Random Acts of Kindness
(Repost from Tracy's original blog, Sunday January 31st 2010.)
We are always short on ice. Actually, we have a running joke on my side of the family because my Father is an iced tea fanatic. He drinks it all day long. In my parents' house the refrigerator is sitting on a funny angle or something because the ice machine would inevitable be one, big, frozen mass of unusable ice. My Father would hear someone reach in for ice and he would yell, "Don't take all the ice!" So now, we always bring him ice anytime we visit.
At our Mill, where the Vanilla Kitchen is, we used to have this small ice maker, and that was all it was supposed to do: make ice. Well, it started out producing perfectly square, one inch cubes. Then we started finding puddles on the floor in the morning. We kept having problems with it for almost 2 years before it finally just quit.
It must have been a generational curse.
So we then began buying ice. I detest buying something we can produce ourselves, but we always seem to be short on freezer space and we don't have any of the big commercial freezers plumbed in to produce ice. So, being the Over Analyzer that I am, I began to devise a way for Grandpa to bag the ice produced from his standard kitchen freezer, everyday, put it in the back chest freezer and then we would fill up the big ice chest in the kitchen freezer for service. This almost always works out well for us. We are a small operation and even on very busy days don't see more than 40 to 50 people. But when we're serving 40 to 50 people cold vanilla lemonade and iced tea on a very hot day in Hawaii, there are bound to be ice issues.
It must have been a generational curse.
So we then began buying ice. I detest buying something we can produce ourselves, but we always seem to be short on freezer space and we don't have any of the big commercial freezers plumbed in to produce ice. So, being the Over Analyzer that I am, I began to devise a way for Grandpa to bag the ice produced from his standard kitchen freezer, everyday, put it in the back chest freezer and then we would fill up the big ice chest in the kitchen freezer for service. This almost always works out well for us. We are a small operation and even on very busy days don't see more than 40 to 50 people. But when we're serving 40 to 50 people cold vanilla lemonade and iced tea on a very hot day in Hawaii, there are bound to be ice issues.
This was one of those days. Jim took Isaac, Elliot and Aidan and rushed into Honoka'a for some ice. He grabbed two bags and went to check out. Well, they won't take a debit/credit card for ice. They rush back to the car and start searching for change. They had $1.39, two dollars short. they had all the car doors open and were reaching between the seats when a gentleman walks over, hands Jim two dollars (exactly what they needed) and says,"It's really silly they won't take a credit card for ice." And then he got in his car and drove off.
Of course Jim and the boys thanked him profusely. But what I want to thank him for is not the ice. It's for showing my boys what it means to see a need and fill it, if you are able. It's the forever-learning of the paying-it-forward process that we all need to be playing our part in. Life is caught more than taught and I hope my boys catch whatever it was that he had.