My wife and I used to feel that it was impossible to be a true friend to someone whose name we didn’t know. How wrong we were! Years of Sunday-morning bus trips through the city with the same group of “nameless” people have changed our thinking.

Before the bus takes off, we all join in a conversation: where’s the silent woman who sits at the front and never replies to our cheery greetings? Here she comes. Her worn clothing suggests she doesn’t have much money to spare, but she always takes an extra cup of coffee for the driver.

We get smiles from a Mexican couple as they get on the bus hand in hand. When they get off, they’re still holding hands. The woman was pregnant late last year, and one day her change of shape showed that she’d given birth to the child. We even felt a little proud at the thought of our extended family.

For many months, our only sadness lay in our being unable to establish the same friendship with the silent woman at the front of the bus. Then, one evening, we went to a fish restaurant. We were shown to a table alongside someone sitting alone. It was the woman from the bus.

We greeted her with friendly familiarity we’d shown all year, but this time her face softened, then a shy smile. When she spoke, the words escaped from her lips with difficulty. All at once we realized why she hadn’t spoken to us before. Talking was hard for her.

Over dinner, we learned the stay of a single mother with a disabled son who was receiving special care away from home. She missed him very much, she explained.

“I love him… and he loves me, even though he doesn’t express it very well,” she spoke in a low voice. “Lots of us have that problem, don’t we? We don’t say what we want to say, what we should be saying. And that’s not good enough.”

The candles flared on our tables. Our fish had never tasted better. But the atmosphere grew pleasant, and when we parted as friends—we shared names.

When I was in my first year of high school, I had a terrible time when every area of my life was a disaster. I felt so hopeless and alone that I thought everything was impossible.

On one such day, I was walking from class across the school to catch the school bus home, with my head down, fighting tears of total hopelessness, when a young man came down the sidewalk toward me. Though I had never seen him before, I did not want him to see that I was in such low spirits, so I turned my head away and hoped to hurry past. I thought he'd walk on by, but he moved until he was directly in front of me, waited until I looked up, and then smiled.

Looking into my eyes, this stranger spoke in a quiet voice："Whatever is wrong will pass. You're going to be OK, just hang on." He then smiled again and walked away.

I can't explain the effect of that man's unexpected kindness and caring! He gave me the one thing that I'd lost completely—hope. I looked for him in our school to thank him, but never saw him again.

That was thirty years ago. And I've never forgotten that moment. Over the years, whenever I see someone who is in trouble, I will always think of that young man and try to give a flash of hope in the dark wherever I can. I carry things for people when they are too heavy for them, sit with naughty babies in the waiting room while their mothers are busy, or talk to tired couples at the checkout line or it could be anything.