Youth is wasted on most of the young, not all of them.

Sunday I was in a pastry shop picking out assorted decadent desserts to bring to my brothers for dinner and this tiny elderly woman walked up next to me. Hunched over, the poor woman must have had osteoporosis, starts to point and select her own decadent desserts to a young girl who strained to hear her.

"What?" the young one said when she missed The Elderly Lady point and describe the millefeuille. I wanted to smack her. The urge to correct her and make her apologize was boiling up in me, but instead, I watched how The Elderly Lady reacted. She did nothing. Her face did not flinch as surely my mothers would have had I said that in my youth... her face and her backhand, I can assure you. But no. Nothing.

Apparently rudeness is easily forgiven and painted over like the terracotta-gone-wrong colour in my living room. It's never truly covered though. It's a sound, a message that can never be taken back. This young thing now knows "what" is an appropriate thing to say when you did not hear something. How dreadful.

Sitting in a Tim Hortons tonight I witnessed something incredible. A woman, who was intellectually handicapped, sat at a table across from me and watched as I read, and drank my coffee. I gave her a smile. When she got up to visit the restroom I noticed her again because she was carrying soo many bags I couldn't imagine what she would be traveling with at 9:30 at night. While she was in the restroom, my friend showed up, and I never saw her leave - not that I paid much attention, after all, my friend was there.

About an hour had passed, and being a Tims, at least a dozen women must have gone in and out of the washroom. All uneventful. It seems nobody noticed the legs of the woman strewn across the floor and feet sticking out from underneath the door, until one young girl called it to the attention of the employees on duty. Not one of them did anything... except the young girl who found her.

After some investigating, her and her friends found out the mystery woman's name, her address, and they all pitched in money for a taxi to make sure she got to her foster home safely. No one wanted to let her venture alone on the bus with it being after 11:00pm now. I saw them all walk her out to the waiting car and an instant later were gone too.

There's more to youth than the "what's." That is what keeps my faith that there still are really good people in the world, some of them much younger than I, who would rather help someone than walk away.