The card declined once, then again, and the line behind the elderly woman started to shift and sigh the way lines do. The teenager at the register did not sigh. He walked around his own counter, swiped his own card, and went back to scanning groceries like nothing had happened. That is one way a town takes care of itself. This week also gave us a city spending money before a crash instead of after one, and a song that almost got rushed when it needed to stay slow.
Murfreesboro Gets $10 Million to Make Its Streets Safer
Murfreesboro has been awarded $8.28 million in federal funding through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program. Paired with a $2 million local match, the city now has $10 million to spend on roads before someone gets hurt on them, not after.
The plans are specific. Traffic calming improvements are coming to 2.8 miles of Saint Andrews Drive, along with signal upgrades at key intersections around the city. A pedestrian hybrid beacon is planned for Veterans Parkway near Barfield Crescent Park, where people on foot and cars moving at speed have had to share the same stretch of road.
Near the intersections around Middle Tennessee State University, the city will run what’s called a near-miss demonstration — watching how drivers and pedestrians actually move through those corners to catch the dangerous patterns before they become accident reports.
It’s not a flashy kind of good news. No one gets rescued, no one gets a windfall. What it is, is a city choosing to spend real money on the version of the future where fewer people get hurt crossing the street — and building a Pavement Management Plan so that thinking carries forward past this one grant.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
He Paid a Stranger’s Grocery Bill. His Town Paid Him Back.
Brent Cabahug moved from the Philippines to Minnesota with his mom and sister. He was a senior at Stillwater Area High School, working his first job at Walmart, saving up for a car. On a Tuesday evening in January, an elderly woman’s card kept declining at his checkout line. The line behind her grew restless.
Cabahug didn’t ask her anything. He walked around the register and paid her $80 bill himself, then went back to scanning the next customer’s groceries.
A mother of four named Dani Dircks was in that line and saw the whole thing. “He didn’t care in that moment who she was, who she loved, who she voted for,” she said. She didn’t know Cabahug, but she found out he was saving for a car, hoped to help his family buy a house after graduation, and — after a leg injury ended his volleyball career — had set his sights on becoming a nurse. She started a GoFundMe. It has since raised more than $18,000 toward a $20,000 goal.
Cabahug wasn’t trying to start anything. He saw someone struggling and did the thing that felt obvious to him. The only reason the rest of us know about it is that someone happened to be watching, and decided a moment like that shouldn’t just disappear into a Tuesday evening.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
The Song Roberta Flack Wanted to Speed Up
When Roberta Flack recorded “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for her 1969 debut album, she stretched it past five minutes, with a long piano opening and a lot of space between the notes. She doubted it was built for the charts, and for a few years, it wasn’t.
Then Clint Eastwood heard a rare radio recording while making his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, and wanted it for a reconciliation scene between his character and his girlfriend. Flack herself suggested speeding up the tempo to make it more commercial. Eastwood said no — the slowness was exactly what the scene needed.
He was right. Atlantic Records released it as a single after the film’s success, and in 1972 it spent six weeks at No. 1, becoming Billboard’s song of the year. Flack won Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the 1973 Grammys.
The artist closest to the work doubted it. It took someone else seeing it clearly — and refusing to rush it — for the rest of the world to catch up.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
A safer intersection, an $80 grocery bill, five unhurried minutes of piano and voice — none of it looks like much from a distance. Up close, each one is somebody deciding not to rush past the obvious right thing. If something like that happened in your corner of the Boro this week, we’d like to hear about it.