Manners cost nothing, so why are people stingy with respect?

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

My glasses were dirty, they’re always dirty, and I was in a parking lot rummaging around in my ridiculously giant pocketbook for the little blue microfiber cloth, which should be where it belongs in the zipper part of my bag, but never is. That’s when my uncle, whom I went to visit last week in Florida and whose car I was driving, handed me a handkerchief.

He pulled it out of his pants’ pocket and smiled.

“You have a handkerchief?” I asked, as surprised as if he had pulled a coin out of his ear.

“I always carry a handkerchief,” he said. “I put a fresh one in my pocket every day.”

My uncle is 94. He does not go out often and when he does, he wears jeans and a sports shirt, not a suit and a tie. But there he was offering me a perfectly folded square of clean, white cloth. Like the finest of gentlemen. Like his brother, my father, used to do.

My father always had a clean handkerchief, too. He never wore a hat indoors. He stood up to greet everyone who stopped by. And he opened and held doors.

On a bus, he used to give his seat to anyone older and to any woman, young or old. I saw him do this a million times. I saw him tip his hat when a funeral procession drove by. And when we were in Boston on our way to see some Audie Murphy movie, which we did every February, he would always walk on the outside of the sidewalk, closer to the street, because, he said, the inside of the sidewalk was safer.

How did he know this? Who taught him these things? My father and his brothers grew up poor, in the Depression. Their father abandoned them. They didn’t have a male role model. They didn’t go to a fancy school where they learned to carry a clean white handkerchief or to hold open a door. They didn’t go to expensive restaurants where they learned to pull out a chair for a lady and to wait until everyone was seated before eating.

My uncle says manners were something that everyone had because you didn’t have to pay for them. “Are you cold? Here’s my jacket,” you could say to a girl and it didn’t cost a penny. And you’d give her your jacket and she’d think you were swell.

I think my uncle is swell. I clean my dirty glasses and smile.

When I’m back home, a friend tells me about her weekend, about how she visited an old friend, rang the doorbell, walked into her friend’s home, and how, in an adjacent room, she saw the woman’s husband watching TV.

“He gave me a half-hearted wave.”

He did not get up to greet her.

This man is well-educated. He wears a suit to work every day. He works out. He has a prestigious job. He belongs to prestigious clubs. He has money.

But he doesn’t stand up, shut off a TV, and say hello to a guest.

A general lack of courtesy is a silly thing to bemoan when we live in a world that could be annihilated by a nuclear war at any moment. But most of us have absolutely no control over the world or what our world leaders will do. The only thing we can control is ourselves and our actions.

Maybe it’s frivolous, being polite. But as the old saying goes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” or as my father would have said, “You have to start somewhere.”

Maybe if we say “Please” and “Thank you” and “Excuse me” and “I’m sorry” and hold doors for people, we’ll see these people, we’ll look them in the eyes and see that the stranger in a hurry behind us isn’t much different from the person we are.

Maybe if we stand up and acknowledge someone’s presence, say, “Hey! It’s so good to see you,” shake hands or give a hug, “It’s good to see you,” will become the truth.

Maybe the small things, being kind, listening, not interrupting, will lead to big things and we’ll stop yelling at strangers from our cars and slow down to let someone merge.

The hurtful “joke” that led to a slap in the face at the Academy Awards last week is a snapshot of our ill-mannered times. So many people are angry. So many people are on different sides of so many issues, cursing and screaming, that we’ve forgotten that we are all in this mess we call life together.

Manners are small signs of respect that remind us to be kind. Without them, the mean jokes and the retaliatory slaps are just starting.