I was on a National Express coach from Newcastle to Edinburgh, years ago, and a couple stops in this guy stows a mountain bike in the luggage compartment, gets on the bus and it’s pretty full so he ends up sitting next to me.
We chatted for the whole trip, he was telling me about how he’d just spent the last couple of days biking across the country, it was just a really nice pleasant encounter with no awkwardness or anything, which as you can imagine since I’m on Lemmy is not a normal occurrence for me.
At one point I started to feel travel sick, which I think freaked him out a bit at first, but I’d come prepared with some minty sweets to keep it at bay which I of course shared with my new friend.
He got off the coach before we reached Edinburgh, and I remember sitting there watching him retrieve his bike and wave up at me to say goodbye, and I realised…we never even introduced ourselves. Like, not even first names. And I don’t know if it was the mild delirium of the travel sickness but I was just hit with this wave of existential realisation that I’d never see this person again ever in my life.
It wasn’t a romantic thing or anything, he was just canny and it’s weird we didn’t exchange any info!
I think about National Express Bike Bloke on a fairly regular basis. Hope he’s had a happy life.
I was about 13 at the time and on a family vacation. My parents were in a store shopping and I was bored so I went to stand outside. I’m standing out there and this very old, very fat, very short man (he looked a lot like Danny devito) walks up to me and says “Aren’t you just the cutest.” He then pinches my cheek and walks away. I’ll never forget him.
I was ready for this to go way worse.
Plot twist: that was Danny DeVito
Old man gave me a friendly wink at the mall once in the '90s, and I felt like I was just the coolest member of the club.
I saw a stranger riding a bicycle along the gravel trail surrounding the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial in DC. He was kitted out like a tour de Francer and was riding way too fast for being in a crowded area. So inevitably some tourist steps into his path. Instead of hitting her he threw the bike to the ground and launched himself over the handlebars, landing with a perfect shoulder roll. He dusted himself off, asked if the tourist was alright, and zoomed off into the twilight with his bicycle.
So he perfectly diffused a dangerous situation that was entirely of his own creation. I’ve never known exactly how to feel about that random dude that was simultaneously super talented and super irresponsible. I’ll never forget that random ass dude and his midlife crisis sprint bike.
That’s some Artie, Strongest Man in the World shit.
That’s a perfect comparison.
I was 18 and riding on a train in Salt Lake City in 1999 or 2000. There was this girl with her friends on the other end of the car and she was knitting. We made eye contact and she smiled. My friend urged me to go talk to her but I was too intimidated.
One of those “what if” moments…
A homeless man held the door open for me at a pizza place. He didn’t ask for any money or have a sign or anything. Just made himself useful, presumably in hopes that some of the customers would show him an act of kindness in return. It was the first time I gave someone money. He also took a q-tip out of his pocket and somehow used it to relight a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray.
I went on a summer camping trip that involved driving through miles of desert in middle of no where USA. There was no water, fuel, or anything for at least 500 miles in any direction. Especially no traffic. Our van came upon a car stranded on the side of the road, two twenty something guys desperately trying to flag us down. We were kinda wary because they were acting off, and we were all women But no way could we leave them, that would be a death sentence. So we told them to climb up in the cargo bay, gave them water and told them we’d drop them off at the next town. A couple hours later they sobered up and explained they had gotten lost coming back from a summer road trip, driven until they had run out of gas. Four hours later of 100 plus degree temperatures and no other cars they had gotten overheated from the sun and had made the monumentally dumb decision to drink the tequila they had brought as a souvenir because it was the only liquid in the car. We took them into town, replenished our water and went on our way. I think about how easily they could have never run into anybody out there before it was too late.
Drinking tequila to stave off dehydration is a monumentally crappy decision!
When i was fourteen and on vacation in sardegna,on a boat trip with my family i saw this girl i absolutely fell in love with. Never talked to her, never saw her again. Still remember her face.
When I was a lonely teenager/young adult, I used to have intensely vivid dreams about meeting imaginary girls. I’d spend what felt like hours with them, maybe days, often falling in love over the duration of these dreams out on beautiful beaches or vistas, and really committing their faces to memory. Then I’d wake up, and all at once they’d be ripped away from me. I’d remember their face, their voice, the presence, but I’d be wholly alone again and confronted with this strange and bittersweet reality where I felt as though I had lost someone important who never even existed. Just this fabrication of my own mind that crushed me for maybe an hour before their memory slowly evaporated and ceased to matter, much like any other dream from the night before.
I haven’t experienced that since young adulthood, though. Can’t say that I’d want to, either. It’s wild that you experienced that scenario in person.
I was a teenager at Wendy’s with my parents and some homeless looking hippy ahead of me turns around and says “don’t ever change” lol well I guess he was somewhat accurate ahahah!
I once saw this stranger almost trip in public and then look around if anyone saw it.
I did and I will always remember. I think about you every night.
There’s a saying about not worrying about embarrassing memories because you’re the only one who remembers the event. It’s not always true.
So many. Kathy at the Blackfoot Angler. The dude who handed up a Rainer on the Oregon Outback. But mostly Elizabeth W. who found my lost wallet in the wilds of Montana and returned it to me the next day “Just ride down the freeway and we will find you”. I didn’t believe it but god-damn it worked!
I was working at a grocery store, stocking food in the freezer aisle. Along comes a customer, passing by on the other side of the waist-level coolers that divide the aisle in half. She’s unremarkable: middle-aged, white, obese. Indistinguishable from the thousands of other customers I saw in my years there.
So this woman passes me, just looking at the frozen foods. And there, hanging on the back of her shirt, is a lizard. And not just a common garden-variety lizard, but a bearded dragon.
A live adult bearded dragon is just chilling on the back of this customer’s shirt as she does her grocery shopping.
Just. What.
I had so many questions. But I was a socially awkward teenager so I said nothing and never saw the lizard lady again.
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A friend and I got lost in Switzerland. We messed up trying to catch a train. We were alone, cold, and a bit scared. We didn’t have money, not in general and especially not for Swiss prices.
A guy saw us probably noticed we were scared. He took us inside his bakery, which was surprisingly baking loads of batches at that time. We couldn’t believe it.
He gave us a bag of bread for free and ate while walking to the nearest town. Even though we slept under a bridge in the cold, we were energized by the bag of bread. The next day we caught our train and carried on.
