One Thursday afternoon, when I was in Grade 9, a new boy came into my classroom. He was short and thin. He walked up to the teacher and told her, very seriously, that he was new. His name was Christian. He sat down, took a look at me, and then looked away. I didn’t think he was very nice and I was sure he wasn’t the type I would like to make friends with.

During that year, I didn’t talk to him much, but he smiled at me when our eyes met, always shyly. He never ate lunch with anybody, and he never talked to anybody but me.

But one day I joined those unkind kids who were making fun of him. We made fun of him though I thought it was wrong.

“Haven’t you got any friends?” a kid asked Christian, who had walked past us alone, with his head down.

“No, he hasn’t got any friends. He’s too stupid and shy” I said. Then Christian looked up at me with the saddest dog eyes I had ever seen. I felt very sorry at that moment.

That night, I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t get Christian’s face out of my mind. In the weeks that followed, he never met my eyes in class and never smiled at me. It was really hard for me to decide to write him a note asking him to forgive(原谅) me. But I thought I should.

The next day in class, I wrote him a note telling him how sorry I felt. About five minutes later, I turned and saw tears in his eyes. “You will never realize what your apology(道歉) has meant to me, Jimmy” he said to me. “I hope we can become friends.”

We had lunch together that noon and we had the best talk I had ever had. Over the years at high school, we were close friends.

When I think back, I realize that, if I had not apologized, I would never have known what a lovely person Christian was.

Apologies can really change your life, so never miss the chance to tell somebody you are sorry.

As temperatures approached 90 degrees in New York City last July 4th, three police officers hurried into a Whole Foods Market to get something cold to drink. What they walked into was a heated human drama.

Once inside, the cops (警察) , Lt. Louis Sojo and Officers Esanidy Cuevas and Michael Rivera, were approached by a store security guard who asked for help with a suspected thief. The woman in question didn’t have the look of a career criminal. She was obviously scared, and her cheeks were wet with tears.

The cops looked quickly inside her bag. “Al1 we saw was containers of food. We didn’t see anything else,” Cuevas told CBS New York.

“I’m hungry,” she explained quietly.

Caught red-handed, the woman no doubt expected to be cuffed (带上手铐) and put into prison for the crime of being hungry while poor. But the cops had other ideas. “We’ll pay for her food,” Sojo told the surprised security guard.

There’d been no discussion among the three men, no need to see whether they were all in. It went unsaid. Instead, they picked up the woman’s bag and escorted (护送) her to a cash register, where each contrilbuted $10 to pay the bill. She would not be arrested today.

All the woman could do was weep in thankfulness. Covering her face with a handkerchief and drying her eyes, she repeated, “Thank you, thank you.”

She wasn’t the only one touched by this act of sympathy and understanding. “It was a very beautiful, genuine moment,” says Paul Bozymowski, who was at the store. He was so taken by what he’d witnessed that he posted a photo on Twitter for all to see.

But attention was never what the officers sought. They were driven by a far more common emotion. As Sojo told CNN, “When you look at someone’s face and see that they need you and they’re actually hungry, it’s pretty difficult as a human being to walk away from something like this.”

Cassie Thomas thought she was just meeting with the media at her lunch break. Instead, the nurse at Janet Weis Children’s Hospital near Danville got a surprise party from her workmates. It was her first day back to work after a family vacation in Clearwater, Florida, and what a vacation it was!

“Just as I looked up, there was this big pinks lightning that just came down and hit the beach, ” Cassie said. Cassie, her husband, and their two daughters were on their hotel balcony last week when they heard and saw the storm.

After Cassie saw the lightning, she saw two boys lying on the beach. So, she shouted to them. “Then one boy sat up and he just started shouting back, and I said, ‘Jay, call 911; I’m going. ” Cassie said. So the 31-year-old nurse sprang into action. She ran down 16 flights of stairs onto the beach where she found the two boys, Jansen and Cameron, who are from North Carolina. Cameron had no heartbeat.

“I rolled Cameron over and I just started compressing(按压),”Cassie said. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she-was risking her own life to save the teenage boys.

“My daughters were on the balcony and it was a very dangerous situation to put myself in. I just wished to keep me safe because I was going, ” Cassie said. “It just goes to her character to help others. And you know what? When it’s your kid, you’d want someone to be coming in and saving his life, ” one of her workmates said.

Cassie was there when Cameron got out of the hospital. “He just said, ‘Thank you; thank you; thank you.’ He gave me so many hugs, ” Cassie said. “A nurse never truly goes on vacation. I just keep telling everybody the same thing. It’s just what you do. ”

Cassie and two other people got Good Samaritan awards from the Clearwater Police Department for saving Cameron’s life. Cassie’s workmates said they couldn’t be any prouder of this-life-saving nurse.