These Short Stories Will Put a Smile on Your Face!

We hope you are doing well. It’s been wonderful having such sunny weather recently, summer is well and truly on the way. A friendly reminder – we totally understand that it is so much harder to practice social distancing when the weather is this lovely, please continue protecting yourself when you are out.

Many of you mentioned that you appreciated the short stories the most, so we have decided to share just a few stories with you, please enjoy.

Two bags of apples

Two roommates went to a market one day and each bought a bag of apples. When they returned to their apartment, they received an emergency call and had to leave town immediately. Note, this story predates the invention of refrigerator.

They returned to their apartment a few days later and immediately noticed some rotten apples in each of their bags. Roommate A started eating and enjoying the good apples right away and simply tossed away the rotten ones. Roommate B, on the other hand, could not stop worrying about the rotten apples, this went on for days until all the apples went bad in his bag.

Life is filled with “good and bad apples”, don’t ever let the bad apples stop you from enjoying the good ones.

*Story by Waran N., an employee from our Eglinton Campus, thanks Waran!

Love stays

A nurse took a tired, anxious serviceman to the bedside of a sick old man. “Your son is here,” she said to the old man. She had to repeat the words several times before the patient’s eyes opened. Heavily sedated because of the pain of his heart attack, he dimly saw the young uniformed marine standing outside the oxygen tent. He reached out his hand. The marine wrapped his toughened fingers around the old man’s limp ones, squeezing a message of love and encouragement.

The nurse brought a chair so that the marine could sit beside the bed. All through the night, the young marine sat there in the poorly lighted ward, holding the old man’s hand and offering him words of love and strength. Occasionally, the nurse suggested that the Marine move away and rest awhile. He refused. Whenever the nurse came into the ward, the marine was oblivious of her and of the night noises of the hospital – the clanking of the oxygen tank, the laughter of the night staff members exchanging greetings, the cries and moans of the other patients.

Now and then she heard him say a few gentle words. The dying man said nothing, only held tightly to his son all through the night. Along towards dawn, the old man died. The marine released the now lifeless hand he had been holding and went to tell the nurse. While she did what she had to do, he waited. Finally, she returned. She started to offer words of sympathy, but the Marine interrupted her.
“Who was that man?” he asked. The nurse was startled, “I thought he was your father,” she answered.
“No, he wasn’t,” the marine replied. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“Then why didn’t you say something when I took you to him?”
“I knew right away there had been a mistake, but I also knew he needed his son, and his son just wasn’t here. When I realised that he was too sick to tell whether I was his son, knowing how much he needed me, I stayed.”

The problem with dandelions

A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still they plagued him.

Finally he wrote to the Department of Agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed his letter with the question: “What shall I do now?”

In due course, the reply came: “We suggest you learn to love them.”

Jumping the queue

Today, a true tale of heroism that takes place not in a war zone, nor a hospital, but in Victoria station in London in 2007, during a tube strike. Our hero – a transport journalist and self-described “big, stocky bloke with a shaven head” named Gareth Edwards, who first wrote about this experience on the community blog metafilter.com – is standing with other commuters in a long, snaking line for a bus, when a smartly dressed businessman blatantly cuts in line behind him. (Behind him: this detail matters.)

The interloper proves immune to polite remonstration, whereupon Edwards is seized by a magnificent idea. He turns to the elderly woman standing behind the queue-jumper and asks her if she’d like to go ahead of him. She accepts, so he asks the person behind her, and the next person, and the next – until 60 or 70 people have moved ahead, Edwards and the seething queue-jumper shuffling further backward all the time. The bus finally pulls up, and Edwards hears a shout from the front of the line. It’s the elderly woman, addressing him: “Young man! Do you want to go in front of me?”

Please continue to take care of yourself and your loved ones.

Sincerely,

The Anderson College Team