People can be very nice.  Yes, they also can be like the last part of the horse to go over the fence, but isn’t it amazing how people we don’t even know can touch our lives with kindness?

Vicky, my wife, traveled to California this week.  It was a business trip.  One of those long flights no one is excited about being on, even if you are going to an exciting place.  One of the U.S. Air stewardesses wore an apron as she dispensed refreshments to the passengers, and on this apron were all sorts of buttons and what my wife thought was the name of her university. Wondering why the “le” was missing in Ole Miss, my wife asked, “So you went to Ole Miss?”

The stewardess laughed. “No,” she said “we are supposed to wear aprons with our name, but since everyone just says ‘O, Miss’ I thought I would use that for my name.”  You could tell she had a great sense of humor.

Then Vicky noticed, among all her buttons, a Piedmont Airlines button.

“So they also allow you to wear a button of a former Company.”

“Yes,” she said.  “That is my Piedmont Airlines button.  It was a great airline.”

It was then Vicky commented  about my mother who also worked for Piedmont, staying during the day with her children and working third shift at Piedmont.  “She is deceased now but she always said it was one of the bet jobs she ever had.  She punched cards for Piedmont.”

Some of you young chaps may not know what a punched card is.  Here’s a little help from Wikipedia.

A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Now an obsolete recording medium, punched cards were widely used throughout the 19th century for controlling textile looms and in the late 19th and early 20th century for operating fairground organs and related instruments. They were used through the 20th century in unit record machines for input, processing, and data storage. Early digital computers used punched cards, often prepared using keypunch machines, as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. Some voting machines use punched cards.

Prayer:  God help us to be like this U.S. Air stewardess, to care for people we don’t know, we barely know, or will never know.  And yes, help us to care for the folk we know all too well, while also caring for ourselves.  Amen.