Wild Blueberries = Kindness

You never know when life will surprise you.

In the mid-70s, when I was 18 and very new to the Bay Area, I had taken bus and BART and bus from San Francisco to Oakland because it was the last day of an exhibit I really wanted to see at the Oakland Museum of California, but I couldn’t find the museum until after it was too late. I was tired and hungry and deeply disappointed, so I sat down with my feet in the street and my butt on the sidewalk and I just cried my heart out right there in public.

A lady I didn’t know walked up to me and said, “You look like somebody who could use some blueberry pie — come with me.” Since my usual mode of long-distance transportation was hitchhiking, it didn’t seem odd to me to drive off with a complete stranger, so I got in her car and we drove up to the hills above Oakland and Berkeley, into Tilden Park. That was probably the first time I had been up there, and it’s a different place, green and quiet and cool.

When we stopped, I followed her down a dirt path and she showed me what wild blueberries look like, and between us we gathered enough to make a pie. Then we drove down the other side of the hill to the house where she and her mother lived, with a fabulous view of the park that was beginning to darken. Her mother took it in stride that there would be an extra guest for dinner and, while the blackbirds sang, we all made the pie together, then made supper and ate it with wine, talking and laughing while the pie cooked and cooled.

When the pie was done, the three of us ate the whole pie. After many more hours of lively conversation, they set me up in a spare bed, and in the morning the woman drove me back through Tilden Park and down the hill to Berkeley so I could catch a bus back to San Francisco.

I’ve forgotten their names after all these years, but I’ll never forget that incredible gift of kindness and blueberry pie.

Here’s hoping some random kindness comes your way soon.