One day I stopped my car and leaned out my window to call to a man by the side of the road. He looked to be in distress. I said, “Can I help you?”

His reply, “Yes, please, I’ve lost my dog. Have you seen her? She’s an old black lab, and I’m afraid she’s been hit by a car.”

I hadn’t seen his dog along the small country road, but I told him I would keep a look out as I drove home, and could I do anything else? It seemed such a small matter to me, to have stopped in the first place and to tell him I would look as I drove along the road to my home. We exchanged names. I took his number in case I found the dog, and I drove home, my eyes scanning both sides of the road. I found no dog. I wondered for a while if he’d found her, then I forgot. A week or so later, I saw the man again in town. He recognized me first and waved me over. He’d found his dog. She’d found some smelly carcass in the woods and had come home by herself, reeking of dead animal, limping with exhaustion but otherwise fine. Then he thanked me. I asked him why? I hadn’t done anything. He said, “you were the only one to stop that day. You were the only one to offer help. You were very kind.”

I didn’t see it. I had been kind? I thought I’d simply been human. Kindness, to me, meant going out of one’s way to help someone. To me, kindness was when my mother stopped a woman on the street and told her she could come stay at our house until she got back on her feet. The woman had been pushing a shopping cart full suitcases, and had four little girls with her. She’d been kicked out of her house by her husband. My mother, upon hearing her story, found her a lawyer and kept in touch long enough to make sure the woman and her daughters were taken care of. To me, that was kindness. But when I told my mother, she insisted that it was just being human.

Once I was flying back to Europe on my birthday. I was leaving my home, going to an uncertain future. I was in a bad mood, depressed, a little scared, and all that made me feel angry. I decided I would sit in my seat and not speak to anyone, but when I started filling out the card for customs, the man next to me saw it was my birthday, leaned over, and asked me why I was flying that day. I said I was just going back to work. I was still in a bad mood so I curled up in my seat and tried to sleep. At midnight, three hours after take-off, it was my birthday. A tap on my shoulder. The stewardess offering me a glass of champagne – from the man next to me – for my birthday. I was surprised, and a little sheepish for being so churlish before. I thanked him, and we started to talk. This is what I found out. He was from Brazil, and he was going to Paris to collect his son’s body. His son had been working in Paris on a construction site, and had had an accident. The embassy called him. He was to go to the morgue to identify his son’s remains, then eveything had been organized for him to fly back to Brazil for the funeral. I was devastated for him – we were both crying at this point. I was thinking how kind he was to offer me a glass of champagne when he was mourning, how awful it must be to lose a child. Then there was the problem of language. His English was rudimentary and he spoke no French at all. He had booked a room at a place near the morgue. He had never been to Paris. He told me about his son. Showed me pictures of him. I suddenly thought of my roommate, Carmen, who was Brazilien. In those days, there were no cellphones. I told him to wait when we got through customs, and we found a payphone. I called Carmen and passed him the phone.

Carmen was incredible. She met him at his hotel. She accompanied him to the morgue and to the prefecture, helped him with his papers. She stayed with him from the moment he arrived until the day he left. We had one dinner together. He gave me a small wooden charm, and he said it was for luck. I still have it. He told me I was a kind person. But again, I had to disagree. I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t the one to accompany him, to translate for him, to give four days out of her busy job to make sure he was OK. I had simply made a phone call. Carmen did the rest. He said, yes, Carmen is an amazing person. A heroine. But I had been kind – kind enough to see a solution to his problem, even though I could not help him, I put him in contact with someone who could. In that way, I’d been more than kind.

Perhaps, in this world, we could use a little more kindness. In my experience, it doesn’t take much: a moment of time, a question, “Can I help you?”, a glass of champagne and a birthday wish, a thought, a connection. Real heros like Carmen and my mother are precious and hard to emulate. But kindness – that – anyone can do.