Winnipeg’s old bus terminal downtown.
One day, back when the Greyhound bus station was downtown, I was walking by with six bags of groceries. About a half dozen men and women were hanging around near the doors of the station seemingly just socializing.
As I was passing by, one woman quickly turned and offered to carry my groceries and I politely declined this offer. She and I seemed not to know each other; this was just a spur of the moment offer without even asking how far I was going. And maybe I could have taken the offer and offered back a tip or a city bus ticket.
I feared right away the woman could have accessed some of my bags with the offer, run off and I’d be stuck dropping off the remainder to catch up to her only for others of their group to grab those bags too.
There could have been a true genuine offer there, though you just wonder why a group of people would gather to talk and offer their hand with heavy bags of passerby pedestrians.
Churchill, Manitoba
Had I been in a small town known to offer this type of help, and for obvious short distances of a place that a small community would be situated in, I might have taken up the offer and also returned the favour with other people’s heavy loads of food, tools or whatever it may be. While I would not take a ride offered from a stranger in Winnipeg, I recall taking rides off any man or woman in Churchill some years back. It was our way of getting around without ever showing a thumb; you just walk and sooner or later a car would stop.
Could Winnipeg ever get that trusty? Who knows, but we can do better then we are now. And the “Pay it Forward” thing as well as the CNC Town Hall event on the subject of compassion held just over a month ago, to get us knowing each other, these kinds of actions may well ease our worries, and help us funnel the bad ones into better choices with us.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the excitement of picking the wings off butterflies to see how long they live was traded in for the excitement of adding gentle breezes to see how high they can fly.
Monarch butterfly in Assiniboine Park English Garden. Photo by Amy Giesbrecht.
