THE REAL GIFT OF DOING UNTO OTHERS

My mother didn’t have a lot of advice for her three daughters when it came to men, but her one cautionary note rang with the clarity of church bells:

Don’t marry him until you see how he treats the waitress.

I think she was worried less about who we dated than about who we might become if the bad behavior rubbed off. Her own formal education ended with high school, and all of her working life, as a nurse’s aide and then as a hospice worker, was in service to others. She loved her work, but she imagined another life for her girls.

We would go to college and meet a different caliber of boy from the ones in our blue-collar neighborhood. College life would introduce us to wealthier, more sophisticated men who already led lives steeped in rank and privilege.

That’s what worried her. How they wore those advantages, she said, would reveal their character. Anyone who mistreated subordinates was a bully and a bore.

“Everyone has a name,” she’d say. “Everybody has someone who loves them. Everyone deserves to feel they matter.”

So, she raised us to do our bit in her campaign to convince everyone we met that, yes, indeed, they mattered.

We were expected to use our best manners with every waitress, housekeeper, bellhop, parking lot attendant, mechanic, salesclerk—anybody who waited on us or someone else for a living.

If we dared to groan under the weight of this responsibility, she was quick with the wagging finger: “Many of those people could be your relatives.”

Her rules were simple and intractable: Make eye contact. Smile at them and call them “ma’am” and “sir.” Thank them for their help. If they’re grumpy, don’t yell at them. Instead, tilt your head just so and say, “You must be having a bad day.”

And never, ever rob them of their dignity.

Author Robert Fuller, the former president of Oberlin College, calls the abuse of subordinates “rankism.” In his recent book on that topic, Somebodies and Nobodies, he offers this example: An executive pulls up to valet parking, furious that no one immediately takes his keys. He yells at the approaching teenage valet, “Where the hell were you? I haven’t got all day.” Then he throws the keys at the kid’s feet.

When the boy asks how long he’ll be, the man yells, “You’ll know when you see me, won’t you?” The valet winces but remains silent.

We can all add examples from our own experiences: A customer berates a store clerk because she has to take time to change the register tape. A working mother turns to the stay-at-home mom and says, “What do you do all day?” A surgeon calls his patients by their first names but insists they call him “Doctor.”

The harder list to compile is the one detailing our own missteps. Do we know the names of the servers in our company cafeteria, the person who keeps the washrooms clean, the security guard who nods hello to us day in and day out? When is the last time we asked the clerk at the dry cleaners how her family is doing? Have we ever? How often do we greet a weary cashier with a loud, disgusted sigh?

Christmas is one of the busiest weeks of the year for many of us. We’ll dart in and out of stores for that last-minute gift, the film we forgot to pick up last night, groceries to feed all those guests. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to be kind, or not, to the harried folks who have already had to put up with God knows what by the time we show up.

We won’t change the world by smiling and asking how they’re holding up, but if you doubt for a moment your kindness makes a difference, let me tell you one more story about my mom.

She never held elected office, was never a company president or in charge of anyone other than her own four kids. But when she died, more than eight hundred people showed up for her calling hours.

I heard tender stories about my mom from almost all of them.

I met the hairdresser who teased up her beehive, the clerk who sold her olive loaf at the corner market, the man who rotated her tires, the seamstress who hemmed her pants….