I don’t know if this was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me, but it’s recent, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Nine days ago, I went to meet some friends at One Ocean in Atlantic Beach. On the way out, I stumbled and fell headlong onto the parking lot. I don’t remember falling. In fact, I don’t remember anything between walking out of One Ocean and waking up on my back, staring at the sky.
There are only two things from those first few moments that I can clearly remember. One is the upside-down image of a woman in a red dress standing somewhere behind me, telling me to stay still. The other is a woman I couldn’t see. She was holding my head and speaking to me in this incredibly soothing voice, telling me I was going to be OK.
Knowing me, I’m reasonably certain I told her I was fine and tried to get up. She wasn’t having it. No, she told me, I wasn’t OK. I might have broken my nose. There was blood everywhere, and I needed to stay exactly where I was until the ambulance arrived.
I have no idea what those women had planned for the rest of their evening. Maybe they were headed to dinner. Maybe they were meeting friends. Whatever it was, I’m pretty sure it did not include kneeling in an Atlantic Beach parking lot taking care of some stranger who had just planted his face into the pavement. At least one of them ended up with my blood on her, and she stayed anyway.
For several days afterward, thinking about that made me surprisingly emotional. There was something deeply affecting about realizing that when I was hurt, disoriented and vulnerable, people who owed me absolutely nothing stopped what they were doing and took care of me. I don’t even know their names.
I was fortunate. I didn’t have a concussion. I didn’t lose any teeth. I’m going to have a decent scar on my left cheek, and right now I still look a little like I lost a fight to Mike Tyson. I’ve been telling my students that people warned me not to cross this tough guy named Lot, and definitely not to cross him quickly. I didn’t listen, and I found out just how hard Lot could be. Turns out his first name was Parking.
The jokes help, and so does knowing how much worse the fall could have been. But what stays with me most isn’t the blood, the scar or even waking up staring at the sky. It’s that voice telling me to stay still and that I was going to be OK.
Someone who didn’t know me saw that I needed help and decided that, for however long it took, my well-being mattered more than whatever she had planned next. Maybe that isn’t the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. I’ve been blessed with far too many good people in my life to rank acts of kindness that way. But right now, it’s the kindness I can’t stop thinking about.
And I can only hope that if someday I’m the person standing over a stranger who desperately needs someone to stay, I’ll be as kind and decent as those women were to me.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
