An Abundance of Pleasantries
Yesterday I got all wrapped up in slavery and today I am struck by the importance of finding pleasure in everyday tasks and interactions. I think of this because many of the slaves depicted in the Harriet movie I discussed yesterday made it a point to be pleasant people who went about their labors every day with a smile on their face and the pleasure of being alive and otherwise in God’s good graces. They lacked that single element of being that some find intolerable to be without. Mel Gibson said it best in Braveheart when he said under the executioner’s ghastly disembowelment knife, “You can take my life, but you can’t take my freedom.”
I feel conflicted by this. I want to admire people who can and do revolt against tyranny like Harriet Tubman. I want to shake people like her poor sister who is too scared to run and take the risk to do what Harriet did, even with Harriet’s help. I want to remind her sister that a sunny day of slavery is not as good as a rainy day of freedom. But at the same time, we all can understand how not everyone is able to be the revolutionaries we admire in history. It’s hard and its certainly not for everyone. Those people who can do it tend to be people who can’t find pleasure in that sunny day. I recently wrote about Nelson Mandela and Invictus and I sense that he managed, by being the master of his own fate, to enjoy the sunshine during his twenty-seven years in prison and still be the activist that got himself released and able to go on to lead his country out of Apartheid.
So what is the secret of attitude? I have said for years that I have been blessed by having a brain chemistry which allows me to see the sunshine in every day, but then again, I was born free, I was born into an educated household, I was born to a mother of great ambition that valued adventure while always doing the right thing. That good fortune certainly gives me the ability to see the sunshine, where I can imagine that others not so fortunate might not have that advantage. I am certainly a liberal who believes all my hard work and ability pales by comparison to my good fortune as a cause and effect of both my successes and my attitude. But I also know many people with similar advantages of good fortune who do not have the brain chemistry to see the sunshine.
What made me ponder this line of thinking today was a combination of several interactions I had today. I start my day every day walking out my apartment house front door with a stop and quick chat and handshake with Corrado. Corrado still has his Italian accent and has a wife battling cancer, but every day he says to me to have a “Bella giornata”. They say that people with cancer need to maintain a good attitude to keep their immunology in its best form. I don’t know if there have been studies to this effect, but I bet a cancer supporter’s good attitude has a similarly important role to play in the defeat of the beast.
I went to lunch today at a favorite restaurant, Battery Gardens. I have been going there for almost ten years now and know the hostess, the lead waiter and the busboy. Each one of them remains in the same position in the pecking order that they have been in for all that time. I have no idea how they each do financially or why they stay, but I have to assume it is some combination of a decent work environment and compensation scheme and the fact that all like what they do. None of them has a particularly difficult job, but as we all know, wait staff can be good, bad or indifferent. All of these three are in the good category. They know what I like and what I order and they anticipate my needs with a smile and a nice simple unobtrusive nod. They are familiar without being overly chatty. They are professionals at their roles and at their craft. And here’s the big thing, they are always in a good mood when I see them. Yes, I tip them well for this, but I don’t sense that’s what makes it happen. They know I value them and I think that means something to them. I am always courteous and thankful as well as happy to see them when I next arrive. It means something to them and me.
Every Tuesday and Thursday in our office building, a shoeshine guy comes to our floor to gather shoes to shine. This is almost a lost service. To NYC businesspeople, this is the daily milk bottle delivery. It’s close to being extinct, but most of us who have grown up in NYC business, value a good shoeshine person. Maybe people in the country take out their shoes and shine them all up regularly, but I can’t remember the last I’ve I had to do that and doubt I could even find the shoe polish. This fellow who comes twice a week is Brazilian and from the look and sound of him, I bet he came here from one of the urban favellas in Rio or Sao Paolo. He is an older man, who hustles every day to make enough money to feed his family, from what he tells me. His income is directly dependent on his hustle and his friendliness. Every day, regardless of the weather or the amount of shoes available to clean, he is friendly and smiling. He appears through the office glass walls with a big grin and a light tap on the window. If he is waived off he makes no bones about it and just moves on. If you ask him in he politely waits for you to take off your shoes. When he returns your shoes he has a shoehorn for you and a hands-together signal of thanks. Whenever I give him more than the norm (which I usually do) he thanks me on behalf of his family like he was George M. Cohan. Today I had on blue suede shoes (really) and he cleaned them and the stitching bringing them back to like-new. All that and a nice smiling thanks.
Tonight I had to pick up dinner for me and my son at Dos Torros. I was buying burrito bowls to a specific order from my son. There was a young African American man behind the counter who reminded me of one of the characters in Harriet. I imagine a fast food worker in today’s world is about as close to “modern slavery” as it comes. And here was this young man engaging with me with a smile and helpful suggestions. He went the extra mile for a three-minute customer who he would likely never see again and couldn’t tip him. This really struck me.
What I knew I could do was to write a story about him and those like him that work hard at what we would call “menial” jobs and note that there is great honor in doing every job well and even greater honor in doing a job with an abundance of pleasantries.