Star’s deed taught ‘currency’ of kindness, woman says
Ludacris, the Grammywinning rapper, didn’t know the woman whose groceries he paid for this week at a Whole Foods store in the Atlanta area. She was a stranger to him.
But he knew this: She was buying dog food with her groceries and she told him she had rescue dogs.
Therra Gwyn-Jaramillo says she was shocked when he picked up her tab, a moment of well-timed charity she described in an emotional essay on her Facebook page this week that has gone viral with more than 11,000 shares as of Aug. 3.
“What Ludacris had no way of knowing is that his quiet kindness and generous gesture came at a moment when my candle was out,” she wrote. “He used his personal light to fire up my own. Isn’t that what we should be doing for each other?”
She could only afford to be there that day, she wrote, because a friend who knew she was struggling financially had given her a gift card to buy groceries. Then the nice man in front of her at the check-out line paid for her groceries, she wrote. All of them.
“I was emotional when I walked into the store and I was out of my freaking mind when I walked out,” GywnJaramillo told Today.
Life has been a struggle, she told CBS News, since her husband died of brain cancer in 2014. “There wasn’t a part of my life that wasn’t destroyed — emotional, physical, financial,” she told CBS.
Just recently, she wrote on Facebook, she had run “into a financial hit of almost $4,000 within one month when I had to get a new water heater ($2,000) and I didn’t get a freelance writing check I was owed.”
She shared that her budget simply couldn’t “hold under that huge a hit.”
“It’s just me who is responsible for taking care of everything now — the house, the property, four rescued dogs, two rescued cats, an elderly, blind chicken named Dixie Licklighter, my disabled brother … and myself,” she wrote.
“There is no one else to do it. It’s all on me. I was too embarrassed to say out loud I was having financial difficulty but it was a solid problem. I was making rice for me and the dogs to eat. I was losing sleep. I was crying daily. I rationed gas in my car.”
Then a friend she referred to as “Miracle Mary” gave her that Whole Foods gift card.
“I went to a Whole Foods across town with a dream of hummus and fresh food. Real dog food for the pups. Maybe a pizza with roasted exotic toppings,” she wrote.
“As I walked through the door to the store I whispered to myself, ‘I may go down, but I’m going down swinging.’ I set my jaw and started shopping with a relief I haven’t felt all month.”
She didn’t keep track of how much she had spent and didn’t know until she got to the check-out that she’d spent more than would be covered by the $250 gift card.
At the check-out, she wrote, her dog food got mixed up on the conveyor belt with the food of the man checking out in front of her.
He told her “I might as well get it,” she wrote.
Then he told her he was buying all her groceries, she wrote.
“I tried to put things back and he said, ‘I said I got this. All of this. Don’t put anything back!’ ” she told CBS. “He started putting the stuff I was going to put back onto the conveyor belt. I was stunned.”
When she asked him his name, he said “Chris,” she wrote on Facebook.
The “Fast and Furious” star was born Christopher Brian Bridges in Champaign, Ill.
“We shook hands. Then I hugged him, shedding tears on the tattoo on his shoulder,” she wrote. “I thanked him, but I was so stunned that even as we made small talk (he asked me about my four dogs) I tripped over my words, all the while thinking, ‘I’m talking to an angel. Should I tell him? Should I tell him he’s an angel?’
“Who ARE you?” I asked at one point, in true wonder. “‘Just a guy,’ he said. When the cashier finished loading her cart, Gwyn-Jaramillo wrote, she said, “You know that’s Ludacris, right?”
The rapper’s philanthropy is well-documented, and it often involves more than checks from The Ludacris Foundation, founded in 2001 to help youth and their families in communities across the country, according to its website.
During a campaign called Hunger Action Month, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes, Ludacris “rolled up his sleeves and taught kids at the Carrie Steele Pitts Home how to prepare healthy snacks. Then they all played games.”
Last Thanksgiving he and the mayor handed out turkeys at a rec center in south Atlanta, according to the newspaper.
The Kansas City Star has reached out to Whole Foods and the Ludacris Foundation for comment on Gwyn-Jaramillo’s story.
“He taught me that kindness is a currency that we all have,” she told Today. “The more you spend it the richer you get. He gave me a gift that will outlast all of those groceries. He gave me something that is not perishable.
“The gift he gave me, the lesson, will long last after the groceries are gone.”
She ended her Facebook essay with an invitation to her followers to “be like Ludacris y’all,” and that has since morphed into the hashtag #BeLikeLudacris now making the rounds on Twitter.
“Now all I want to do is to #BeLikeLudacris,” tweeted one woman.