Shin Matsuo is a high school student and he rides the Amtrak train from Los Angeles to San Diego.

He sits in silence as the passengers mill back and forth along the aisles. That silence is shattered by the grinding of wheels against the rails as the car lurches wildly back and forth over a rough patch on the rails.

Passengers hold on for dear life as a 78 year old man is elasticated across the car slamming his head into a steel post then falls back against the wall spilling his food tray on the floor. 

Shin springs to his feet and secures the fallen senior as he begins to slide down the wall. The old man has been stunned and is now half conscious and disoriented. For the next ten minutes Shin lovingly cares for the senior as if it was his own grandfather, who had fallen down in his own home. Talking to him in a calming and reassuring tone and with all the maturity of an adult many years his senior, he inches the old man back to his seat.

Overwhelmed by the young mans kindness and maturity the man begins to cry bitter sweet tears as he realizes how vulnerable he is riding alone, but how truly caring the student is for his elder an utter stranger.

Shin’s heroic actions rekindles the old mans faith in human kind, who had long since given up on todays callous and self indulgent generation.

Shin did not take a bow, nor did he seek the limelight, he simply slipped off the train as the old man napped with a nasty bump on his temple but with a smile on his lips and dried tears on his cheeks.

Shin is most certainly an old soul who for certain, in the future, will do more on the same like an ancient chivalrous Knight Errant * from long ago.