Karma’s little helper

I have a nickname for myself: Karma’s Little Helper. I believe in karma. If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. If you do good things, good things will happen.

The Bible believes in karma. Galatians 6:17: “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Buddha believes in karma. Udana-Varga 5:18: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”

Native Americans believe in karma. Black Elk: “All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One.”

But sometimes karma does not happen as fast as I would like. Sometimes karma needs a little push, a helping hand. Enter me, Karma’s Little Helper.

The other day as I was driving home from the Denver Tech Center on my scooter during rush hour, a lit cigarette was flung at my feet. With a red light at the intersection, I had time to lean over to the woman next to me and say, “Excuse me, I think you dropped your cigarette.”

“I KNOW,” she sternly replied. And looked straight ahead, ignoring me. BIG mistake.

If you know me, I absolutely abhor people throwing trash out of their cars. Cigarette butts make me fume. And lit cigarette butts light me on fire.

“That’s not cool,” I scolded her. “Lit cigarettes start roadside fires.” She just stared coldly ahead.

Enter stage left, Karma’s Little Helper. I picked up that lit cigarette butt and tossed it right back into her window.

Normally, that would have been enough. But karma woke up and took it a step further as a result of my helping hand. At the moment of my toss, the woman happened to be looking away. She did not see me throw the cigarette back into her car. With the sun approaching the western horizon, her visor was down, partially blocking her open window. The lit cigarette hit the visor and dropped straight down between the driver’s seat and the car door. The smoking litterbug witnessed none of this.

Smug in her belief that she had gotten away with her crime, the woman rolled up her window in an attempt to further ignore me, sealing herself inside her car with a burning lit cigarette.

Now I just waited. I wondered how long it would take for the woman to realize she had a burning cigarette smoldering in the carpet of her car floor. Since the car already reeked of cigarette smoke, this could take a while. The traffic light went from red to green and both our lanes of traffic moved forward, only to be stopped by more rush hour traffic about a hundred feet away.

I could see the woman starting to look around. Something was amiss. She opened her car door, looking for the source of burning cigarette AND burning carpet.

The traffic broke up and it was time to go. I rode off into the sunset with a panicked woman pulling to the side of the rode in my rear view mirror.

Karma’s Little Helper strikes again.