A Good Newspaper Vendor Story

I am not the biggest fan of the people who sell newspapers on the street corners, even though one is a friend of mine (hey Lee!).

The problem to me is that some are over aggressive, some allow the traffic to get messed up, and some seem to put their lives at risk and I just don't want to see one run over.  The ones behaving like knuckleheads just make the rest look bad.

Yesterday at 4:50 p.m., when it was 98 degrees, I saw the world turned upside down. I was on the Loop access road at Indiana (heading west) about to hang a left under the Loop towards 82nd.  A girl in a white SUV had broken down. Her emergency blinkers were on and she was obviously calling for help. Believe it or not, the woman who was selling newspapers on the corner walked over and gave the broken down driver a bottle of cold water.

You know, it was a small thing, and I even hesitate to mention that it was an African-American woman assisting a young white woman, but these days its kind of worth mentioning. If you want to think about it as just one human helping another human, then that's even better.

It's little things like this that bring us together. Let's have more of it.