One Christmas Eve years ago, Alice Davidson, a teacher who lives in Mountain Brook, was driving with her children to deliver Christmas presents. Davidson passed a woman waiting next to one of the blue metal poles marking a bus stop. The woman had probably helped serve dinner on Christmas Eve, and now she was waiting, her arms loaded with bags, for the bus to take her home.
Davidson drove on, thinking the bus would come any minute. When she drove by again half an hour later, the woman was still standing in the same spot. Davidson picked her up and drove her home; “it was probably no more than 15 minutes.”
Decades later, that memory has stayed with Davidson.
“You know [the woman's bosses] had given her presents and a good bit of money, but that’s not what she needed, she needed a ride home. I think sometimes that people don’t understand the basic things that people need. You think that money and gifts can take care of things, but that's not what she needed, she just needed to go home.”
