I can explain away my crying in public this way. I’m more easily moved to tears as I age, letting go at funerals, weddings, movies. Maybe it’s a matter of not worrying so much about crying in public. Maybe, age stretches the defenses, and I’m left more susceptible to emotional counterattack.
So, as a warning that something important was happening here, tears weren’t useful. They run too easily. I needed something more meaningful than wet cheeks.
The empty desk chair, day piled on top of another day — that alerted me. That led to me feeling the mounting loss of yet another afternoon gone by without seeing this modest, efficient secretary who exuded a powerful and concentrated kindness every school day over the winter and into the spring.
Later, I could not look past the emptiness in me, a feeling that I had botched an opportunity to share a meaningful moment with someone — not a stranger, not a friend, one of those many people who occupy the great middle of our social lives.
You know the ones: The veterinarian technician who welcomes you when your old cat is ill again; the crossing guard at the school who holds traffic at bay with her hand-held stop sign while flashing you a smile; the guy checking your groceries whose aisle you choose even if it’s longer, because he’s friendly, efficient and impressive in the way he tosses from one hand to the other bananas and cans of beans, and you’re easily amused by grocery store juggling.
These are not people with whom you stop and share meaningful moments. You do not dig under the surface of the everyday with these people. We all agree to nod our head, flash a smile if we must, and move on. Finding meaning can wait.
This incident that had me crying in a school office started back in September. I reported to work at 1:55 p.m. said hello to the fill-in secretary, a young woman who knew she would not be doing the work long. She sometimes acknowledged my old-man presence, sometimes did not. Those are the rules by which we play. Don’t expect anyone to respond to a nice overture.
Before long, the young secretary returned to her former job and was replaced in late fall by a middle-aged woman who had worked in the offices of other local schools. My routine remained the same: Show up between 1:55 and 2 p.m., get the day’s attendance report, grab a key, greet the secretary.
Without fail, she was kind and personal. Wearing her straight, blond hair in bangs, she looked me in the eye, announced that she was glad to see me. This was disconcerting at first, like she was teaching me new rules to an old card game.
Ok, then, I thought. Hello to you and I’m also glad to see you.
I realize I’m talking about an elementary school here. People are supposed to be kind in grade schools. This is not extraordinary.
This is the same school where months later in the late spring I saw a tree outside the front doors adorned with hanging paper symbols of kindness, fastened there by one of the kindergarten classes as a reminder to others about how important it is to be nice to each other. After all, without kind, you can’t spell kindergarten.
We are indoctrinated in the creed of kindness as preschoolers. On it goes up the grades, kindness and decency are pillars of the elementary school social curriculum. So a nice word from one woman in the school’s office would be like finding sand at the beach.
Maybe the magic was in her consistency She never said or did anything that by itself changed my day. Instead, she was like an incoming tide, hardly noticeable in the moment, impossible to stem over time.
Everyday, I opened the office door with the large glass pane, sometimes late and sometimes harried. Everyday, she’d look up, beam a smile at me, say my name and tell me how glad she was to see me. I’d grab the key and the reports and be on my way. Nothing to it.
After a month of this, I noticed that the effect of her kindness lasted beyond my exposure to her. I toted it along with me to my next stop. The encounter with the elementary school secretary lasted maybe one minute, two at the most. Let’s say by 2:05 p.m. I was back to my normal. Yet, that’s a tidy return-on-investment — at least a ratio of 1:5. One minute of her kindness affected the next five in a positive fashion.
She made me feel like the accumulation of her daily gestures of kindness was an act of superior intention. It marked me, tattooed me with the ink of decency.
I admit that it felt good. I was also suspicious of my feelings. How could something so good be the result of something so simple, so shallow, so kindergarten.
Through the winter this continued. By early spring, it unraveled.
For two weeks she was out. Health issues. Her first day away was easy to ignore, but the continued absence of kindness became more noticeable as I realized that I had been depending on it during the dark winter months, looking forward to the time when someone for only seconds out of her day, paid attention to me in a way that wasn’t flirting, wasn’t calculated. It was simple. It was kind. That’s all. Just nice, like the chat that means nothing with your neighbor. It means nothing on its own, but stitch a few kindnesses together, it’s a message: You matter.
Her health worsened when she returned to work. Surrounded by the miasma of viruses and bacteria that float about an elementary school, she fell sick and had to take more time off. She was out for another week. Then another.
It took her being away for me to realize her power. I wanted her to know how how her kindness, her being simply nice, had helped me navigate my own too-self-involved world.
So one Monday in May, I pulled up a chair, sat next to her and tried to tell her that I admired her kindness, had missed it, in fact. My motive was to celebrate her talent for making people feel valuable, not let her actions evanesce, as a wave fades and ripples to nothing.
But I mishandled it. I could not say what I thought was simple. I started crying, not bawling, just tears running from both eyes. Feeling too vulnerable, I guess embarrassed, I got up without finishing what I had to say and excused myself.
The next day, hoping to continue the conversation, at least apologize for being overly emotional, I found the secretary’s desk empty again. She had decided, for health reasons, to work half-days for the rest of the school year. I haven’t seen her since.
Now, my work at that elementary school has concluded, the story could end there, maybe it should end there. I noticed that when someone is kind, it can feel nice, move a weepy man to tears. Lesson learned. The End.
And yet. That response strikes me as, well, a nice try, a mediocre attempt at telling the secretary that her kindness has a depth that I could not appreciate at first. Some social scientists would call her kindness that I carried past the school office a viral response. I caught what she had and infected others with her kindness. That’s the theory.
To not return, to not look her in the eye and say thank you for being so regularly nice, now, that would be…what?
Unkind with a side of weakness and timidity.
I got the idea that I’d bring her flowers, that way if I were to choke up again, I could gift her something without having to say anything. I cut two bright orange calendula and one red Maltese cross flower from my garden. I brought a glass jar as a vase and set off for the school, making sure that I arrived early.
The chair was empty again. She was gone, out for the morning. I left the flowers and a note of thanks for her unflagging kindness.
Three flowers in a Mason jar vase. That’s what marks a winter of consistent kindness between two people not strangers, not friends. Otherwise, it has vanished.
Mr. K's World 