I was recently the beneficiary—though I felt temporarily like the victim—of a “random act of kindness.” I was standing in line at a store in my neighborhood where every item costs a dollar or less. I had six pairs of reading glasses in my hand.
We’re constantly reminded, often by politicians bent on widening the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor, that our problems won’t be solved “simply by throwing money at them.” But some time ago I discovered, delightedly, that my long-standing problem with reading glasses could be solved simply by throwing one-dollar bills at it. I no longer have prescription glasses. Once I discovered my local dollar store, I started buying glasses by the half-dozen. Not surprisingly, they’re flimsy. The lenses pop out, the wings fall off. But I figure that, even if they come apart at the breakneck pace of a pair a week, it will still take me something like four or five years before I’m out the sort of money I lost at a single stroke one sweltering August day when, while I was hoisting a series of very heavy boxes, somebody swiped my prescription sunglasses off a post-office counter.
To set the dollar-store scene properly, I should add that I was looking pretty scruffy. I was badly in need of a shave. One, or possibly both, of my tennis shoes needed tying. I was wearing a stained and frayed but until that morning trustworthy pair of khakis that had mysteriously just emerged from the dryer some two inches short: hobo pants. Still, given the calibre of clientele lined up before the dollar store’s one working cash register, I didn’t suppose I looked unusually ragged.
As my two grown daughters often point out, I don’t do well in lines. I shuffle. I squirm. I huff and sigh. While waiting, I’m often powerfully afflicted by a sweeping, oceanic feeling, which I can usually keep at bay, that might be described as the Conviction of the Futility of All Human Existence, but Especially My Own.
Meanwhile, I was feeling annoyed with the cheery, heavyset, talkative woman directly in front of me. She distracted me from my solemn communion with Futility by commenting on the purchases made by those preceding her in line. (“Oh, yum! Jelly Belly, those are so yummy!”) Finally, having made her own purchase, she announced, to the cashier, “I want to buy him his glasses.” Meaning me. “Six pairs. That’s six dollars, right?” She slapped six dollars down on the counter. She turned to me. “Call it a random act of kindness. Pass it on.”
Well. My feelings came thick and fast, most of them disoriented and absurd. I felt embarrassed—had I boorishly indicated my displeasure with her or with life? I felt denigrated. I felt a rare, rebellious impulse to defend my financial solvency. (“Just last month, I bought a thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV!”) And then less absurd feelings arrived. I felt unworthy, as though I was receiving a gift under false pretenses. And I felt that an injustice was being enacted, that our roles should be reversed: I, the professor with laughably impregnable job security (it’s called tenure), ought to be offering money to her, the magnanimous, candy-munching woman who wished to keep an evidently down-at-the-heels man supplied with reading glasses.
I found my tongue and thanked her in half a dozen meant-to-be-amusing ways. She wasn’t looking for gratitude, though. She shrugged me off, and a moment later she was gone. The cashier presented me with the bill, which with tax came to six dollars and thirty-six cents. And now the absurdities really began to pile up—I was thirty-six cents short, and I didn’t have any change. It seemed I had to pay with a credit card. But what sort of hobo would be holding four different credit cards?
Then the woman behind me in line chimed in: “I’ll give him the thirty-six cents.” (What was I going to be offered next? A free haircut? A pair of mittens knitted by an orphan? A bowl of soup?) I said I’d gladly take the coins, but only in exchange for five dollars, which meant that I still had to pay by credit card. But it also meant I’d successfully lightened my odd new nest egg to a dollar and thirty-six cents.
All day, the incident stayed with me. Why had I kept a dollar? If trading dollar bills for a quarter, a dime, and a penny, why not hand over all six of them? Maybe, at the moment of decision, I’d yielded to a sentimental impulse: I wanted to hold on to some keepsake of a sweet, improbable act of charity. But was that truly my motivation? Or was it a paltry reflex of greed, a desire to turn some small profit in my otherwise generous gesture?
