These little essayettes are about positive moments, and one of the most positive of positive things is being helpful to someone else.

A tried and true remedy for overcoming sadness and depression is finding something to do for someone else, and I can say for sure that it works, as I learned when, down in the dumps, I volunteered to work at my local Women's Resource Center. But that's for another day.

Today I want to write about a simple conversation I had one evening in the lobby of my public housing building. By the way, I should start by saying that I loved living there; it was a wonderfully varied collection of odd and interesting folks, many of them not native English speakers, all of whom—including me, of course—had no money.

So anyway, this one evening I was in the lobby and found there a neighbor originally from Bangladesh: Id. I never knew his last name. He was waiting for a ride to the mosque, and he was quite distressed about it. Until a couple of months before, he could walk to the mosque in a little mall about three blocks away, which he did four times a day; but then City Council ordered it taken down to make room for a huge apartment building intended for students. I will spare you my soapbox spiel about erecting a building for hundreds of people in a congested downtown area and including no parking. Ahem.

So Id was waiting for his ride, and I asked him why he was looking sad. He loved going to the mosque—it was accessible by bus, but the schedule didn't work—which shouldn't have bothered him since he was getting a ride.

Well, he didn't like having to rely on someone to drive him. He liked being independent. I asked him who was picking him up. A younger man who was driving there anyway but had to make a bit of a detour to fetch him. So it was an imposition on the guy, and Id didn't like that.

Hmmm. I asked him whether, when he was younger, he had ever helped anyone get to services. Well, sure, of course. Part of his faith included assisting others. It was an act of love. And did he like doing it? Yes, he liked it a lot. He got to talk with people he might not have otherwise known, it was easy for him to do, he was going there anyway, etc.

Well, then, might not this younger guy feel the same way? He got to put his faith into practice and hang out with Id, who was interesting and funny. He was going there anyway; the detour was just short. Did Id want to deprive him of an experience he himself had found fulfilling? Wasn't that, too, part of his faith? He allowed as how it might be.

When the man pulled up and Id left to get in the car, he was feeling better, and I was too. I hadn't done anything special. He already knew all the things I mentioned to him. I just brought them to the front of his awareness. True, he preferred being independent, but giving that independence up to allow someone else to savor the sweetness of helping was an act of love.

Id was a man capable of love. When his wife died unexpectedly a year or so later, he told me they had lived together for over 50 years, and he had tears in his eyes over her loss. Later on, he let someone in the congregation take care of him in her stead, a profound loss of independence that he gladly sacrificed on the altar of love.