why did the turtle cross the road...?

I'm one of those saps who tries to brake for small animals stupid enough to run out into the road. I'm not stupid enough not to hit them if there's no other choice, but if I have a few seconds, or a bare empty road, I'll certainly swerve. Maybe the world suffers from an overpopulation of groundhogs, squirrels, raccoons, skunks, opossums and deer, but I hold the slightly old-fashioned opinion that if I'm going to bring about a wild creature's demise, it should come as a mark of my skill and not the fact that I'm driving a thousand pounds or so of unwieldy metal.

I'm also one of those saps who persists in believing that goodness exists among people -- that there's something good in almost everyone, even if that something might rival a mustard seed in size.

Oddly enough, one of the continuing occurrences that boosts my sappy opinion of people is their sappy behavior toward animals in the road. I've never in my life seen anyone gun his or her motor with the intent of mowing down a little critter. (Maybe people only do this at night when no one else is watching -- our morality, after all -- or at least its reinforcement -- is largely social in nature.) Instead, I've seen traffic backed up for ten minutes while people wait for a family of geese to dawdle from one side of the road to the other.

Last week as I returned to work from lunch, I saw the cars ahead of me performing all sorts of stunt maneuvers, and as I approached I saw why -- a tiny loose miniature pinscher was racing all over the road, barking savagely at the cars, and the traffic slowed to a stop as people tried to inch past it without crushing it. This might sound pretty run-of-the-mill, but the dog was so small that barely anyone could see it, and all the drivers on both sides of the road had their windows rolled down and were calling out the dog's location to each other. The air was filled with directions and whistles attempting to distract the dog.

"You're clear, he's behind you," a woman called to me when it was my turn to stop and wait forever hoping he hadn't crawled under a tire.

Moments like that make my heart glow a little bit with how organized and careful people can be in such trivial situations.

But when these little thoughtfulnesses toward animals come from children, it really makes me shine.

"Sarah, I meant to tell you this story earlier," Meg said last night. "It gave me hope for the future generation."

She recounted a drive she'd taken a few days before on one of the back highways of Michigan, heavily trafficked but largely unsupervised by police. As she came around a bend, she saw ahead of her a large turtle making its slow way across the road. She and I have both seen the remains of turtle roadkill, which has always saddened me; you can think the squirrels are dumb and have bad senses of direction, but they're fast enough to get out of the way if they don't lose what little wits they were born with; turtles don't stand a chance.

What really caught her attention, though, wasn't fear for the turtle. It was the two little boys, about eight and ten years old, flanking the turtle and facing down traffic waving their arms and wearing desperate expressions. Stop! they were yelling. Watch out for the turtle!

Meg said, "I figured their mother would probably kill them for running out in the road, but I couldn't help feeling so...proud of them."

"Well, when you think of little kids, you generally think they'd be throwing sticks at it, or waiting by the roadside to see how long it took the turtle to get hit," I said. "It's really, really good to be wrong."

It was one of those warm moments. People -- myself included -- like to enumerate the many ways in which you can tell the basic ugliness of humanity by watching the brutal inclinations of children. But so much of the time it's the children who care most for other helpless creatures. I think of two little country boys so intent on keeping a reptile from harm that they left all fear of traffic, and all thought for their own safety, behind them on the roadside to rush to its aid. I think too of their implicit confidence that, although someone might hit a turtle, no one would hit them. And, like Meg, I smile with a little more hope in the small goodnesses of which humanity is capable, the small goodnesses that can make all the difference in the world.