 These days, we all have to pitch in to keep each other safe and sane. Here, longtime amigos Pete and Kathi drop by with homemade pizza and humor therapy to boost our spirits. So this pheasant flies into a pub, smacks headfirst into the wall, stuns itself silly, and falls onto the floor. As Good Samaritan r/CasualUK explained on Reddit, “My husband decided we should try and take it to a more ‘pheasant appropriate’ place in the car ... The plan was to wrap the pheasant up in his jacket and I was to have the pheasant on my lap.” All went well until her husband’s next kindly impulse: turning on the car’s heating system. The sudden blast of air drove the pheasant berserk. “It was flying around the car, I was screaming and my husband was still trying to drive. It was flapping all over the car … pooping as it went. My husband pulled over … and we opened the door to get the pheasant out ... well, that was another 20 minute job.” I can only imagine the pheasant’s side of the story: assaulted by the pub wall, kidnapped by giants, escaped by the skin of its beak. It’s always a matter of perspective.  "It was a nightmare, I tell you," the pheasant keeps saying to its mates down at the pub. On the same Reddit thread, biscuitboy89 told about sitting on a train and having a baby seagull wander in and settle on his feet. The conductor suggested the guard at the next station would “take care of it,” but that sounded ominous to biscuitboy89 (and doubtless to the baby seagull as well). So he took the youngster home, where he discovered it loved hot dogs, baked beans, and Cheerios. (Who doesn't?) Eventually he took the bird to a rescue center run by “a pretty kind but very eccentric lady. Amongst all the cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, geese, goats, pigs, llamas, rabbits, guinea pigs and god knows what else, this lady had about 15 baby seagulls in a barn. They had a big safe area full of straw, with a heat lamp and loads of cat food to eat. She said she just feeds them and when they want to leave, they make their own way and fly off.”  A baby sea gull finds comfort and safety in a Minnesota rescue center. I love the randomness of this rescue story, and the selflessness of bisciutboy89 and the eccentric lady. They remind us that we never know when or where we’re likely to have a chance to do something kind for a fellow creature. These are moments of grace, offering us the opportunity to be our best selves, to rise to the occasion with generosity and Cheerios. I have the good fortune to have one such opportunity 24/7 in my California neighborhood: a community fridge.  San Anselomo's community fridge displays a poster by local school children with the motto, "Take what you need, leave what you can." Tucked away in a hidden corner of a church’s side porch, the refrigerator holds donated fruits, vegetables, milk, and other fresh food; next to it is a metal locker full of pantry goods: rice, beans, pasta, hamburger buns. Everyone’s invited to contribute. Anyone can help themselves to anything they need. No strings attached, no questions asked. Ever. “If you see your neighbor taking five cartons of eggs,” said Sabrina Socorro, one of the founders of Marin Community Fridges, “you don’t ask why. There is no hierarchy and no policing of each other.” The concept of community foodsharing sites took off about ten years ago in Germany then Spain. The first one I saw was the Kindness Wall in Kalamata, Greece in 2019. A Kalamata woman told me, “The important thing is that it’s anonymous, so neighbors in need aren’t shamed in front of the community.” Sometimes called “freedges,” or “(N)ICE Boxes,” hundreds of community fridges popped up across America during the pandemic, mostly on private property. The Love Fridge Chicago — launched in 2020 using the slogan, “We all gotta eat, we’re all gonna eat” — now maintains 23 fridges throughout the city. New York has over 100. LA and San Francisco each have 16. My county, Marin, hosts a handful; my town, San Anselmo, is home to one.  Tatiana Smith organizes the community fridge outside her house in Jersey City during the pandemic. Photo: Ismail Ferdous/The Guardian Because my town is not poor or urban, early on people questioned whether a fridge was even needed here. But constant usage demonstrates that these days hunger can happen anywhere, to anyone. Food insecurity — not having the financial resources to put three square meals on the table every day — affects 47 million Americans, including 14 million kids. “To truly address hunger at this scale,” wrote MIT Urban Studies professor Ezra Glenn, “would require food banks the size of supermarkets and a distribution network comparable to Amazon’s.” Instead, there’s a patchwork of charities and government food programs, many of which are on the chopping block right now. Beyond that, it’s up to us.  