Help wanted another day!

The red pick-up truck ahead of me seemed familiar as I neared the stop light.  Was it the same truck that jumped the red two stop lights prior?

The light turned green.  The truck didn't move.

A guy, perhaps a tad older than me, got out of the truck and started pushing it.

I switched the hazards in mine on and went to push that red truck as the vehicles behind me started moving over to the other lane.

"Do you need help?"

"Yes, thanks.  Till we turn the corner."

We turned right at the light and went over the railway tracks.  "I'll be fine now."

"Are you sure?" I asked him before returning to my vehicle.

When I got back in, it was all the more evident that I was not doing well.  Perhaps the sniffling was not allergies.  Perhaps my body aching and the sniffling were flu-like?  No wonder I promptly went back to bed after the morning coffee and breakfast!

My heart was beating away like crazy from that little bit of exertion.  I was wiped out.

Would I have stepped out and helped him if I had known that I was not well?

I think so.

For one, that is the right thing to do.  How could one not help in that situation?

I know there is also a selfish reason in that: chances are that someday it could be me hoping that somebody would help me with my car problem.  Maybe it won't be my car; I could sprain my leg while walking, and wouldn't it be wonderful if somebody helped out at that time?

As I continued driving, I remembered an essay we read way back in middle school, or perhaps the early high school years.  In that essay, which perhaps was apocryphal, a French woman is helping a wounded young german soldier in the contested Alsace-Lorraine region during the First World War.  Another French woman questions why she was helping the enemy, to which the first one replies that her son was fighting somewhere in Germany and she hoped that a mother there would aid her son should he be injured.

As I read the sentences above, the situation seems to be completely fictitious.  But, there is nothing imagined about the moral there, right?

I reached home, and popped in another Aleve. And curled up and assumed a fetal position under the blanket on a sunny, warm, summer afternoon. "I am sure I am not well" I told myself as I moaned away my aches.

This time, I helped myself enough to blog about it!  A note to the scorekeeper: I will take a raincheck on the help.