Literature and early/mid-century movies always have a special place reserved for the old lady odd couple. Apparently, my great grandma and great aunt were a real version of that for a decade or so. My great grandma was still working, which left my great aunt the role of primary housekeeper. My grandma tells a story of her mother (my great grandmother) coming home from work one evening, and after putting her things away and washing up, sitting down at the table for dinner. Halfway through the meal my great aunt, who had clearly been stewing the whole time, clattered her silverware onto her plate and said in a grand mixture of hurt dignity and sour disdain:
"You've been in this apartment for almost an hour and you haven't even noticed."
It was true, my great grandma hadn't noticed anything. She admitted it.
"The doorknobs," my great aunt declared while throwing down her napkin, "I spent the entire day washing and polishing all the doorknobs, and you didn't even say anything."
The way my grandma tells this story, channeling her mother who told it to her, is hilarious. The story is also rather common. It plays out in dozens of different ways all day long for all of us. We do things and hope that others will validate us. We have expectations of others and feel let down when those expectations aren't met. Leo Buscaglia (whom I LOVE -- I refuse to put it in past-tense although he has passed) wrote and talked a lot about the art of letting go of expectations that we place on others.
Advent Calendars leading up to Christmas are common. For the past three years we have done a "Service Advent Calendar" -- meaning we fill in a blank calendar with different service ideas for each day leading up to Christmas. I know. This blog is making it seem like we are just amazing little service elves... and we tell everybody all about it. The truth is, we do our services during December, then a day for each of the kids' birthdays and other than that we are terrible, myopic people who basically kick people in the shins when we walk past. Seriously.
Anyway, for our service today we decided to maybe save somebody from getting the flu this year. With a canister of disinfectant wipes we started on the top floor and did the doorknobs for each stairwell, the doorknobs on the laundry room door and the elevator buttons for the service elevators and main elevators. Then we moved down through the building floor by floor until we ended up on ours -- 102 doorknobs later. We will do the bottom half of the building next week.
The kids love love love it when we do secret service. Today it was our plan to move throughout the building stealthily. When we passed people in the hall we tried to look inconspicuous and we slowed or quickened our pace to avoid detection. All was well until floor 32.
"Oh, are you guys on this floor now?" Dolt! As we turned a corner a lady I've chatted with in the elevator was silently standing. Waiting. We thought she had gone into her apartment, but she did not. The three of us clearly looked guilty, which heightened the look of curiosity on her face. In a moment of panic I simply said that we had noticed the doorknobs never seemed to get cleaned, so we were doing a bit of cleaning.
Boy were my co-secret service agents ticked. I had to hear about it for another two floors-worth of doorknobs. While their inability to be flexible was irritating, overall I'm glad that they have an interest in doing things without getting credit. There was no, "I wonder if this person is going to thank me" going through their brains after their mission was complete.
Because the circumstances are vastly different, I'm not going to belabor the comparison between the kids' doorknob cleaning and that of their great-great-aunt's, but I will posit that Leo was right: when we do stuff simply to be helpful it frees us in a way that doing stuff with an expectation attached does not.
For the record, I'm totally taking after my great-aunt -- generally as a human, and as the kids' teacher. I'm symbolically clattering my utensils and throwing down my napkin all over the place. I'm going to work on it.