Lisa (left) and Sue explain how they organize the community fridge and pantry. For overflow, there's extra storage in the church kitchen. Supplies rarely get depleted, but if they do, donated funds are available to restock. This week I met with Lisa and Sue, who lead the handful of volunteers keeping San Anselmo’s refrigerator and pantry clean and tidy, weeding out the stuff they can’t accept, such as expired canned goods and opened packages. Both women are members of First Presbyterian Church, which bought the refrigerator, provides space for it on the porch, and covers the cost of electricity, about $30 a month. An electrician from the congregation helped with the wiring. Neighbors, businesses, and community organizations donate groceries. “How many people take food every week?” I inquired. “We get asked that a lot,” said Lisa. “We have no idea. We don’t keep track of anything like that.” What? No controls? No CCTV? That’s a shockingly loosey-goosey attitude! And yet it works, benefitting those who give as much as those who receive. Nowadays when I shop, I often pick up extra rice or olive oil to donate, and this week the unopened portion of my latest Costco impulse buy — a massive supply of Quaker Oats — is heading over there. Stepping onto that porch is always a feel-good moment for me. I have learned that when madness roams the earth and threatens to overwhelm my soul, the surest way to dispel the gloom is doing something for others. Our acts of kindness are how we maintain “islands of sanity,” according to poet Margaret J. Wheatly. “It is now too late to solve global issues globally to try to save the world,” she says. “We can only work locally to create islands of sanity that will preserve the best of the human spirit.” I thought about the Irish monks who spent the Dark Ages copying books, so the collective wisdom acquired over thousands of years would not be wholly lost. Today Wayback Machine archivists are copying endangered digital material; they've saved 835 billion webpages so far. The rest of us are entrusted with an equally vital task: preserving such intangibles as human decency and compassion.  Not all our efforts have ideal endings. I suspect r/CasualUK won’t be relocating another dazed pheasant any time soon. But often the results exceed our expectations. Think of all the cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, geese, goats, pigs, llamas, rabbits, guinea pigs, and baby seagulls that owe their lives to that eccentric woman at the rescue barn. It's comforting to know our small acts of kindness are not just helping those around us, they’re contributing to the preservation of the human spirit through dark and perilous times, as so many have done before us, keeping alive hopes of seeing brighter days ahead.  A young volunteer inspects a community fridge in the UK. Photo: Lucy Young Learn more and find a community fridge near you. Curious about what it takes to start one? Got a story about a community fridge or other acts of kindness? Let me know in the comments below. FINDING HOPE This story is part of a series of blog posts exploring ways people help each other find hope in this worrying world. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POST ANNOUNCEMENTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.
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 Joel Eis in his Rebound Bookstore, reading from Fahrenheit 451 during Banned Books Week 2024. This morning a podcast host sent me a list of questions we’ll be discussing next week, starting with this one about my move to Seville: “What were some of the most surprising challenges you faced — and what helped you adapt successfully?” My mind instantly filled with a montage of memories — early attempts to order tea in a bar, Spanish lessons with condescending 20-somethings, the intervention about my hair… I recalled with a shudder one of the biggest shockers: getting banished from Seville’s public library.  Seville's main public library, Biblioteca Infanta Elena, scene of my banishment Early on I’d discovered the library’s tiny collection of English-language books: dog-eared Agatha Christies I’d already read, popular novels several generations out of date, and fawning biographies. I began slowly working my way through this underwhelming assortment until one day I returned a book late. And instead of being fined (something with which I am abundantly familiar) I was banned from the library for three weeks. Oh, the horror! It felt like hearing they were cutting off my oxygen supply for three weeks. I slunk away in disgrace and soon afterwards bought my first e-reader.  My first e-reader was this 2012 Kindle with a keyboard and a miniature lamp you pulled from the spine. No backlighting, no touch screen. You turned the page via a button. Positively primitive! Of course, I will always love print editions, and whenever I’m in California, I haunt local booksellers. My favorite is the cozy second-hand Rebound Bookstore — aka "the Biggest Little Bookstore in the Universe" — in the nearby city of San Rafael. Owners Toni and Joel Eis are my kind of book people: passionate, quirky, and dedicated to sharing ideas. “Community is everything,” said Joel, when I sat down with him this week. “That’s why we’re here.” He and Toni host poetry readings, jazz nights, stand-up comedy, occasional pot luck gatherings, and book clubs — including the newly formed Outlaw Bookworms devoted to reading banned books. (Yes, I've joined it. )  I'm re-reading this for the first time since high school to prep for the inaugural meeting of Outlaw Bookworms. Right now I'm in the middle of the big courtroom scene. The story has lost none of its punch. Joel fell in love with the bookshop twenty years ago, when he came out from Colorado because he’d heard the owner was ready to sell. “As I came into the store, this young girl, probably a high school kid, came out. I can see her now. She was wearing a lovely summer dress and she had a book in her arms and she spun around out in front of the store, like ‘Oh, boy, I’ve got something really cool.’ And I said, ‘You know, that’s what I want to do. I want to make people feel like that.’” Unfortunately, not all American teenagers are dancing in the streets for the sheer love of reading. In fact, 33% of eighth graders and 40% of fourth graders fail to meet basic literacy benchmarks in school. “A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate,” wrote David Brooks in the NY Times. “Literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world.”  Without the ability to figure out what’s going on, weigh options, and calculate consequences, it’s tough to make smart moves in life. It’s no coincidence that 75% of those who wind up in prison are illiterate. In the general population “thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” Actually, that explains a lot. Have you seen the headlines lately? It’s pretty clear that current events are more like knuckleheaded bullying on a fourth-grade playground than decisions based on evidence, reason, or wisdom — let alone compassion. Let's face it, making sense of the world is never easy; that’s why books were invented.  Americans typically read about 12 books a year. The average adult spends 19 minutes a day reading, usually before bed. Reading a book takes about eight to twelve hours, and spending that much time inside someone else’s mindscape broadens our experience and enriches our perspective — sometimes in ways that transform us forever. Here are a couple of wonderful examples from Tobias Carroll’s 28 Authors on the Books that Changed Their Lives. “The first massive Rock My World book,” wrote Maria Dahvana Headley, author of Magonia, “was Beloved, which I read when I was 17. Not only was I clueless about race in America at that point, coming from where I came from, I was also clueless about living female genius writers. I didn’t know there were any. Up to that point, I’d read almost entirely white men. KA-BAM. I got blasted out of the universe of dead white boys, and into something much more magnificent. Toni Morrison’s way of flawlessly entwining her haunting with her history left me dazzled, sobbing, and bewildered.”  “Although I read Far From the Tree about two and a half years ago,” wrote Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Eligible, “I still think of it all the time — its exploration of a wide range of disabilities, its examination of what a disability is, its extraordinary compassion. I truly feel that if our civilization was destroyed and Far From the Tree was the only book that survived, it could convey to future alien races nearly everything there is to know about 21st-century earthlings.” Wow. You don’t hear that kind of praise for posts on Facebook or TikTok. You can see why Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, once said, “I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.”  We need all kinds of bookstores: retailers with new releases from what’s-happening-now authors and little independent shops like Rebound that carry hard-to-find second-hand editions, the ones that are loved enough to be kept around long past their sell-by dates. Having a wide range of books is vital to our civilization. Because as Haruki Murakami, author of Norwegian Wood, pointed out, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” And if there was ever a time to up our thinking game, it’s now. We’re watching a new world order being carved out in real time; life as we know it is being upended. We’re all feeling much as I did in my early days in Seville, as if we’ve woken up in a foreign land with unknown rules and no guarantees about how it’s all going to work out. But others have gone down similar paths before us, and they have left us plenty of guideposts to help us find our way. Since Gutenberg’s time, we humans have written hundreds of millions of books, and while not all of them are life-changing works of profound genius, there are plenty offering us fresh ideas and new avenues of hope and comfort. So how about it? Can we really get through these dark times? As Nelson Mandela wrote, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” I take those encouraging words as a resounding yes.  For years, Joel and Toni have been talking about selling the bookstore and retiring. But for now, they remain stalwart guardians of our civilization's intellectual treasures. Thanks for your service, guys! WHAT BOOK CHANGED YOUR LIFE? Let me know in the comments section below! FINDING HOPE This story is part of a series of blog posts exploring ways people help each other find hope in this worrying world. