Kiddo had an excursion into the city yesterday. Two classes – hers and another known as 7B – took a train into the city to visit the Immigration Museum and watch an Imax movie. The Imax bit didn’t happen as one of the students climbed onto a hand rail, sat on it and fell backwards, hurting her head. She was apparently quite dazed and the teachers must have panicked to an extent where they cancelled the rest of the program for the day and packed everyone off, back to the school way before. Anyway that isn’t the story for this entry.
On the way back from the city, kiddo took out her a few things from her backpack, including her school diary. The other stuff made their way back into her backpack, but not her diary. The diary, which contains loads of important information, including details of the appointments with her teachers for tonight’s parent-teacher meetings, was left on the train. We had our usual pow-wows about responsibilities, taking care, blah blah blah and all has been forgotten. We had braced ourselves for her to get a new school diary.
A few hours ago, I took a call from an elderly lady. She said she was from Poland, and had settled in Melbourne a number of years ago. She apologised for her accent but said she called because she had found kiddo’s diary, in the train! She had seen another kid take it but insisted that kid gave it to her, as she thought (she is probably right) that the kid would have binned it.
So tonight, we have to take a drive to a suburb known as East Malvern, to retrieve kiddo’s diary. It’s a lucky break for her, to be able to retrieve it.
There are still fair dinkum folks in Melbourne. People who have absolutely nothing to gain from actions like Mrs F’s but did them anyway simply because they are the right things to do. Doing the right thing. If more did the right thing, this world would be a much better place to live in.
Sure there would always be the moral or philosophical argument as to what constitutes the “right thing”. Hang it, I think. I believe in most instances, there is a gut feel to it all, as to what is the right thing to do in any given situation. Most don’t do it in spite of such conviction, because they weighed up the cost and decided it wasn’t worth it. I mean, what if I turned out to be a granny rapist and unimaginably harmed her, when I dropped into her house tonight? Many would have thought of such caution and binned kiddo’s diary, because in many people’s books, doing this “right thing” would not have been worth it.
Ante 