Do you also wish a superhero would swoop down and fly you to a beach where sunshine is the only butt-warmer needed?

My Super Swooper hasn’t appeared. Still, throughout my life, small-time heroes have popped up like crocuses through snow.

My family was staying in a church’s back rooms with no bathing facilities. Mom’s friend shared her old-fashioned bathtub, making the world a less stinky place.

Unknown drivers pulled over 1950s Chevys to give my young father rides to work.

As a preschooler, I pilfered a necklace from Etta, the Church Lady. Mom forced my confession before Etta and God. Both pardoned me. Later, Etta gave me a necklace of my very own.

A preacher gave me a Hershey bar and told me I could sing.

Serious hero points go to children’s education leaders who kept straight faces and saved mine. Assured any scripture memorization qualified for a prize, I recited Song of Solomon passages. Unknown to me, they weren’t about palm trees and goats.

As a teen driver, I smashed a pastor’s car, yet he maintained his religion.

At my first job, I dumped salads with French dressing on a lady wearing a white suit. She waved off my tearful apology: “No problem. I have six kids.”

A college student, I worked summer nights in a rough Western town. The cook drank coffee out front, wearing a snarl no cowboy challenged. “If anybody hassles you, I’ll break ’em in two.”

Less menacing, a couple with small children picked up my boyfriend and I for church every week.

Despite my future in-laws’ visions of a marital Titanic, they supported our wedding during medical school.

Other small-time heroes zoomed in:

An unemployed couple slid 10 dollars under our door.

A child brightened my tough workday by saying I was pretty.

A stranger, concerned about my pregnancy, pushed my shopping cart and unloaded groceries.

A snowplow operator cleared our driveway, with homemade bread for payment.

I’d asked a Burger King counterperson to reheat cold fries. Upon hearing I’d been dieting and hoped to enjoy a treat, she handed me smoking-hot replacements.

A young college student carried this old adult student’s backpack up three flights of stairs.

A grouchy, nonfiction editor didn’t throw me out for mistakenly pitching fiction to her at 8:00 a.m. She ultimately published several of my pieces.

A writing friend grabbed me before I entered an important meeting wearing a Chiquita banana sticker on my power-suited butt.

All these and more have rescued me. I can’t count how many times my family has saved me.

Who needs Super Swooper, anyway?

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Who are your small-time heroes?