Generosity Starts, Ends With Giving

There are two kinds of people in this world; those who are generous of spirit and those who aren’t. You can’t tell which is which by the money they have, or their education or good manners. You’ll never recognize them by the kind of car they drive, the grammar they use or the clothes they wear.

You can spot a generous spirit by the amount of bread they throw on the water without expecting any of it to float back. Generous spirits don’t keep score. They don’t just remember you on your birthday. Generous spirits are never afraid that, by giving, they’ll lose what they have. Instinctively they know that to multiply their own blessings they have to share them.

This lesson came home again to me on an ordinary Tuesday when I’d stepped in a hairball before breakfast, paid too many bills with not enough money and said no to every telemarketer in America. Even at sunset I couldn’t get away from the phone. On the 38th call I grabbed the receiver and barked: “WHAT?”

“Having a bad day, are we?” It was my friend from high school. We don’t see each other very often, he runs a big company, has three teenagers and a wife who’s gone back to college. But once in a while, sitting in a hotel room with time on his hands, he phones and we talk for hours.

Old best friends are hard to come by. I once called him to ask, “What’s that red light on the dashboard mean?” and he flew 2,000 miles to change my oil. When he called me to say he wasn’t sure he really wanted to marry his girlfriend of six years I got him a job on a friend’s boat in the Caribbean. She married somebody else.

When his dad died, Steve spent the next Christmas Eve at our house. When my dad died, my husband sat on one side of me at the cemetery, Steve on the other. I’ve been there for his health and marriage crises and he’s been there for mine. When we find ourselves on business in the same city we take turns buying each other dinner and talking about anything that pops into our heads. He’s better than a brother; there’s no sibling rivalry.

So Steve was telling me about his latest business coup and angiogram while I whined about my deadlines and increasing aches and pains, and then he brought me up short: “What would it take to make you feel better?”

“A bathtub,” I shot back without hesitation. The only drawback to my house was no tub, an oversight not likely to be rectified unless I won the lottery, scored big in Vegas or saved for the next five years.

“Get one,” he answered. Yeah, right. I explained why a tub wasn’t in the cards. Speaking patiently, as if to a 4-year-old, he said: “Listen carefully. Pick out a bathtub, find somebody to put it in and turn it on. I am giving you a present. Do you understand?”

I didn’t. Nobody had ever given me a bathtub before. Why would he do that? It took four days for the impact of his grand gesture to sink in. I called him back.

“Were you kidding?”

He laughed. “The check is in the mail. Honest.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “why are you doing this?”

He said he’d made a lot of money over the past few years, life had been good to him, I was one of his oldest (ouch!) and dearest friends, we weren’t getting any younger (ouch! again) and he wanted my aches to feel better.

“If I can help, I will,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

I don’t love my friend because he’s giving me a bathtub. I love him because he wants to. And the next time I have an extra 20 bucks in my pocket I’ll remember him and pass it on.