Charity

I'm afraid I don't do charity well.  There's two aspects to that though.  One is that I'm not by nature a generous person.  Neither a borrower nor a lender be resonates very well with me.  The other facet is that I am cognizant of the the charity business model.  I don't often give money to big charities but I will occasionally give some money to a person.

Yesterday I was on the road for work.  In fact I spent about 7 hours driving and I still didn't leave the province.  On the way home I stopped in the middle of nowhere at a small restaurant that caters to the traffic on the highway.  I walked in and the young lady who was shortly to become my waitress was talking to a very pregnant woman.  The conversation was animated and both girls were obviously excited.  Then the pregnant one left and the waitress took my order.  I spoke to the waitress and the pregnant lady was her sister and was leaving for the hospital as she was almost 42 weeks and they wanted to assess her before inducing her.  The waitress was obviously excited at the prospect of being an aunt.

About ten minutes later she got a phone call as she was delivering my entree.  Her sister's water had broke on the way to the hospital.  The waitress levitated back to the kitchen to call in someone to cover her so she could head to the hospital.  I thought about it over lunch and decided to leave a baby gift with the waitress. When I paid my bill I fished a twenty dollar bill out of my wallet and told her that it was for her sister's new baby.  The waitress whipped around the counter gave me a big hard hug and told me how nice that was.

About thirty minutes later I realized I hadn't tipped the waitress I'd only left the baby gift.  You see even with the best intentions I still don't do charity well.