After a Calamitous Spill, an Epiphany as to Why Readers Crave This Column

There were many more submissions that you have not read because, and I hope you will forgive me, they seemed too trivial. Know that readers have labored, without satisfaction of publication, to share their joy at the simplest courtesy: a stranger's rush to pick up something they dropped, the young man who mowed a lawn because it was the right thing to do for an elderly neighbor, a pleasant exchange of words where pleasantries were unexpected.

I've spent my life in a profession charged with chronicling the less loving side of the human experience, and with that grows a cynical view. Still, through my observation of behavior that doesn't make news, not much of this kindness took me by surprise.

Your thirst for it has.

I've never seen such a response to anything I've touched in a newsroom.

Scores of letters come in like one the other day from Thomasine Lyles:

"I am a longtime subscriber to The Washington Post, who from time to time has said, 'This is the day I will cancel my subscription!' Then I read Random Acts. What refreshing articles. Please don't ever stop printing them."

Early on, I heard from a colleague who deals with urban mayhem as a crime editor. His wife, a local TV anchor, comes into your living room every night with a professional obligation that includes an abundance of crime-scene footage. Cynics? No. "It's the first thing we read every morning now," he said.

Even if I was slow to fully comprehend, I recognize that for so many of you the column was an oasis, an affirmation that this is a decent, just world.

Call this schmaltz and I will tell you you've never felt truly vulnerable, that your body has not flown 20 feet through the air, then skidded another 20 down the highway.

We hunger for evidence that there is love in this world and that it will arrive dramatically in our hour of need.

From the first moment I lay on the pavement -- "Please lie very still, sir" -- to this moment as I type with the hand that still works, I have been buoyed by love and kindness.

Some were no more than voices through the morphine haze. They can set screws three millimeters into your skull without killing you. Who knew? It keeps the head from moving, but the people around you are reduced to their voices and their touch. The voices of intensive care didn't belong to people putting in another eight hours until quitting time. They sensed the pain; they shared the intensity. There are seven bumps in the hallway between intensive care and the X-ray department, and every trip, I was told about every one of them.