Perplazed

If it looks like a petrified state-owned institution, if it behaves like a petrified state-owned institution and if it’s as user-hostile and unreliable as a petrified state-owned institution then it’s … our beloved post office. That was the experience I had always made, and so I had liked visiting the post office accordingly – until I moved to a new neighbourhood.

One single thing was enough to make Mr. M and myself some kind of secret allies – a smile. Waiting in a long queue for my mail with recorded delivery, I noticed how, no matter how unfriendly, tired or bothersome the customers were, he always greeted them with a smile. He greeted me the same, I smiled back, we said hello to each other, he found my mail.

“Now, if I may have your autograph…” he said, handing me the acknowledgement.

“Oh, I’m aaaall yooooouuuuhz,” I said, trying to immitate an elated rock star, signing the delivery.

We both laughed, said good bye to each other and I went home, for the first time in years happy to have been at a post office. Since then anytime I went there, I hoped it would be him behind the counter. We remembered each other and made a joke whenever we could.

“My apologies to your back in advance,” I said to him one day, picking up some books. “As far as I know, it’s about 10 kilos.”

A while later he came back with the two packages. “This body may look old but there’s still a lot of strength inside! Besides, it’s just 5 kilos each. I can handle that just fine but now you, dear addressee, show me how you effortlessly carry away both of them at once, a-ha!” Of course I theatrically staggered under the heavy burden.

Every visit of the post office turned into a little improvised stage play. It wasn’t much but it was bloody more fun than I’d ever had at any other institution. Next to being funny, he was a real pro and anytime there was a problem, the other clerks always asked him for advice.

When I was moving away seven years later, I went to the post office just to say good bye to him and thank him for the great times. And I thought that was it.

Actually, there had been just one thing that made me sad about him. Sometimes when the delivery had been nothing substantial or I had been sure there couldn’t be any trouble, I had signed it as Elvis Presley. He’d never noticed.

Cut. Seven months later. I mean, a few weeks ago. I go to the post office in my new neighbourhood. This one is oh-soh-moh-dhern, issuing queue numbers and stuff. So I’m sitting there, waiting for my number to blink on the display, looking around the counters. Suddenly my gaze catches familiar features. I slide my eyes back there – could it be … Mr. M? Yes, it’s him! And what’s even better, the display tells me I’m his next customer.

“Hello, I’m obviously one of your Erinyes and won’t let you rest in peace – but what are you doing here?”

“Oh, hello,” he said, smiling at me as broadly as ever. “I asked myself if it really was you when I saw you sitting there. And me? Here? Well… They transferred me, for the two months until the dismissal notice becomes effective, that is. Then I’ll go behind a counter in a supermarket in our neighbourhood.”

“WHAT?” I whisper-shouted, absolutely incredulous. He had always been the embodiment of professional competence and customer satisfaction to me.

“You know, I didn’t wag my tail enough. I wasn’t too happy to get a new manager who was 30 years my junior and had even less education than me. So she got rid of me as fast as she could, transferring me for the rest of my contract so that we don’t meet at all.”

So my joy of meeting Mr. M went sour in about ten seconds. Obviously, this had been complicated. There sure had been a big conflict between her and him. Or perhaps they had been dumping all older employees to refresh their services, or whatever they’d call it. But I couldn’t get it. I didn’t get it. I still don’t get it. They were getting rid of the one and only post officer I’d ever found pleasant to meet, someone who had stood for all the positive qualities the postal service had wanted to offer but wasn’t really able to, being what it was, a petrified post-state-owned behemoth. If there was one single employee they should have kept, it was him!

His contract ran out at the end of August. My current post office is once again a modernized but dull place without him. But you know what? I’ll go to that supermarket some time. It’s not particularly close to my place but I want to meet him, exchange smiles, and possibly arrange a beer with him later. To thank him once again for all the years of fun, to reproach to him he’d never noticed the Presley autograph.

To tell him that for me, he’s not finished.

Sometimes I feel like God is urgently trying to tell me something but however hard (S)He tries, I’m just too stupid to understand. Fortunately, at other times the message is clear enough.

One bright and shiny day about a year ago I went to a tea house to enjoy a quiet while with a book. To my pleasant surprise I turned out to be their first guest of the day, so the room was all mine. I was reading Anthony de Mello’s The Way to Love, at times even thinking I was getting what the author had meant, so I felt very spiritual and uplifted.

Some minutes later, two ladies came in, settled nearby and started to talk. They were obviously excited about being in a tea house. Perhaps it was their first time. Either way, one could see it was a real adventure for them to sit there, look around and read the tea menu and everything. I, on the other hand, was not so thrilled. “Oh well, there goes my moment of quiet spirituality,” I thought.

I had just returned to my book when the tea master came to take their orders.

“Would sencha be good with honey?” one of the women asked.

I rolled my inner eyes. Japanese green tea and honey? Oh my! I’d swear I heard the tea master gulp hard. However, he managed to maintain his composure when he replied, “I wouldn’t really recommend that. You know, the sweetness of the honey would go against the key tones of the tea’s natural taste.” The ladies, a bit disappointed, said they would take some more time with their pick and I started reading again.

I was just getting back into the zone when the tea master returned. They said they would have Nepal FOP. Good choice. I had always loved Nepalese teas. But then one of the tea savages added, “But this one will surely be great with honey, won’t it?”