The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was interesting how much I was thinking about it—and the more sharply I perceived that small or worthless gifts seem to have a peculiar hold on my imagination, drawing me to a wide range of writers with a similar outlook. I recalled my favorite moment in A. A. Milne’s Pooh stories: Eeyore’s birthday, on which the terminally morose donkey—“ ‘Good morning, Little Piglet,’ said Eeyore. ‘If it is a good morning,’ he said. ‘Which I doubt,’ said he. ‘Not that it matters,’ he said”—is thrilled to receive a popped balloon and an empty jar. (On the way to the party, Piglet has tripped and exploded the balloon, and Pooh has gluttonously eaten the honey that was intended for Eeyore.) I recalled, too, my favorite moment in John Steinbeck’s fiction, in Chapter 15 of “The Grapes of Wrath”: the wonderful diner scene, in which Mae, a waitress, is asked whether some fancy peppermint-stripe candies are a penny apiece. (They actually cost a nickel.) She pauses for a moment, as two beaten-down migrant children stare at the gleaming display case with a fervency of desire that leaves them breathless. “Oh—them,” Mae says. “Well—no, them’s two for a penny.” Sitting over an elegant restaurant dinner, hours after coming away with my profit of a dollar and thirty-six cents, I tried to explain the power of Steinbeck’s scene to a friend, but I had to stop; I was choking up.
I’d found a theme to pursue the next day: touching incidents involving trifling or worthless gifts. I reread a story I hadn’t looked at in decades, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” which takes place on Christmas. A young married couple, Jim and Della, who live in an eight-dollar-a-week flat, boast only two possessions of value. Jim has his grandfather’s gold watch, and Della has her beautiful hair, which falls below her knees. Neither has money for gift-giving. So Della sells her hair in order to buy Jim a fancy watch chain; Jim, meanwhile, has peddled his watch to offer Della a luxurious set of tortoiseshell combs. You could dismiss the story as neat, I suppose, but on rereading this seemed just the sort of neatness—with its rumblings of submerged inevitability, of narrative appetites economically aroused and sated—found in the finest fairy tales.
I reread John Cheever’s “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor,” which I saw now was an extension and a variation of “The Gift of the Magi.” Cheever’s woebegone protagonist, Charlie, is an elevator operator in a sixteen-story New York apartment building. He wakes on Christmas Day feeling lonely and unappreciated and resentful of the building’s tenants. (“He held the narrowness of his travels against his passengers.”) As he escorts them up and down, he mumbles a glum refrain: “Christmas is a sad season for the poor.” The result for Charlie is a windfall of rushed and impromptu gifts. Charlie feels restored, though his sackful of goodies—many of them intended for his nonexistent children, whom he has invented in a lie whose “majesty … overwhelmed him”—will hardly serve his purposes, and he passes them on to others, who pass them on in turn. A gentle avalanche of altruism ensues, poignant and imperilled, for, as Cheever reminds us in his haunting penultimate sentence, “we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day.”
Cheever led me back to my favorite novel, Halldór Laxness’s “Independent People.” Here’s another Christmas gift, bestowed on a young Icelandic farm boy, Nonni, by his grandmother. Nonni is about to depart for America with a stranger, leaving forever the remote, icy croft that has been his lair and his polestar. His family—the only people whom Nonni knows—is so poor that they straddle the border of starvation every year that spring arrives late and cold. The grandmother possesses just two items of value—a kerchief and a metal pick, with which she cleans her ear canals—though, of course, in a practical sense these are worthless implements to give a little boy before he voyages to an unimaginably foreign world. Yet, for all the boy’s littleness, Nonni immediately intuits that it’s the richest offering he will ever receive. “And he put his hand in hers and thanked her in silence, for he knew no words that could express his gratitude for such a gift; she was giving him the nation’s poorest Christmas to cheer him on his way when he went out into the world.”
There’s a similar scene, perhaps even better, at the close of Laxness’s “The Fish Can Sing.” (I know of no other writer who describes so beautifully the ineradicable, onerous, precious burdens of familial and communal gratitude.) Our teen-age narrator, Alfgrim, has been asked to sing over the coffin of someone who has committed suicide. The ancient reverend who presides over the service takes quiet satisfaction in speaking for the lost and for the damned, particularly those anonymous, faceless drowned corpses that sometimes wash up on Iceland’s stony shores. After Alfgrim sings, he is given a few pennies by the reverend, who, seemingly as an afterthought, delivers an artistic credo that Laxness himself lived by: “ ‘It is good and lovely to sing,’ he said as he gave me the coin. ‘Especially if one is aiming at nothing higher than to sing over the clay of those people who have no face.’ ”
I believe that Laxness would have enjoyed my story called “Six Pairs of Reading Glasses.” He would certainly have enjoyed the chatty, nameless woman whose impulsive motivation may have been, at root, nothing more or less than a desire to help a stranger to see more clearly. I’d like to think that she got her wish.
Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His collection of new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” was published last year. He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.
Illustration: Ping Zhu
