LJ Idol 9.13: Open topic...
A friend of mine, who emigrated from Russia to New York in his youth, observes Christmas according to the Russian Orthodox calendar, on January 7. Early in our friendship, I asked him what it was like to celebrate Christmas almost two weeks after "everybody else." He smiled, thought for a moment, and said that it all boiled down to two main points.
"On the plus side," he said, "you wouldn't believe the great deals I get when it comes to purchasing gifts during the sales that start on December twenty-sixth!" After we both enjoyed a hearty laugh, he added, "On the other hand, it takes somewhat of an effort to hold on to the spirit of the season after people have put their decorations away and the world has returned to the everyday rule of 'screw your neighbor'."
I knew what he meant. Not long before, I had been walking north on Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan when a man, also walking north a couple of dozen yards ahead of me, took his hand out of his left trouser pocket for some reason, and when he did so, a roll of bills dropped out of his pocket onto the sidewalk. Almost as soon as the money hit the concrete, an individual who had been walking in the same direction a pace or two behind this unfortunate fellow bent smoothly down, picked up the cash, and put it in his pocket, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. I was a little shocked at this rather straightforward example of 'screw your neighbor,' and I doubtless contributed to it by doing… nothing.
From time to time, though, things do move in the other direction. One day, after our family had moved to Colorado, news came of a vacationing couple that had driven back to our small town from the top of Wolf Creek Pass, where they had found a wallet lying on the ground, stuffed with over $3,000 in cash, and turned it in to the local police. As it turned out, the wallet had been dropped by a local college student who had stopped at the top of the pass to enjoy the view on her way to her freshman year at school and her first semester away from home.
And while most of the time, the news seems to be a serial compendium of tales about individuals who, for no good reason, go out of their way to inflict harm to others, there are stories out there-and I believe they are much more common than you would believe, because they are so rarely told-about people who, for whatever reason, do what they can to lend someone a hand.
In my own past there was an incident that occurred a few weeks after my wife and I had moved from New York to Jacksonville, Florida. Various expenses associated with the move had tapped us dry, financially, and I came home a few days short of payday to find my wife in tears. She had gone to the grocery store down the block yo do some shopping with our last twenty-dollar bill-about sixty dollars in today's money-but when the time came to check out, the bill was not in her purse. She had dropped it somewhere, or lost it, or something.
Then and there, on impulse, I hied us to the store, where I stepped up to the manager's counter and asked the bespectacled man there, who was just hanging up the phone, if anyone had turned in a twenty earlier in the day. Clearly, I thought to myself as I asked, this was a mad act of desperation, for I had been born and bred in New York and I knew how the world worked. To my surprise, the manager's face lit up when he heard my question, and he exclaimed "They surely did!" And he reached down behind the counter and handed my wife a twenty. Both my wife and I stood there, for a few moments, in disbelief, before we thanked him and shuffled off into the aisles to do our shopping.
That was not an isolated incident in my life. Shortly after moving from a condo in California to mobile home in Colorado, my wife drove our van back to the West Coast to take care of some unifnished matters. On the return drive to Colorado, the van broke down some distance from Bakersfield, California. She was safe and was coming home by train, but the van would require major repairs to put it back on the road.
Our new neighbors-Shari and Lloyd-were kind enough to lend me a car to drive down to Santa Fe, where I picked up my wife at the Amtrak station. All during the drive back to Colorado, we tried to figure out the logistics of getting our van back from the garage owner, who we had begun to call "the Bakersfield Bandit" (given the size of his bill for towing and storing the car). How would we ever manage to get the van back to Colorado?
When we got back home, our neighbors came to the rescue. "Lloyd's got a pick-up and a trailer," said Shari. "If you can cover the gas," said Lloyd, "we'll go get your van!" I forget the rest, except that Lloyd and I pulled an all-nighter and a half driving to Bakersfield and back over the next thirty hours.
After we got back, I recalled the idea of "paying it forward" that I had learned about from Jerry Pournelle, an author known for his science fiction and whose monthly column appeared, in those days, in BYTE magazine, where a number of my articles had also been published. Over sushi one evening, during one of my trips to the Los Angeles area, Pournelle related to me how Robert A. Heinlein-yes, the Robert A. Heinlein-had been of great help to him back when he was first starting out as a writer, and later, after Pournelle had become established, he asked Heinlein how he could pay him back. "You can't pay me back," said Heinlein, according to Pournelle, "but you can pay me forward," by lending someone else a hand, some day.
And so, over the years, I have been "paying it forward," in my own way: some here, a little more there. And as I've become older, I become ever more convinced that "screw your neighbor" is far from the default setting for human interactions. If it were, we would never have survived as a species.
