NFL Player Gets A Surprise After Showing Kindness To An Elderly Woman

[mountaineer]

NFL Player Gets A Surprise After Showing Kindness To An Elderly Woman
Dec. 29, 2015
Chicks on the Right

Sometimes, we complain a lot about the celebrity culture in our country, particularly as it pertains to professional athletes. There are news stories about athletes involved in drugs or beating their wives or any other troubles with the law. Often, the explanation is that these guys don’t know how to be rich and famous gracefully and they let all of the money and accolades go to their heads, so they think they can get away with anything they want.

But every once in a while, you get a story like this that shows not all pro athletes let fame and fortune affect them negatively.

According to this, Miami Dolphins free safety Walt Aikens was doing some shopping a few days before Christmas at a nearby Wal-Mart. Aikens said that he was “trying to be a macho man” and was carrying all his purchases by himself with no cart. By the time he got in the checkout line, he had so much stuff that he was having trouble balancing it. One elderly lady noticed him struggling and offered him the use of her cart while they waited. He refused her help at first, but she insisted and he ended up putting his items in her cart. He noticed that she was buying baking supplies, as well as some baby clothes and figured that these were probably for Christmas for her grandchildren. Aikens insisted on paying for the woman’s shopping, as well as his own, to thank her for her help. The woman later asked for his address – not realizing that he was a professional football player – promising to send him some cookies, saying said that no one had ever done anything that nice for her before. Especially not in Florida.

A few weeks later, Aikens received a mysterious package at his apartment building. Once his doorman said it was “from the Wal-Mart lady,” he realized who it was from and opened it to find a box of homemade Christmas cookies and a note from the elderly women he had helped (and who had helped him) –

Her note says –

   

Dear Walt,

    I’m not sure if you remember me? I met you in line behind me at Walmart before Christmas and you paid for my stuff. I just wanted to tell you again thank you so much. Your mom I’m sure is very proud of you. Not only are you a professional football player for the Miami Dolphins, but most of all a wonderful kind person too. Here are the cookies I promised you. I hope you enjoy them.

Aikens later had this to say in response to the woman’s kindness –

    “Today when I got this package of cookies and cakes and other treats hand delivered from the lady, it caught me off-guard and showed me that manners and being kind to others can go a long way. This really made my day because I had forgotten about her saying she was gong to send me cookies,” Aikens said. “Honestly, I was just being nice and did not expect any favors in return because treating people the right way is just how my parents raised me. Also, I did not tell the woman I played professional football or anything, so she was just being nice to a complete stranger and cared enough to uphold her side of the bargain and carry out what she would do.”

 
Aikens said he wanted to thank the woman and her husband “for being so thoughtful.”     

“I hope you and your family had a Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year,” he said.

See, the media and politicians would have us assume that people like Walt Aikens and this elderly woman are so different, that there is no way either of them would associate positively with one another. The news is full of stories about people of different races and age groups and other arbitrary census-box-demographics refusing to get along because they’ve been told to divide themselves into groups like that. But then you have stories like this of a 24-year-old professional football player helping an elderly woman buy Christmas goodies for her grandchildren after she helped him in the checkout line. And that shatters the destructive narrative.

Good people are everywhere. You just have to get beyond the news headlines to find them.

Photos at link

[EC]

A gentle note to the author:

Not everything has to be shoehorned into a narrative, you know. This is a perfectly fine and charming story in it's own right. Your readership is, nominally, possessed of brain cells they can use, should they so choose.

Nice guy though. Nice woman, too.