Deputy Receives Note from Two Women at Cracker Barrel After They Pay for His Breakfast
It’s hard to know what to believe these days, with video clips cut to emphasize certain angles over others, photos cropped to streamline a certain message, and sides being as polarized as they are.
News tends to focus on the exciting, the sensational and the tragic, but that can give us a lopsided view of the world. Sure, plenty of terrible, heartbreaking and worrisome things are happening, but there’s a lot of good going on, steadily but surely, and it tends to get eclipsed.
Sumner County Patrol Deputy Jody McDowell experienced a bit of that good on Tuesday morning when he sat down to breakfast at a Cracker Barrel in Nashville, Tennessee.
He ordered his food, and as his meal was brought to his table, the waitress had something besides a plate for him.
“I was told to give this to you,” she said, according to Fox News.
She handed him a piece of lined paper that had been torn out of a notebook with a message scrawled across it.
“BLM,” the note began, “But so does yours! Thank you for your service. Breakfast paid.”
With many of the highlighted interactions between civilians and police being so negatively charged as of late, McDowell was the unsuspecting recipient of a lovely gesture of kindness from a pair of women who’d spotted him as he settled in.
He posted a photo of the note and shared their kindness with the world.
“I want to thank the two sweet black ladies who paid for my breakfast this morning,” he wrote. “While waiting for a transport to be completed, I decided to have breakfast at a Cracker Barrel near the Nashville airport. I received this note from them.”
While he didn’t catch the ladies’ names, he certainly caught their kindness and told them so at the restaurant when they paused to thank him for his service.
Since posting the note on Tuesday morning, McDowell has gotten hundreds of comments and shares and over a thousand likes. News outlets have even taken the hint and picked up the piece, spreading a little bit of sunshine.
“Thanks for showing that to us!” one person commented on McDowell’s original post. “We always hear the bad, but this is what we need to see more of. Thanks for your service, sweet nephew!”
“It is the beautiful caring hearts inside, not the color of all of our skins,” another wrote. “That was so kind and caring of them. Thank you all.”
“I truly believe that there are more people who feel this way than we see at the protests,” a third wrote. “Thank you for your service.”
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