Are you generous? I hope I am, but sometimes I wonder.
Recently, we celebrated the 90th birthday of one of my good friend’s mother, Millie. From the time I was 14 years old, her house was open to me and my gang of high school friends. We had slumber parties there, and when her daughter won a turkey at our school’s annual Turkey Bingo, she cooked it for a dozen girls. When we went to the prom, she opened her home for us bleary-eyed prom goers, getting up at 4 a.m. to cook us homemade waffles after we departed the Gateway Clipper after-prom cruise. Neither I nor my friends were wealthy. We all grew up in three-bedroom, one-bath homes, sharing rooms with siblings, and no one at that time had a “family room.” But we were welcomed into all of their homes, and drinks and snacks were generously provided.
Contrast that to something that I also experienced when I was in high school. In my senior year, I was a contestant in the North Hills Junior Miss Pageant. Upon making the cut as one of 16 finalists, (I didn’t win), all the contestants were welcomed at a party in a rather hoity-toity neighborhood, in what I would have called back then a mansion. Our refreshments? They hostess passed around one small bowl of nuts and served us lemon water. They didn’t even crack open a bottle of Pepsi or pop the top on some Pringles.
It often seems that those who have a lot are the cheapest. When I was in 6th grade, my group of friends decided to go Christmas caroling and donate any money we earned to Children’s Hospital. We went door-to-door in my girlfriends’ neighborhood, and almost every house we stopped at gave us a dollar or two and some even gave us a five-dollar bill! Adjacent to her neighborhood was a plan of newly built homes that looked to me back in 1972 to be homes like the Brady Bunch lived in. When we caroled at these new homes, person after person who opened their door to us gave us a measly quarter.
When I worked at Westinghouse back in the early 80s, someone in our department suffered a tragedy, and one of the secretaries decided to take up a collection for our co-worker. Everyone threw some money into her bag until she got to the “big boss,” who said, “Sure, I’ll contribute. Write a check from petty cash and sign my name.” The secretary replied, “No, we’re not soliciting money from the company; we want cash from just the co-workers.” Sadly, this person could not grasp that giving money from the company funds was not the same as giving a personal gift from the heart.
Stinginess is not an attractive quality, and I hope my meter falls on the side of generosity. Not all of us are St. Francis, renouncing material goods, or have a lot of extra cash to give, but like my friend’s mom, you don’t always have to give cash, you can be generous with your time, your hospitality, your talent and even with your smiles and complements.
