It was my daughter’s birthday and I wanted to bake her favorite cake this year — chocolate-zucchini.

I often write late and then do household chores after. I had all the ingredients I needed except the zucchini.

No problem, I thought. The local farmstand, which I could drive to any time day or night, just leaving the money for produce in the box, will have zucchini. Gardens are bursting with them.

But no. Well, I’d make a dash to the local supermarket. The parking lot looked forbiddingly empty as I pulled in but the lights were still on and I could see someone at the register.

It was 10 p.m. — the same time that the sign on the door said the store closed.

As I drove to a larger store with what I hoped would be longer hours, I thought about how times had changed.

Of course, workers in a supermarket chain should not work longer than their set hours. I should not expect someone to open the door so I could buy a zucchini. That would not be fair.

But still, my mind went back to an earlier time. I remembered a conversation I’d had with William Augustus Brate years and years ago.

He had tended the dump for New Scotland after he retired from running a small grocery store in Voorheesville. He befriended our family — “Just call me Gus” — as we made regular trips there, gutting our wreck of a house to restore it anew.

Gus died on Christmas Day 2003 at the age 83.  

Once, around Christmas time, when we were trying to clear out enough rubble to make a place for a Christmas tree, he held the dump open a little late so we could get in that one last load. He told us then how, when he and his wife, Mabel, used to run their grocery store, he’d sometimes, on a holiday, run over to the store for one forgotten item.

The customers would spot him and line up for service. They’d forgotten something, too. What could you do but wait on them, shrugged Gus with his usual smile.

Gus loved to tell stories. One of his favorite stories was about a particular boy who came into the store to nab a couple of Popsicles without paying for them. It was a hot summer day, and the boy stuck them in his pocket. It wasn’t Gus’s way to yell at a kid or threaten him. Instead, Gus engaged the boy in conversation. Gus kept up the friendly questions and the boy felt obliged to keep chatting and chatting.

Rather than call him on it, Gus just kept the errant boy there until the Popsicles melted.

Gus’s daughter recalled how her father kept a box of index cards in the store where he’d write down what cash-strapped customers owed him.

“‘Gus, I need groceries,’ someone would say. ‘I don’t get paid at the foundry till Friday,’” his daughter recalled. “He’d write down the name and the date and that was it. They never signed anything .... He didn’t always get paid,” she said.

Gus kept up his giving ways after he retired and took his part-time job working at the town’s transfer station. He always made my children feel special. He’d save treasures for them from the dump — an old car horn that really worked, a metal bucket complete with some Florida seashells. But best of all was the discarded electric keyboard he found for my elder daughter.

She had been wishing for months, maybe even years, on every first star and every turkey breastbone, for a piano. I told her not to wish so hard; there was no way we could get one.

Gus unwittingly proved me wrong. She learned to play on that keyboard and went on to the glories of a real piano as did her younger sister. That year, when my younger daughter was 6, she drew a picture of Santa that we thought looked a lot like Gus.

I was lost in this reverie as I sped toward a supermarket I hoped would be open when I saw lights flashing behind me. A State Trooper pulled me over.

“Do you know why I stopped you?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I truthfully answered.

He told me the speed I was going, well over the limit.

As I fished for my driver’s license, dreading a ticket, I told him about my zucchini hunt.

“Doing late night baking?” he asked.

He gave me no ticket and even told me what supermarket was still open.

I was flooded with gratitude.

As I, slowly now, continued my quest, I thought about how there is still kindness in this world.

I remembered the kindness of another cop on another night. In that era, several years ago, I spent every weekend and holiday in the Adirondacks caring for my father after my mother died. I was driving home late on Christmas night. None of the gas stations on my route home had been open.

Very close to home, I sputtered to a stop — out of gas. My daughter, now grown, brought me a can of gas from my husband’s tractor but the nozzle from the can would not fit into my tank.

We saw the flashing lights of a police car and braced ourselves for the worst. Instead, the young sheriff’s deputy saw our dilemma and solved it.

He took apart a kit used to run a Breathalyzer test for drunk drivers and set the tube to form a conduit from the gas can to my car tank.

We made it safely home, wrapped in the joy of an unexpected gift — of kindness.

That, to me, is the center of Christmas time. 

My husband used to read Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” to our daughters every December. In that story, Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew speaks these words as he tries to convince his stingy uncle to share and celebrate:

“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

This brings me back to Gus who opened his heart freely all year long and died on Christmas Day.

When he was in his seventies, working at the town dump, he warmed himself with a stove in his shack there. He liked chatting there with his old store customers and neighbors.

 “Lots of times these days, neighbors don’t know neighbors,” said Gus. “They’re in too much of a hurry.”

On a bitter cold December Saturday, Gus called to say someone had stolen the stove. It was so cold, he sought refuge in his truck. 

When he got home that night, he called me and said, “I sat in my truck all day. It was terrible windy.” Gus stayed on the job as the wind wuthered and wailed on Flat Rock Road. He figured he served 40 to 50 residents.

“You’re good with words,” Gus told me. “I thought maybe you could do something.”

I wrote about Gus and his predicament, and was bowled over with the response. People who knew him and people who didn’t called to express their outrage over the theft and their high regard for Gus. Several offered him stoves.

The warmth he had put out over the years was returned in kind.

I thought about this as I baked my daughter’s chocolate-zucchini cake.

Gus was the kind of man who would help you if you needed it, even if you weren’t going to pay him back. He’d let a boy learn it was wrong to steal by holding him not with force or threats but with warm chatter until the pilfered Popsicles melted in his pocket. He would breathe life into a girl’s dream of playing music, when even her own parents told her to be realistic.

These were all gifts. And maybe now, although we shop at large supermarkets that close at set hours and may not know our neighbors, we can still give one another the gift of kindness. 

After all, if police, who by their very job titles are enforcers of the law, can let an old woman go to buy a zucchini or help her get home on a dark, cold Christmas night — there is hope for humanity. We are, after all, fellow passengers on this journey called life.