You’ve seen the stickers: Be nice. You’re in Bend. I’ve long thought the message reflects the way I see people act in my hometown, on nearly a daily basis.

Traffic, oddly enough, brings out the niceness in a surprising number of people. Many of us, I suspect, have stopped to let a motorist trapped in a driveway pull into traffic; it’s pretty common around here.

One guy went the extra mile earlier this week.

It was during the morning rush to work, and drivers on Empire Avenue hoping to go south on the Bend Parkway faced a couple of obstacles. If they were driving west from Boyd Acres Road, they were part of a stream of vehicles more than two blocks long, and that stream was moving very slowly.

That’s because drivers had to turn left to merge onto the parkway, and they had to wait until the eastbound traffic cleared to do so. Only the traffic never cleared, at least not very much. Some eastbound motorists did stop to allow a left-turning car to cross, but they were few and far between.

They were, at least, until a man in a pickup truck came along. He stopped, and he stayed stopped. He waved not one car through, nor two, nor three. I think I was the fifth driver he gestured to, and I know he waited for at least a few more to pass.

His was the sort of act of kindness that makes you forget all the things that went wrong before you left the house.

You see some of the same sort of behavior at the grocery store, I’ve discovered over the years. It’s surprising how many shoppers are willing to let a person behind them jump ahead if that person has only an item or two in his hands.

It happened again the other day at the Safeway store nearest my house. A couple was purchasing wine and chatting with the shopper in front of them. It seemed clear from their accents that they were not native Oregonians, nor even native to the United States. They and the shopper in front got into a discussion about the advantages of American and Australian wines, and before long the local shopper asked the visitors to step ahead of him. His was a small, nice gesture, made to complete strangers at a time of day when the market was packed. I’ve watched locals take the time to give tourists clear and careful directions about how to get to a specific destination, and so on.

Sometimes small gestures come at an expense to the maker, too. I’ve seen people shell out money for someone ahead or behind them in a grocery line when it was clear the other person had bought more than he or she could pay for.

And I’ve seen complete strangers give money to people obviously in need at intersections and elsewhere. I know people who think that’s a terrible idea, that it only enables the recipient to drink or do something else that likely contributed to his or her homelessness in the first place. Sometimes that’s true, sometimes not. People are not always homeless because of substance abuse, and if even a small gift of cash will make their day a bit better, so be it.

It’s all too easy to wrap ourselves in cloaks of self-righteousness and let the world outside those cloaks pass us by, but I think that’s wrong. Letting someone cut in line at the grocery store, or letting a driver make a turn or enter traffic costs only seconds of our valuable time, and surely most of us can afford it. Even giving money to someone on a street corner is within the capability of most of us, if we choose to allow it to be.

I see the latter in Bend, too, not infrequently. And while it may not be the kind of gift some would have us make because it will be misused or encourage others in similar straits to come to Central Oregon, I disagree. People without the standard trappings of life — clean clothes, homes, cars — are our neighbors just as much as people who lack for nothing. They’re boosted by acts of kindness as much, or more, than someone who has everything.

— Janet Stevens is deputy editor 
of The Bulletin. Contact: 541-617-7821, 
jstevens@bendbulletin.com.