Somewhere in the area of Cook’s Corner, Good Samaritans are doing nice things in the spirit of the season.

On the afternoon of Chrismas Eve, Brunswick High School senior Emily Casler was on her way along the Androscoggin River and through the Bowdoin Pines, to grandma’s house she was going. With her younger brother and sister belted into the car, she stopped for $10 worth of gas at the Cumberland Farms on Bath Road.

“I never even saw her pull up to the pump, but this lady walked up and asked me how much I was going to put in,” Casler said. “She said, ‘I’ll do it for you,’ and I said, ‘No, thanks, I can get it.’

“But she said, no, it’s Christmas and would I let her? The next thing I knew, she’d filled up the tank,” Casler said.

Was this woman perhaps wearing a red suit and a fluffy cap?

Maybe she had a sleigh and some antlered wildlife idling just around the corner?

No, Casler said, actually she appeared to be in her mid-40s and otherwise nondescript.

“I’d never seen her before,” said Casler, 17, a senior at Brunswick High School. “She just gave me a hug, said ‘Merry Christmas,’ and took off.”

Jen Anderson, manager of the 190 Bath Road store, said she wasn’t aware of Casler’s benefactor.

“But there’s been a few things like that that’ve happened,” Anderson said. “There are a lot of good people out there. I just wish there were even more of them.”

She recounted that two men paid for a five-gallon can of gas for a woman whose car had run dry just up the street from the station on Dec. 27, and that just before Christmas, in one of the Portland Cumberland Farms stores, an unidentified woman had paid for 72 coffees.

“She didn’t say why, she just wanted to buy them for the next 72 people who came in,” Anderson said.

Neither was the quantity of specifically 72 explained.

Regardless, “It’s nice to know that there really are still people out there doing things like that,” Casler said.

jtleonard@timesrecord.com

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