I suppressed a howl. This was a bit less of a heresy than with the sencha but it felt all the more personal.

The tea master, however, had barely blinked before he replied, “If that’s how you’ll like the tea best, of course it can be served with honey.”

Suddenly, I had an epiphany. What kind of a haughty donkeyhole was I to judge? Had I ever tried the tea that way? No. I had only been visiting tea houses for a decade or so and learned that a group of self-proclaimed connoiseurs had ruled that these teas tasted best served this way and those teas were to be prepared at that temperature. How could I be sure that what I had learned to perceive as barbaric would not have tasted delicious only to the two tea-thrill-seekers, but perhaps to me as well? I was a snobbish, hypocritical idiot and if it made their beautiful tea house adventure wilder, sweeter, cuter, it was the holiest right of these two ladies to drink their Nepal FOP with honey.

I felt humbled and ashamed and returned to the book. Maybe two, maybe three pages later I arrived to this: “Apply this to every image that people have of you and they tell you that, ‘you are a genius or wise or good or holy.’ And you enjoy that compliment and at that minute you lose your freedom because now you will be constantly striving to retain that opinion. You will fear to make mistakes, to be yourself, to do or say anything that will spoil the image. You have lost the freedom to make a fool of yourself, to be laughed at and to be ridiculed. To do and say whatever feels right to you rather than what fits in the image others have of you.” You just wouldn’t drink tea with honey not because it would have been too sweet or would have spoilt the taste – you wouldn’t drink it that way because it was not right.

It was not all yet. Later when I came home I opened C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, and read the essay The Inner Ring. The key part said, “Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident: it is the essence.”

That was exactly what we “tea lovers” were doing, what drinks experts were doing when they sneered at people drinking cognac on the rocks, what … you get the idea. Just like when kids have a little secret and hop around another, screaming, “I know something and you don’t, I know something and you don’t!”

I love going to tea rooms, I feel enriched by being able to distinguish between different tea varieties. But I will forever remember that the only relevant reason for someone’s taste is ‘like/dislike’. And none of my little secret business.

Jason

P.S.: Anyway, the Inner Rings must have had some rational beginnings. I wonder when, how and why the “If you mix sencha with honey, you probably won’t like it.” changed into a “Thou shalt not taint your sencha with the impure sweet abomination!” commandment set in stone.

A smile is a special thing. No one is so poor that they can’t spare one and no one is so rich that they can get along without one. Alright, I’ve always loved this saying. At times I started to think that it sounded a bit like a sacharine cliché – but this impression always lasted only until someone smiled at me when I needed it. Smiling at a stranger is step one, and it can do a whole world of good. Yesterday I found out about step two – acknowledging people. Or rather – I crashed into it head-on and discovered that it could do, well, whole solar systems of good.

The day before I had returned from a friend’s wedding. It had been a wonderful event. I met some great people I hadn’t known before and others whom I hadn’t seen for a decade. And what was best – the newlyweds were absolutely beaming. It always recharges my batteries when I see happy people, and seeing a close friend radiate joy and fulfillment shifted my power indicators up to the max. I couldn’t be more content and relaxed. Or at least I thought so.

So yesterday I entered this tea house to spend a while with a book. The tea lady looked up, smiled and said, “Oh, I haven’t seen you for ages!” Suddenly, without a warning, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of perplazement. Yes, I’m a regular there, probably all the staff knows me already and yes, her shifts and my visits hadn’t matched for a while. She simply said it out loud. It wasn’t an “I’ve been missing you!”, neither it was an “I’m so glad to see you!” (even though I like to think a shade of that was there) – it was a mere acknowledgment, “I’ve noticed about your existence and it’s been a while since you’ve been here last.” The surprising thing was that it was more than enough, just when I thought that I couldn’t feel any better. It felt incredibly warm.

I thought my day had just been made but the icing on the cake was yet to come. After she had taken my order, I settled on the second floor of the tea house and got immersed in the book. After a while, her colleague arrived with my tea, and as he was putting it down onto the table, he said, “Do I remember right that you’re a fan of the Bai Mu Dan tea?”

“Yep,” I said, incapable of anything more, as I’d just been smitten by all the recognition I had received.

“Well, then I think you’ll like this one, too. Good choice of you.”

Hopefully, I thanked him, even though I don’t remember doing it. He was the second person within some ten minutes who had remembered something about me, and once again it had caught me off-guard.

The biggest surprise out of it all probably is how little is enough. The usual Hello’s and Good bye’s are mere equivalents of cars’ headlights passing each other on the road. The Bai Mu Dan and the Haven’t-seen-you-for-ages, in spite of going only a steplet further, equalled to shaking hands; they were personal.

Next time when you meet someone you hardly know, maybe try to ask them how is their dog or how are the flowers you see them watering every morning. You may light up their whole day, as those two in the tea house lit mine just when I thought I couldn’t be doing any better. I’ll try to pay it forward.

Every day, this world makes me go “WOW – my!” or “Oh, my!” Every day, I live, hear or read stories which make me happy, thrilled, angry, amused, puzzled, sad or uplifted. Often several of the adjectives above apply at the same time. To name my site, I was searching for a word which would express both the “WOW – my!” and the “Oh, my!”, a word which would convey being perplexed and amazed at the same time. I didn’t find any, so I had to make up my own one. Welcome to Perplazed.