A sweet shoe story

This week, when the horror at Virginia Tech was sinking in, I had an encounter with a student that restored my faith in human nature. It was a real Leave It To Beaver moment, and I haven’t had anything like that happen in my life.

About 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, I was stumbling around the house trying to wake up myself and a couple of our kids.

Suddenly, came a knock on the door.

I thought it was one of my son’s friends, but it wasn’t. It was a polite young boy … with a strange request.

“Excuse me, sir, but I fell off my bike in front of your house. I stepped in some mud in my new shoes. Can I use your hose to clean it off?”

It took a while for my foggy brain to register all this. After a while I was able to blurt out, “Uh, sure. C’mon in the backyard.”

So I led this kid through our house into the backyard. I turned the hose on a low stream. He stuck his foot out, and I gently hosed off the goo on his shiny new shoe.

“I got them at Steve and Barry’s,” he said proudly.

He thanked me profusely. I said something profound like, “Sure. No problem.”

And with that, the lad went back out the front door, got on his bike and went to school.

I know: I probably broke six different laws by admitting a child into my house without notifying the police and providing three references.

And when the kid got home that afternoon and told him mom what happened, you know she said, “What!? You went into a strange man’s house! Don’t ever do that again! He could have been a perv!”

She’s right, of course. I could have been a perv or a serial killer or a drug dealer. Kids should not go into stranger’s homes or cars under any circumstances.

But even though we both broke all the rules, I couldn’t get over how trusting that kid was.

He had mud on his new shoe. To him, it was a big deal. He went straight to the nearest house — mine — so he could clean up.

A couple of generations ago, no one would have given that incident a second thought. Nowadays, with kidnappers and creeps on our minds, well, we don’t do things like that.

Maybe so. But I was cheered that whole day by the child’s innocence, and the fact that I was able to help him.