Save face for someone else

“Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.” – George Santayana

When I was in high school, I had my dream job.

Mrs. Barnett, the head librarian at the Morganton-Burke Public Library, had literally watched me grow up there. As a child, I was in the library every Saturday. And every Saturday, I checked out the same book, year after year. You could set your watch by it.

Up I would walk, that dog-eared book in my arms, and put it in the “return books” slot. I would stand very still and wait until Ruth Setzer, the bony-armed librarian, checked it in, taking out that ink-stained due date card and closing the cover. And then, without a word, she would extend that impossibly thin, long arm to me, with my treasure at the end of it. I would grab it and run back to the children’s section until Mama was ready to go. Then, as we readied to leave, I would check it out again and take it back home where it obviously belonged.

One Saturday, Mrs. Barnett summoned me to the circulation desk, a formidable walnut fortress. The other librarians gathered around as Mrs. Barnett smiled and handed a package to me. “Now,” she said sweetly, “we hope you might leave The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking here so other children might read it.”

But I digress. (It’s just that as a wildly red-headed and freckled child myself, Pippi was somewhat of a goddess to me, my alter-ego, my she-ro).

When I turned 15, Mrs. Barnett offered me a job working at the Circulation Desk, that great ship I had hovered in front of so many Saturdays as a child. I was ecstatic to be amongst all those books. I can still hear the sound of the wheels on Book Cart 2 as I rolled it through the stacks, getting lost in that world in which one tug at a shelf could unravel and reveal so much wonder in all those words. It was magical.

Until one day when the quiet magic was shattered as a very angry woman slammed a card catalog drawer shut and literally stomped up to the desk. This was highly unusual in the Morganton-Burke Public Library, since there didn’t seem too awfully much to get angry about. There hadn’t been this much activity since a fellow who worked at Hardees had been caught drinking aftershave in the men’s room.

“I cannot believe,” she fairly well hissed, “that this library doesn’t have any books about psychology! It’s an outrage! How dare you call yourselves a library!,” her voice rang out ricocheting off of the reserve shelves. Being the only one at the helm at that moment, it was up me to respond.

Timidly, I did.

“I know that I’ve shelved some psychology books before,” I began. “Really?!,” she interrupted, “there’s none in the card catalog–none, zero! Ridiculous! Aren’t there any grown-ups who work here?”

“They’re in a meeting right now,” I whispered, scared. “But I’ll help if I can.”

At that, she stomped her way back to the card catalog, with me trailing meekly behind like Pippi never would have done. “Where were you looking?” I asked. “Well, young lady, where on earth do you think I was looking?” she answered as she flung open a card drawer until it nearly fell out.

The drawer she had opened was the “S” drawer.

It hit me like a bolt, a heat wave that spread through my face.

“Well,” I answered very quietly after a moment, “perhaps we should try the alternate spelling.  Sometimes that works.” And I gently moved her to the P drawer.

I don’t know how I knew to do that, but even now, I’m proud that I did. More significantly, it was a moment of real clarity for me: helping her save face and retain her dignity as a human being was important and vital, even though (and perhaps especially because) she had been berating me.

Decades later, I was in line at the Giant Food supermarket in Washington, D.C., when a woman ahead of me in line was buying some basic foods, a very few items, including a package of the cheapest, fattiest meat I had ever seen.

As the cashier got closer and closer to the end of ringing up her 8 items, she kept asking for the subtotal and digging into her small change purse, realizing as the meat made its sad journey up the conveyer belt behind the turnips that she could never afford it. She lacked $1.07 and with the saddest eyes I had ever seen, told the cashier to put it back. I couldn’t bear it. “Excuse me, M’am,” I said as I bent down between my cart and the chewing gum display, “you must have dropped this five dollar bill.”

The only reason I had the presence of mind to do that was having read earlier that week about a millionaire who gives money to people in real need by pretending to find it on the floor or street, as if they have dropped it. It is a way for him to give without appearing to be the overlord of giving, the grand poobah of cash, without taking credit for the gift, without assuming the power that sometimes comes with giving.

It saves face. And puts the impulse for giving and helping where it should be.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

“Face” is an important concept. Saving someone’s face or dignity sometimes involves innovative maneuvers or subduing one’s own reactions to give the other person a way to exit the situation with minimal discomfort or harm to their dignity. It involves creativity, compromise, patience, and sometimes looking the other way to allow things time to get back to normal. Many cultures around the world encourage people to act humbly and with sensitivity to a person’s dignity, especially when that person’s dignity and self respect is endangered. Find ways to help save face for other people this week.

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"Sometimes when we are generous in small, barely detectable ways it can change someone else’s life forever." –Margaret Cho

"When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world."  –Harold Kushner