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POST ANNOUNCEMENTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Humor isn't in AI's repertoire. When a journalist asked artificial intelligence to create a New Yorker-style cartoon, this was the result. Drawing: 10 points. Caption: Huh? Ya gotta love AI. Its brainpower is (I checked) 6 billion times as large as mine, and yet this morning, when I was searching for a quote about surprising outcomes, this was the best it could come up with: “The unexpected is the only thing that can surprise you.” Well, duh! My modest human brain was looking for a nifty way to describe the way small stuff can bloom into extraordinary experiences. Like the woman I knew in Ohio who couldn’t resist adopting a stray dog. And a second. Then more. When she found my future puppy, Eskimo Pie, by the side of the road, she was tempted to keep her, too. At nine weeks, Pie had that extra dollop of adorability that made even the most hardened cynic coo, “Awww, look at that little face!”  Pie was a tiny, adorable puppy — and she milked it for all it was worth. “I love her already,” the woman said. “But I don’t really need another dog.” “How many do you have now?” I asked. “Twenty-seven.” Gadzooks! “Where do you keep them all?” I imagined some rambling country farm with dogs gamboling about the hayfields. “We live in a little house with a small yard. But my husband built an extra room for the dogs.” I pictured a heaving mass of bored canines draped over shabby furniture, stained rugs, and one another. When I took the puppy home I very nearly named her “Lucky” because she had clearly dodged a bullet.  This is how I imagined that woman's house. And speaking of projects taking on a life of their own, there was the time that Rich had his Brilliant Idea about the dead oak in our front yard. “I was going to hire someone to haul it away, but instead I’m going to get that Amish guy to help me cut it into planks we can use in home improvement projects. It’ll pay for itself!” You see where this is going? The ancient tree produced ten 15-foot logs, each weighing 2000 pounds. An Amish miller arrived with a complicated system of claws, pulleys, and terrifying blades to saw the logs into rough planks. After shifting the planks to the barn for a year of drying, Rich hired haulers to take them to a kiln, and 90 days later hired another crew to transport them to a craftsman who produced finished tongue-in groove boards.  The tree on the left is the century-old red oak that Rich turned into useful (but not inexpensive) flooring. “How much do you figure that tree cost us?” I asked Rich this morning at breakfast. He shrugged and changed the subject. But for simple jobs that grow beyond our wildest expectations, I have to hand it to our friend Joe Kinsella. One day he heard about a Marine fresh from Afghanistan named Adrian Kinsella (no relation, but it caught Joe's attention) who was trying to help his former field interpreter and family resettle in the US. The translator was 18 when he began serving with the military. “The troops nicknamed him Yoda, like the Star Wars character, because he didn’t say very much,” Joe told me. “His mother and seven younger siblings did not know what he did when he disappeared during the day. It was kind of ‘loose lips sink ships.’ But he did ask for permission from his father.” “My dad, he was glad,” Yoda recalled in a 2014 interview with John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. “He was really excited, he was like ‘This is a great opportunity, you’re going to be helping your country and supporting the US troops; they are here for your country, to rebuild your country.’”  John Oliver interviews Yoda in November 2014. The Taliban took a dimmer view; they saw collaboration as a death penalty offense for the whole family. First, they kidnapped and killed Yoda’s father. Next they abducted Yoda’s youngest brother, a toddler. Then they thought, “Hey, why not turn a profit?” They told Yoda, “Your brother will be laid on the grave of your father unless you give us all your money.” “They got hurt because of me, because of my job,” said Yoda. He paid every penny the family had — almost $35,000 — to get his brother back, then they all fled to Pakistan. As fugitives with dubious legal standing, they spent five years rarely leaving the house, foregoing school and medical care to stay out of sight. Luckily, the USA takes care of those who have risked their lives for us; a Special Interest Visa was available for the whole family. Unfortunately, the red tape involved was insane. After three and a half years, Yoda got his visa but his family remained stuck in Pakistan. Then John Oliver did a show called Translators, holding up stacks of paperwork and sharing some of its many absurdities.  Oliver shows an actual question from the US State Department's DS260 Form. "To which I'm guessing your answer is, 'To be honest, my main plan was to not get killed by the Taliban. I haven't really worked out a plan of attack for my sex life yet." “By now the ghost of Franz Kafka is thinking ‘Don’t you dare call this Kafkaesque, I don’t want my name anywhere near this,’” Oliver said. “‘Compared to this, waking up as a cockroach is normal.’” He showed a stray donkey befriended by American troops that was transported to America in just eight months while Yoda’s family spent half a decade in hiding. How embarrassed was the State Department? It brought Yoda’s family to America the month after Oliver’s show aired. And Joe — in one of those small impulses that change your life — offered to help them find housing. He soon found himself in charge of “Team Yoda,” volunteers from the NextDoor community and a nearby Catholic congregation who helped the family get settled.  (From left) Joe, Yoda, and Adrian Meanwhile Adrian Kinsella did paperwork to pave the way for their green card applications. This was complicated by the fact that on all legal documents, Yoda, whose first name is Mohammed, was erroneously listed as Mohammed, FNU (first name unknown), so he became embedded in the American system as Fnu Mohammed. Then there were the cultural issues. The Afghans were astounded when Joe explained you don’t bargain with the cashiers at American supermarkets, and that dentist appointments are for a precise time, not whenever you show up. Over the years he has become “Uncle Joe” to Yoda’s family, celebrating with them as the older kids graduated from college and started careers, when Yoda became a biomedical engineer, the day green cards were finally granted in 2023, the announcement that youngest, the toddler kidnapped by the Taliban, made the high school track team.  Joe and his wife, Susan, recently joined the family for iftar, the meal after sunset that breaks the Ramadan fast. Joe’s story made me think about all the people — from close kin to total strangers — who must have assisted my relatives when they first immigrated to America. Why do we help people we don’t even know? Because we understand, deep in our ancestral brains, that cooperation has always been the key to survival. That was true when we were spindly little newcomers on the African savannas, surrounded by larger creatures with ferocious teeth and claws, and it’s equally certain now, as we turn more and more of our lives over to machines with 6 billion times our data capacity, but none of our hard-earned wisdom or compassion. Looking out for one another is how we Homo Sapiens have paid it forward for 200,000 years. Given current realities, who is to say that we might not end up as refugees in a foreign land someday? If so, we can only hope that we are lucky enough to have an Uncle Joe around to welcome us to our new home.  Much to learn we still have FINDING HOPE This story is part of a series of blog posts exploring ways people help each other find hope in this worrying world. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Ohio, 1988. We had to drag Buck out from under the deck for this family snapshot. Can you tell he's not really into it? Right after we married, Rich and I moved to Ohio, bought an old stone house, and adopted Buck. He was a fine figure of a dog but (and I say this lovingly) not an intellectual giant. He was perpetually baffled by half-open doors, never realizing he could push one all the way open with his nose and walk through. Everything terrified him: loud noises, people he didn’t know, people he did know, his food bowl, and mice, to name but a few. His favorite activity was cowering under our back deck. Occasionally we would drive him into the nearby village of Chagrin Falls to stroll through the park by the river in a vain attempt to interest him in the world. He would shuffle morosely along, looking like he was on his way to the gallows, until we gave up and took him home. And then, one snowy winter day in the park, he spotted ducks landing on the river’s frozen surface. A hitherto unsuspected killer instinct kicked in. He tore his leash free from human hands and galloped across the ice toward his prey. Unfortunately, there had been some thawing, so ten yards out the ice crumbled beneath him. As the ducks flapped slowly away (I swear they were snickering), Buck dropped like a stone into the freezing water, just above the falls.  Chagrin Falls in winter. Photo: David Petkiewicz Rich dashed into the nearby hardware store shouting, “Dog through the ice. I need a rope!” The owner flung him one. Rich raced back, tied the rope around his waist, handed me the end, and crawled forward on his belly like a reptile to distribute his weight across the fragile surface. Buck was pawing at the crumbling ice, his wild-eyed look clearly saying, “See? The world really is a terrible, horrible place!” Slowly Rich inched across the frozen surface, grabbed hold, and hauled Buck out of the water to safety. And it did not lessen the heroism of that moment one iota when we learned that the river was less than two feet deep in that section, and Rich could have easily kicked through the ice and waded to the rescue. But then, I wouldn’t be re-telling this story decades later, would I?  "Well, I think you're wonderful!" Afterwards, while Buck wallowed in PTSD, Rich basked in the satisfied glow that accompanies acts of kindness. In these cynical times, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the survival of sentient beings over the last four billion years is largely due to cooperation, the simple act of lending a helping hand — or paw — when it is needed most. Scientists and philosophers once defined altruism as uniquely human, but they’ve had to eat their words as experiment after experiment has demonstrated the surprising amount of selflessness in the animal kingdom. Classic trials with rats show they’ll work to free a trapped companion and refrain from pressing a bar to get food for themselves it if means one of their own will get an electric shock.  