People tell me that I’m getting more curmudgeonly as I get older, which I take as a compliment. I mean, have you ever met one of those people in their eighties who are upbeat and pleasant all the time?  I look at those people and I can only assume that for eighty years they just haven’t been paying attention.

But sometimes a gesture of human kindness pierces my heart and cuts through all the negativity I’ve accumulated as a result of Darfur, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, global warming, and Adam Sandler.

Such was the case this weekend.  My friend Meredith knows some crazy people, and one of them threw a birthday party for her fiancée. What was the nature of said party? We were given movie cameras and told to write, film, and edit a movie in around six hours.  The Red Vic theater in San Francisco was rented out at midnight to screen all of the movies to a bunch of tired and (by that time) mostly drunk filmmakers.

Needless to say, this was a pretty stressful enterprise; we only had a few hours of light to capture all the footage. And most of our film consisted of exterior shots, as it was decided to do a parody of Run Lola Run (one of my favorite movies, as it happens) full of in-jokes and references to the birthday boy and his fiancée.

So anyway, I was trying to take some shots of Lola (Meredith) running.  We were running out of time, and we were all tired.  I needed a shot of her running down her apartment stairs, but we were in a cramped courtyard and I was having a hard time setting up the tripod.  I backed up against an apartment door and shouted “Okay, give me a second, I’m trying to get you into frame--”

--and suddenly, the door behind me opened.

I turned around, and an elderly lady smiled and gestured to me.

“Come in, come in, shoot here.” She had an accent--I couldn’t quite place it. Swedish?

It was a foggy, chilly day in the city, and I could feel the heat spilling out of her well-warmed apartment.

“Oh!” I said. “Okay, it will just be a second. Thanks!”

And I backed up a few feet.

“Come in more, shoot, shoot,” she said, urging me on.

So I backed up even more and planted my ass in her hallway and set up the camera and got the shot.

I turned around and said to my savior, “You’re very kind.”

“Ah, of course, of course,” she said, and then she shut the door.

Now, admittedly, this was Meredith’s neighbor and probably knew her by sight, so she didn’t think she was opening her door to a psycho killer or anything. But still, this lady was warm and peaceful in her apartment on a cold November day.  She disrupted her tranquility so a bunch of shouting morons could enter her house and finish a ridiculous movie.

So, of all the things I’m thankful for, topping the list is anyone who is willing to open the front door, place trust in humanity, and let people get the shot they need:

(And isn’t Meredith a dead ringer for the real Lola?)

Happy Thanksgiving.