You know how we love to rail against the idiots who dump trash on the side of the road? Well, here’s a different story:

One Saturday morning, at around 6:30, a friend of ours was approaching the stop sign on Middle Street in Milford, ready to stop and then proceed into the Oval.

Ahead of him, a car was stopped at the sign and suddenly, a man got out, holding a bag, and shut his door. Our friend wondered if the man had mistaken a sign that meant stop and then go for some sort of absolute, as in “Stop! Forever!”

As is the wont of our friend, he was ready to assume the person who had exited that car was going to do something annoying, and our friend was prepared to send the man a New York-Boston admonition, which we won’t bother to detail here.

But then he saw the man run quickly across Middle Street to the sidewalk in front of Town Hall and drop the bag he was holding into the trash container. Then the man ran back to his car, waved an apology to our friend, and drove off.

Our friend was stunned. He had just witnessed an act of good citizenship and couldn’t quite deal with it. He, and we, are so used to people taking bags of trash and hurling them onto the roadside, that it was hard to believe someone had done the right thing.

But this person had.

We don’t know who he was but our friend gave this description:

Somewhere between 25 and 35, wearing a cutoff shirt decorated as an American flag, tattoos all along his arms, and driving some kind of black car.

We give you this description in case you know this man so that you can, for our friend and for us, say this to him:

Thank you.

Thank you for doing the right thing, thank you for making our friend’s day, thank you for being a good guy.

We need more folks like you.