for not showing up for her project presentation, I told her I would retrieve her project from the lab and give it to her teacher along with the doctor’s note.
We didn’t end up leaving the hospital until around 6 am. When her mom dropped me off at my dorm, both my friend and her mom thanked me for staying the entire time despite how late it was, and that I had to be awake for a presentation at 7:30 am. Both of them thanked me for looking out for my friend when she needed it most.
This somehow fixed all the tension my friend and I had been having, and we got a lot closer.
Donated money to cancer this morning.
Selling marshmallows with choclate for a charity :) we selled more than 800 marshmallows! :) Now the children in Liberia can go to a school! I’m only 16 years so I help the people where I can.
:) Hope everybody does something, something small is better than nothing
Sorry for the bad english, i’m from belguim
My story has a lot of background so sorry in advance: I used to work in an office building next to a store called The Asian Convenience Store. There was a nice little old lady who ran the store and I saw her every day when I went to buy snacks. We could never talk much but she was always super polite and one day she even lent me money for the bus and told me I could pay her back whenever! One day, a horrible thing happened to her. A man who had just been released on parole went into the store and beat her horribly, all for a pack of cigarettes. By the time passer-bys called the police, he had crushed her windpipe. She survived the attack but was too traumatized to go back to work in the store so her daughter and her daughter’s husband took it over.
Now it was the two younger people I became close to and I chatted with them and saw them everyday. Usually both of them were in there but one day, when it was just the daughter working, I was in there when a really large, intimidating man came in. He didn’t buy anything or really look for things to buy, just kind of hung around (which was strange because the store was extremely tiny). I could tell he was making the daughter nervous so I stayed there at the counter, talking to her and keeping her company until he finally left. I was more than twenty minutes late getting back to work, but she was so grateful and I could tell it made her feel so much more comfortable! I felt warm and happy the rest of the day that maybe, though I couldn’t help her mom, I made her a bit safer :)
My friend Anie has never really had a good relationship with her father. They have just never really been able to co me to terms with their supposed roles in Korean society. Anie is American through and through. Her father is still very Korean.
When she went off to Notre Dame for college, their relationship was even more strained. She wanted very badly to connect with her father, but never quite knew how.
One day I bought a box of notecards with envelopes from barnes and noble. I put address labels with her address @ university on every last envelope! Just so he couldn’t make more excuses for himself, I got first class stamps for ALL the envelopes!
He knew who I was, so I arranged for my sister to drop it off, with some excuse that they had gotten it at the address down the street. I attached a note too, that said something along the lines of “Don’t let your only child get away from you”.
To this day I have no idea if he ever sent her any of them. But I do know that they’re on better terms than they were. That was 3 years ago, and while I’m sure most of it involves personal maturity on both their parts, I’m glad they talk.
I was on my way home from a rather long day at the library. It was October, I think, or maybe November. My point: it was wet, cold, and dark. I had very little money left, and wasn’t sure when I’d see the next paycheck. On my way I noticed an old man under the neon lights of some boutique. For a while I just stood there, frozen, looking at that contrast. It was on a busy street, there was this Mexx store, there was this cafe, liquor store, with all these people buying half a metre of fabric for ten times the amount of this guy’s pension, spending half the amount of his pension for one meal.
I crossed the road, gave him all the money I had, and left. There really was very little, enough to buy bread and milk, at best. But he was thanking me as if it was the biggest thing anyone’s ever done to him, and his voice was shaking.
I cried like a wuss all the way back home. I often give money to beggars on the street as here where I live it’s the only way to make sure that charity reaches those who need it, and not some figure who will supposedly spread it to the masses. But I think I’ll remember this man for a long while. I hope he’s alive and well.
I smile at old people (or someone who really looks like they need someone to smile at them) when I pass them on the street, and when they smile back they look really happy. I really make it a point to do this because it might just bring a tiny bit of joy into that person’s life.
Another time I talked with my ex-boyfriend from high school for over 2 hours; I talked him self out of killing him self. Even though he broke my heart in HS, I forgave him and now we are good friends.
Wow – Cary, that was a really brilliant thing to do. Kudos to you for the thought and action!
Well, the most recent good deed that I’ve done, I guess…would be when i went to a resturante and the workers had gone on break, leaving a spanish dish boy there alone. People were ordering and he couldn’t speak a lick of english and I felt horrible for him! The customers were being extremly rude so i stepped in and translated for him and the people with my broken spanish! We got all the orders in and the man gave me a coke on the house! I was so happy that I got to help him! It felt really good! <3
The latest one? I talked to my 3year old cousin about fairies and the nature.It’s going to be a good thing to grow up believing in fairies, the ultimate nature lover’s, and eventually respect the environment…
When I was 10, my family was really poor. My brother and i lived with my dad who worked a night shift for not a lot of money. There were times when Dad had to pick between paying the phone bill, electric bill, water bill, rent, or food. He always choose us in the end. Sometimes not getting any food for himself.
So, for his birthday, I slipped $5 into his wallet while he was napping. I had saved that up for over a year and I thought it would be something to help him.
He must’ve figured it out because he came him and cried and hugged me. I just didn’t want him to keep choosing between us and him. We should all be able to eat and live :)
In college, I knew a girl who had really bad endometriosis. Both she and her family were not well-off by any means, and she was literally on her last pack of birth control pills…the same pills that helped regulate her system and make the symptoms of her disease bearable. She literally had NO MONEY to get her next pack of pills, so even just her anticipation of what her body might do when she went off the pills was awful for her.
My grandfather was still practicing medicine at the time, so I first asked my friend’s roommate what kind of pills she took, then called my grandpa to see if he had any samples. I thought he’d just send over a month or two supply, but he sent a SIX MONTH supply! I was able to sneak it into her room…she wasn’t supposed to know who sent it, but her roommate spilled the beans.
I remember the look on her face and the tears in her eyes very vividly. She gave me a giant hug and said “thank you” like a million times. It was really cool to know that something so simple could help someone that much.
Cool question, Doe! You have super readers.
A sweet little old lady came into the retail store I used to work in once. She had trouble walking, so I calculated the shortest route to pick up everything on the list, and slowly pushed the cart around for her while she shuffled along side. It was the nicest experience I’ve had providing customer service ever; she was so thankful, and I felt like more than a low-wage monkey performing repetitious tasks for once.
I work as a hostess at a restaurant in my town. Tonight, I’m covering a shift for this girl Lauren, whose grandfather passed away recently.
My good friend Cait is the Head Hostess and was supposed to cover the shift, but she has been having trouble with her relationship with this super sweet guy Brian, because they never get to see each other, because Cait always gets stuck filling in for other people on her days off.
I’m not feeling great today. I had a fever yesterday and a sore throat for three days. Fever’s gone, and I told Cait I’d take the shift for her so she could go see Pixar’s Up with Brian. She thanked me and told me I was saving her relationship, and promised me 100 ice cream sandwiches. :D
Every year I volunteer with a non-profit organization called Camp del Corazon. It’s a camp for kids 7-17 with cardiac issues (I have a congenital heart defect myself). I not only volunteer as a counselor for the camp, but in the office any time they need me, for whatever task, however menial or seemingly small. Every little bit helps. I will even have eBay auctions where the proceeds go to camp, even if I could easily use the money for myself. I don’t want them to ever have to turn a child away due to lack of funds (the camp pays for every child to go)
My mom works at the hospital and one of the nurse’s father-in-law fell and had to have hip surgey and they needed an overnight sitter to be with him and take care of him and I took up the job, I told them I’d do it for free but they ended up paying me anyways. :)