About to enter my doctor’s office near Lexington Avenue and 81st Street, I stopped to let the building’s maintenance man finish watering the sidewalk. He stopped to let a young mother and her 4- or 5-year-old son and, I presumed, myself, pass.
The lad was holding an empty toy watering can. We all stopped when the maintenance man approached the boy with the hose. Without a word, the boy extended his watering can, and the maintenance man, smiling, filled it. At a slight urging from his mother, the boy then approached a nearby tree, and began watering it as we all smiled.
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