In any event, I always make sure to send my old New York friend a Christmas card timed to arrive just before January 7. It's the least I can do.
"On the plus side," he said, "you wouldn't believe the great deals I get when it comes to purchasing gifts during the sales that start on December twenty-sixth!" After we both enjoyed a hearty laugh, he added, "On the other hand, it takes somewhat of an effort to hold on to the spirit of the season after people have put their decorations away and the world has returned to the everyday rule of 'screw your neighbor'."
I knew what he meant. Not long before, I had been walking north on Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan when a man, also walking north a couple of dozen yards ahead of me, took his hand out of his left trouser pocket for some reason, and when he did so, a roll of bills dropped out of his pocket onto the sidewalk. Almost as soon as the money hit the concrete, an individual who had been walking in the same direction a pace or two behind this unfortunate fellow bent smoothly down, picked up the cash, and put it in his pocket, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. I was a little shocked at this rather straightforward example of 'screw your neighbor,' and I doubtless contributed to it by doing… nothing.
From time to time, though, things do move in the other direction. One day, after our family had moved to Colorado, news came of a vacationing couple that had driven back to our small town from the top of Wolf Creek Pass, where they had found a wallet lying on the ground, stuffed with over $3,000 in cash, and turned it in to the local police. As it turned out, the wallet had been dropped by a local college student who had stopped at the top of the pass to enjoy the view on her way to her freshman year at school and her first semester away from home.
And while most of the time, the news seems to be a serial compendium of tales about individuals who, for no good reason, go out of their way to inflict harm to others, there are stories out there-and I believe they are much more common than you would believe, because they are so rarely told-about people who, for whatever reason, do what they can to lend someone a hand.
In my own past there was an incident that occurred a few weeks after my wife and I had moved from New York to Jacksonville, Florida. Various expenses associated with the move had tapped us dry, financially, and I came home a few days short of payday to find my wife in tears. She had gone to the grocery store down the block yo do some shopping with our last twenty-dollar bill-about sixty dollars in today's money-but when the time came to check out, the bill was not in her purse. She had dropped it somewhere, or lost it, or something.
Then and there, on impulse, I hied us to the store, where I stepped up to the manager's counter and asked the bespectacled man there, who was just hanging up the phone, if anyone had turned in a twenty earlier in the day. Clearly, I thought to myself as I asked, this was a mad act of desperation, for I had been born and bred in New York and I knew how the world worked. To my surprise, the manager's face lit up when he heard my question, and he exclaimed "They surely did!" And he reached down behind the counter and handed my wife a twenty. Both my wife and I stood there, for a few moments, in disbelief, before we thanked him and shuffled off into the aisles to do our shopping.
That was not an isolated incident in my life. Shortly after moving from a condo in California to mobile home in Colorado, my wife drove our van back to the West Coast to take care of some unifnished matters. On the return drive to Colorado, the van broke down some distance from Bakersfield, California. She was safe and was coming home by train, but the van would require major repairs to put it back on the road.
Our new neighbors-Shari and Lloyd-were kind enough to lend me a car to drive down to Santa Fe, where I picked up my wife at the Amtrak station. All during the drive back to Colorado, we tried to figure out the logistics of getting our van back from the garage owner, who we had begun to call "the Bakersfield Bandit" (given the size of his bill for towing and storing the car). How would we ever manage to get the van back to Colorado?
When we got back home, our neighbors came to the rescue. "Lloyd's got a pick-up and a trailer," said Shari. "If you can cover the gas," said Lloyd, "we'll go get your van!" I forget the rest, except that Lloyd and I pulled an all-nighter and a half driving to Bakersfield and back over the next thirty hours.
After we got back, I recalled the idea of "paying it forward" that I had learned about from Jerry Pournelle, an author known for his science fiction and whose monthly column appeared, in those days, in BYTE magazine, where a number of my articles had also been published. Over sushi one evening, during one of my trips to the Los Angeles area, Pournelle related to me how Robert A. Heinlein-yes, the Robert A. Heinlein-had been of great help to him back when he was first starting out as a writer, and later, after Pournelle had become established, he asked Heinlein how he could pay him back. "You can't pay me back," said Heinlein, according to Pournelle, "but you can pay me forward," by lending someone else a hand, some day.
And so, over the years, I have been "paying it forward," in my own way: some here, a little more there. And as I've become older, I become ever more convinced that "screw your neighbor" is far from the default setting for human interactions. If it were, we would never have survived as a species.
In any event, I always make sure to send my old New York friend a Christmas card timed to arrive just before January 7. It's the least I can do.