A mouse petforms a kind of rodent CPR on a friend. A recent University of Southern California report “shows that mice tend to help other mice they know are unconscious. Their response ranges from gentle sniffing and grooming to more forceful actions such as mouth or tongue biting, before finally escalating to pulling the tongue out of the unconscious mouse.” (I'm hoping this means extending the tongue past the lips, not ripping it out altogether.) The study’s author, Wenjian Sun, commented, “The behavior was especially unique due to its similarity to how humans behave in emergency responses.” (OK, yes, whew! I think that means the tongue thing is what I said.) “A pawsitively endearing behavioral study on dogs,” reported Huffington Post, “has discovered our four-legged friends exhibit human-like levels of empathy and giving toward each other — but with special preference for ones they know.” In the experiment, dogs literally pulled strings to obtain treats for their friends.  Doggone good behavior from donor on the right, who tugged the cord to give his friend a treat. Photo: University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna “Chimpanzees,” noted Live Science, “have now shown they can help strangers at personal cost without apparent expectation of personal gain, a level of selfless behavior often claimed as unique to humans.” Are humans really selfless? Not all the time, obviously. But we sometimes manage to rise to the occasion with breathtaking acts of compassionate courage. Take the evacuation of Dunkirk, for example. For younger readers, this was early in WWII, when the Nazis overwhelmed the Allied Forces and trapped them on the northern tip of France with their backs to the sea. Their only hope for survival was evacuation, but the beaches were too shallow for ships, the harbor was heavily mined, and the Luftwaffe kept circling overhead, strafing and shelling. A call went out, and 850 British volunteers set forth in their own small boats — skiffs, fishing trawlers, pleasure yachts, lifeboats, barges — anything that could stay afloat long enough to get those soldiers off the beach. The organizers prayed they could save 40,000 men. They rescued 338,226.  A flotilla of "Little Ships" rescued soldiers trapped on the beach at Dunkirk.  It took nine days to get them off the beaches. It seems to me that we are in a Dunkirk moment right now. Our world feels more chaotic and dangerous than ever before in my lifetime. The ultimate outcome is far from certain. Many of us are afraid. And I ask myself, if they were in my shoes, what would all those altruistic mice, dogs, and chimpanzees do? They would look after each other.  Lowland gorillas Jamila and Suwedi comfort each other in a German zoo. Photo: Roland Weihrauch/DPA/AFP via Getty Images I’m proud to say many humans are stepping up to meet the animal kingdom’s standard of compassion. In the two weeks I’ve been back in California, I’ve been impressed and inspired by all the ways, large and small, my friends and neighbors are helping those around them. Their acts of kindness recall the seven Corporal Works of Mercy I was taught in my Catholic schooldays: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, tending the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and burying the dead. OK, I’m leaving that last one to the professionals, but the others are as important today as they were in Biblical times. Not to second-guess Divine Wisdom, but I would add more stuff, like helping newcomers, the illiterate, and the technologically challenged. However you define them, works of mercy and compassion matter in this world. And if the nuns were right, in the next as well.  As my regular readers know, I spent the last six months in Seville answering questions from anxious friends about how to escape the US and move abroad if necessary. Now that I’m back in California, I want to explore how folks in America are finding ways to stand firm, build connections, and watch out for one another. Like that ragtag flotilla of little boats heading to Dunkirk, we must endeavor to save as many as we can. And who knows? Maybe our small acts of kindness will add up to something that changes the course of history. I’m still debating what to call my new theme — Dunkirk Moments? Ordinary Heroes? The Kindness of Mice? Whatever I settle on, the posts I write this spring and summer will highlight compassion in action, reminding us that the world isn't always, as Buck thought, a terrible, horrible place. Somehow, in spite of everything, life still offers hope, love, laughter, and on a good day, evidence that humans can be as decent as mice. THE KINDNESS OF MICE This is the first in a series of blog posts exploring ways we help each other when we need it most. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco  If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
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I'm an American travel writer dividing my time between Seville, Spain, and California. I travel the world seeking eccentric people, quirky places, and outrageously delicious food so I can have the fun of writing about them here.
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Winner of the Firebird Book Award for Travel
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April 2025
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