Sister Anne works at the St Vincent de Paul soup kitchen in Oakland, a drab one story building sandwiched between a freeway overpass and a wide thoroughfare that is home to liquor stores, storefront churches and single room occupancy hotels. Sister Anne is 93 years old. I do not know her last name. She does not wear a full habit, but she still does wear a wimple. She also wears plastic framed glasses, orthopedic shoes, a black skirt, and a light cardigan sweater. The same every day.

Her job is to carry trays of food across the dining hall to people who can not make it through the serving line – the disabled and families with small children. They use a side entrance, and have their own tables set aside for them.

Sister Anne has a purposeful, blocky gait, the result of her age and an old hip injury.

When I first started working there, I found her intimidating. She reminded me of the sour nuns who taught us in elementary school. She didn’t smile. She scowled. I couldn’t tell whether she enjoyed what she was doing or not, or whether it mattered to her that she enjoy it at all.

But after a few weeks, I discovered what everyone else already knew: Sister Anne had a wry sense of humor, and her apparent scowl was no scowl at all, but simply her straining to hear you.

Before each shift, we gather in a circle and listen to a gospel reading by Brother Francis, who isn’t a monk at all, but a 67 year old divorcee estranged from his grown children. One day Brother Francis announces that he will be shortening the reading as it is unusually long. Sister Anne perked up and said, “Thank God.”

We all exchanged glances: if she says it, then it’s okay.

Before Brother Francis begins his daily reading, the man who runs the place, Mario, thanks all the volunteers for showing up, reminds us that the kitchen exists only because of our generosity, that it couldn’t run without us, and offers a prayer for our continued health and safety. He has a thick Salvadoran accent, and he says this with genuine warmth and sincerity, and he says it every day. Now one day Mario is absent. Sister Anne notices this and before Brother Francis can begin his reading, she says to the twenty or so of us gathered in our little circle, with just a smidge of sarcasm,“Where’s Mario? How else are we gonna know that this place couldn’t run without us?” From that moment on I decided I loved Sister Anne.

So here’s where luck – good and bad – come into the story.

Last week Sister Anne was going about her usual work, picking up trays and walking them over to the rear of the dining hall. Suddenly I heard a commotion. A man inside the dining hall was yelling. Outside, in an enclosed courtyard, somebody was trying to steal his bicycle. A good dozen men show up each day on bicycles, and because the courtyard is enclosed except for one doorway, no one locks their bikes. And it’s never been an issue. But that day someone violated the social contract and was lifting this bike over a hedge to steal it.

The bike’s owner yelled and sprinted for the back door to the courtyard. He was in such a state that I don’t think he realized at first that he had slammed into Sister Anne and knocked her on her back. He ran outside and confronted the man. The would-be thief ran away, and the man still had his bike.

It was now that he realized what he had done. He ran back into the dining hall and saw the elderly little nun being helped to her feet by several people. Sister Anne grimaced in pain. Her arm was broken in three places. The man ran up to her, fell to his knees, and started sobbing. He kept saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over. He was hunched over, the elbows of his coat shiny from wear and grime. An ambulance was called, and Sister Anne was taken away.

It was a simple case of bad luck: innumerable little choices and unforeseeable events converged to put this man on a collision course with Sister Anne.

As to the good luck?

Well, of all the people he could’ve knocked over and injured, fate paired him with Sister Anne. She forgave him on the spot.

Tuesday she went into surgery to have pins put in her arm. Brother Francis visited her before the surgery and reported that when he told her he felt bed that she would no longer be able to help out in the dining room, she replied “I still have one good arm. I’ll just walk twice as fast.”