| There was a television commercial a few years ago about a popular brand of frozen waffle. It irks me to this day. Not because I have waffle issues, but because I think the commercial tells a larger story. It started out with the adult male in the household, whom I assumed to be the father, tip-toeing around in the early morning hours in his bathrobe with a toaster tucked under his arm. He slowly and carefully walked down the basement stairs and plugged in the toaster. The reason for all these secret moves was that there was only one waffle left and he didn't want to share it with his family. If he had attempted to toast the waffle in the kitchen, his family would have either heard the toaster, smelled the waffle or both which would have condemned the father to sharing the waffle with his own flesh and blood. This kind of selfishness is beyond my comprehension and I have my mother to thank for my inability to understand how a person would try to keep food from his own children. Despite the father's best effort his plot was uncovered and one of his children smelled the waffle toasting in the toaster that was smuggled down to the basement. I think that is where the commercial ended. But is it any surprise that you often hear people say that they don't know their next door neighbors, that they do their shopping in huge stores where they are not likely to run into anybody they know, or that extended family members -- consisting of aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents -- are only herded together for compulsory holidays that produce photo album snapshots that mimic togetherness? If we are alienated from family members then it stands to reason that we would consider the people next door strangers and the world outside our neighborhood (if the term "neighborhood" really applies) as mysterious and foreboding as the inhabitants of a far-off planet. Nobody has the right to prescribe how you should define sharing. It's an individual thing. People have different things to share at different points in their lives. Sharing can take the form of money, time, consistently offering encouraging words, inconsistently and consciously offering encouraging words, or sharing can manifest in ways that are known only to the person who is sharing. The key is -- I think -- to invest essential parts of ourselves in something or someone other than ourselves. How did I arrive at these basic understandings? Through experience. My mother, father, sister and I did not live in the lap of luxury during our early days in the housing projects on the Lower East Side of New York City, but we had plenty of good food to eat 99 percent of the time and love flowed like syrup. But, as is the case with many families, there was a little dry spell. I think it was in the summer of 1959. Today, when a child says that there is nothing to eat in the house it means that the particular thing that they feel like eating is not in the house. Young people today seem to have a different definition of "nothing." The "nothing" that I'm trying to explain is a little different. It's the kind of nothing that doesn't discover a can of sardines hiding in a corner on the top of the cupboards. It's the kind of nothing that doesn't cough up a slightly stale sleeve of saltine crackers. It's the kind of literal nothing that means there nothing in the house to eat. I foraged through our small apartment for food during this very brief but intense period. Bread boxes were popular in those days. Tin boxes with hinged fronts that occupied space on kitchen counters. I knew that our bread box would be empty but I opened it anyway. People who have spent even one minute being truly hungry know the habit of opening a refrigerator, cabinet or -- in this case -- a bread box door, only to open it again a few seconds later as if some item of food would mysteriously appear that had been overlooked before. Well, I opened the bread box door several times and each opening revealed nothing. Then I got the bright idea to look behind the bread box and lo and behold, I discovered an old piece of bread and it even had jelly on it. I was delighted. My little sister -- who was about two years old at the time -- wrapped her little arms around my knees saying "I want some. I looked down at the person who was dearer to me than anyone in the world and told her that there wasn't enough to share. My stomach overpowered my heart, but that was no excuse. As I was about to gulp down the toast, my mother appeared out of nowhere with the speed of a superhero, pointed her finger at me and glared in a way that makes me shiver to this day and said, "Whatever there is, you share!" I got it. I still get it. I will always get it. There is a kind of magic that goes along with sharing. If it is done with a good heart and without the expectation of pay-back, the giver will benefit at least as much as the receiver because the giver one day is the receiver at some other point in time. Another piece of sharing-magic is that it causes us to look inside ourselves to discover the wealth of things we have to share that would have remained hidden in the absence of the desire to share. When I was a child, I had a cousin who had the uncanny knack of showing up at our apartment on Sundays precisely at the moment we sat down to dinner, and the time was not fixed. It would be 2 pm on one Sunday and 4 pm two Sundays later. It didn't matter. Cousin Clarence was synchronized to the time. Cousin Clarence's appearances were never a problem because whenever possible my mother would prepare enough food for the people she knew she would be feeding, plus enough for an unexpected visitor. And if there wasn't enough to set aside an extra portion, we'd just divide whatever we had to accommodate Cousin Clarence or whoever else might show up. Dividing four pieces of chicken five ways is not easy, but there is something very satisfying about doing it. |
| Simple Things/Lang Kenneth Haynes Sharing |
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