Pay It Forward

Here is another exciting story that also appeared in the Virginia -Pilot under their Pay It Forward snippets. It was more abbreviated then, so here is the full story:

That first year I only invited restaurants in the downtown area to participate. Once the field of participants had been narrowed down to 14, I made an attempt to pick up all the donations on the same day, basically scheduling a stop every fifteen minutes. One of my first stops was at Outback Steakhouse.

That year Outback had a fairly large box, all the donations in the same box. There was no way I was going to be able to carry it by myself out to the truck or to lift it into the bed, so the dishwasher offered to help. Now I have no idea the circumstances that led this gentleman down the road to this particular job at his age. And I have no idea why someone of his age would have to ask permission from the very young kitchen manager to leave the area for only a few moments to load a box into my truck. We have our different paths to walk, and often in F & B, those paths seem altered by hard lives and strange choices.

We carried the box and loaded it in the back of the truck, and then the man asked if I could wait a few minutes. He said he had not contributed anything yet and wanted to run into the nearby Dollar Store to buy a few things for the drive. So I waited... and waited... and waited... and waited. The day had just started and I was already behind schedule! The stress was about to give me a stroke! I started to think maybe he had gone out another door.

So I went inside to look for him. There he was, standing at the register with bags and bags of food. $50.oo worth of food! I asked him what he was doing; why so much food? And he told me his family had been on welfare most of the past year, that they had depended on their local food pantry to feed the kids, and now that he had a steady paycheck, it was time to give back.

Now I don't know how this man got into this position, but I do know for that Christmas season, he was my angel. He was the one who made it worthwhile, and he was the one who I thought about the next year when deciding whether to try it all again.