Acts of common decency come to light

Every once in a while, it’s good to acknowledge common decency — which is what came to mind over the last little while as, independently, a handful of such tales landed quietly in the inbox:

It bugged Cook Street Barbershop owner Rolf Moosmann that one of his regulars, an octogenarian with no family, was stuck with a wholly inadequate means of transportation: “He has an old beat-up walker, held together with duct tape and equipped with an old rusty hammer in case the wheels seize. This walker does not fold up, so he can’t use the bus or a cab.”

So, last week, Moosmann decided to do a fundraiser in the barbershop to buy his customer an electric scooter that he found at nearby Mobility Rentals for $600.

Except when Moosmann asked to take a picture to use for the fundraiser, the owner volunteered on the spot to donate the scooter. Nice.

Bob Gougeon wrote from Nanoose Bay to say I should get Courtenay’s Wendy Knudson to tell the tale of the battered cyclist who came wobbling into the Seven Springs camp near Parksville just as the Vancouver Island Music Workshop was setting up for a weekend retreat.

The cyclist, a young woman from Texas, had twice been blown off the Island Highway by passing trucks and was looking for a quieter route.

Ah, but a wounded young wanderer can’t stumble into a group of 100 mostly middle-aged folkies and get away that easily. “We’re all parents, right?” Knudson said.

So the musicians fed her lunch. They tended her bruises. When they found out she used to play the viola, someone rustled up a spare fiddle (close enough) and they gave her a scholarship to the music camp. When the woman performed at the closing concert, someone FaceTimed her family in Austin to show them that she was OK. After that, someone else drove her down-Island and plunked her on the Mill Bay ferry.

“There is something vaguely Canadian in all this,” Gougeon wrote.

Speaking of bruised, that was Duncan’s Paul Fletcher after his regular Thursday night wheelchair rugby game.

“We’re always bruised,” he said, still short of breath. “It’s a really hard game. There are lots of collisions. One of the guys got thrown out of his chair tonight.”

He’s on the phone to promote Sunday’s annual wheelchair rugby tournament in Duncan’s city square, where 16 teams will go at it from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The teams are a mix of players who usually use wheelchairs and those who don’t — “uprights” and “crips,” as they call themselves. There will be live music, a beer garden, food, thrills and spills.

The event, which began as a fundraiser for Rick Hansen’s Wheels In Motion campaign, could have faded when that program ended a few years ago, but nope, the Cowichan Wheels crowd kept it going. They have raised money for a pool lift, a wheelchair-accessible wildlife viewing platform in Somenos Marsh, a wheelchairfriendly trail in Centennial Park and more.

You might recall reading back in March that Victoria’s Jeremy Hespeler-Boultbee and his wife, Alemie, were about to leave for her hometown of Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, full of worry about the drought that has stricken the African country and frustration over the lacklustre results of a fundraising campaign. They had managed to come up with only $2,400 for a school they support there, one for children from poor families.

Happily, the total rose to $6,000 by the time they arrived in Africa in April. Now back in Victoria, a jet-lagged Hespeler-Boultbee reports the money resulted in an Ethiopian manufacturer building and delivering 50 desks, each seating three small children, to the Gish Abay school.

And, to finish off, a story from May’s Times Colonist book sale, this one from longtime volunteer Donna Davis.

One day after the sale, Donna’s partner, Bob Tweed, got an envelope in the mail at home. Inside was a single lottery ticket, one that he had endorsed on the back, including his address. Attached was a note from the sender: “Hey Bob, if it’s a winner do you want to split it?”

Turns out the sender, a stranger, had found the ticket in a book that Bob had donated to the sale, so mailed it to him just in case it was a winner.

Alas, no one got rich. Still, mailing the ticket was an act of common decency. Such things matter.