by Jo Giese
Now, wouldn’t most parents go out of their way to praise, maybe even brag, about a child whose speech was once unintelligible, who was also a nervous nail biter, but who overcame that early handicap to win prizes in public speaking?
When Ed, who adored Babe, and I discussed why someone would withhold praise, Ed explained it this way: “When you won all those trophies, your mom wanted credit for her contribution. Otherwise, she felt diminished.”
As a child, I didn’t understand a whiff of this, but now it brings to mind a mother-daughter passage from Allan Gurganus’s novella Saints Have Mothers. The teenage daughter says to her mother, “Admit you think I’m an overachiever . . . But why must you almost make that mean you’re underachieving? I’m just in high school.”
Does this help explain the dynamic that existed between my mother and me? Maybe. Or was it more that Babe was a product of her generation? Was hers a 1950’s style of parenting: don’t brag about your child; be modest?
I do know Babe said she didn’t compliment her children because she didn’t want to play favorites. But, as an incredulous friend suggested, “She could have given compliments to all three of you!” Exactly.
Today, even the manufacturers of those fitness-tracker wristbands understand that they may nag us at intervals throughout the day, but to be user-friendly they also have to hand out praise. And it seems to work—even if it is prerecorded, digital praise from an inanimate device.
Since I know how good it feels to receive a compliment—not just from a fitness band, and even in a somewhat compromising situation. Once during a gynecology exam, I’d scooted all the way down to the end of the table, my feet were in the stirrups, and one of those crinkly modesty sheets had been spread over my private area. The doctor had started the pelvic exam, never the most pleasant experience, and she said, “You have strong abdominal muscles. Really strong.”
Afterward, I went to Gold’s Gym, in Venice, for my workout, and, buoyed by that praise—I’m really strong!—I floated from machine to machine, even the cranky ones that I usually don’t like. I couldn’t help but notice the powerfully buoyant effect of those two sentences—only two sentences, but positive ones.
Did Babe’s behavior make me more needy for compliments?
Probably.
Did that make me more generous in giving out compliments?
Definitely.
Because I know how it hurts not to receive a positive comment, I’ve adopted a different behavior: I try never to let a compliment go unsaid. If I ever think something positive about someone or something—even the most fleeting thought—I share it before it vanishes. Perhaps it’s my decades of meditation training that have led me to fear I’ll be harmed if I keep the positive idea unspoken—if I withhold it, hoard it, and don’t share it.
I guess this could backfire, but I can’t recall that ever happening. The young coffee barista might have mistakenly thought I was hitting on him when I complimented him on his cool plaid tie. Instead, he tossed one my way and said he liked my “Harry Potter glasses.” A virtuous circle. For that mini-moment, hardly calculable, we smiled at each other and basked in a small space of social sweetness.
Or take the time I was placing an order with a florist. The woman I was speaking with seemed thrilled I’d called. And mine wasn’t some big order that would save the day—just a little arrangement for my friend Nanette’s birthday. It turned out that I was speaking with the owner, and before I hung up, I told her she had the best phone personality, which she did.
“You just made my week,” she said.
Her week? That such a simple comment made by a total stranger had struck such a chord made me wonder what difficulties she was going through. Because most of the time, we don’t have a clue about the struggles other people are up against, and yet a social nicety, a mini-compliment out of the blue—though it must be an authentic one; it can’t be insincere or something phony, trumped up for social lubrication—has the power to touch people profoundly.
Another time, I was at a store, and as the clerk was ringing up the sale, I glanced at the woman standing next to me in line. She was a plump, middle-age brunette wearing a sundress made out of a crisp cotton piqué. I complimented her on her yellow dress, how cheerful and summery it was. I said yellow was one of my favorite colors, and I pointed to my sunshine-yellow purse.
“Thank you so much for saying that,” she said, barely holding back tears. “You don’t know how much that means to me. I just came from a funeral, and everyone was wearing black. People told me I was being disrespectful. But I thought the deceased—a friend in his eighties—would appreciate something cheerful.”
I’d just shared another spur-of-the-moment reaction—this time to the happy color of someone’s dress—and I wasn’t expecting such an outpouring. I had no idea I was giving a gift to someone who needed one so deeply. She took my comment as an affirmation of her very self—regardless of what her girlfriends had said, she wasn’t a bad person for having worn a sunny color to a funeral. She was okay. And isn’t that what we all crave? To feel we’re okay?
After that brief encounter, I walked away with an extra bounce in my step, and probably she did, too. Giving a compliment releases energy and relaxes the spirit. Besides, it’s fun. It adds an extra punctuation mark, a spark!, and life feels momentarily fuller. And giving a compliment is such an easy, fluent currency.
I was listening once as Ed, who is not a touchy-feely kind of guy, explained this positive “force field” concept to our hardest-to-please, then-eleven-year-old grandchild, the one who had an uncanny ability to ferret out and emphasize the negative in every situation. “It’s a positive energy, a receptivity, an openness,” he said. “Because Jo gives out compliments so freely, she’s also the recipient of constant compliments. And it’s not from the same people, either.”
When Babe was ninety-five, to celebrate New Years Eve, my brother and his wife, Lynn, drove Babe and Ellen, her caregiver at the time, from Houston to Bozeman, Montana, where Ed and I have a home. (“Never turn down a road trip” was another of Babe’s maxims.) All of us wanted to celebrate New Years together in snowy Montana, and we agreed that at ninety-five, Babe shouldn’t fly in winter. What if a snowstorm delayed her flight? She still had the stamina for a direct three-hour flight, but not for a layover in a strange city while a storm passed. So my brother, who likes to drive long distances, and Babe, who loved to be driven, set off from Houston.
Three days later, the happy foursome arrived in high spirits. As they walked down the freshly salted and plowed walkway, with snow still falling, and burst inside, I got such a kick out of seeing Babe and Jimmy together—the real Mutt and Jeff: Jimmy was nearly seven feet tall, while Babe, gripping her walker, was down to five feet plus an inch or two.
The next day, Babe was sitting inside, cozy, by the warmth of a crackling fire. Looking out over snowy Bridger Canyon, which opened below us like a vast white inland sea, she asked if we were at the top of the mountain. I explained that we were only about three-quarters of the way up: we were at 5,500 feet, and the top was about 7,000 feet.
Our unpaved rural road was usually two lanes of washboard-bumpy gravel, but by late December it was reduced to one snow-plowed lane, if we were lucky. The afternoon of New Year’s Eve Day, it had stopped snowing, and the sun was sparkling diamonds on the fresh snow. Since cabin fever had settled in, I decided it was time for us to get some fresh air. I’d drive us all the way up our mountain to that special place that makes you feel like you’re on top of the whole world and the snowcapped, big-sky vista stretches in every direction.
Babe, Ellen, and I piled into Ed’s sturdy 1998 blue Tahoe, which looks like a tank and drives like a truck, which is a good thing when you live in the country. For our little joyride, Babe was belted into the passenger seat, and Ellen was in the middle of the back. As we started off, the tires crunched into a fresh layer of powdery snow—perfect, easy driving conditions. The uphill shoulder was lined with a stand of evergreens
so pretty they looked like a row of Christmas trees.
Winter owned that dazzling, golden afternoon. Before the first curve, on the sloping hillside over on the next mountain, we spotted a herd of about a hundred elk grazing shoulder to shoulder. Their glossy auburn coats were as lustrous as if they’d been rinsed with hair conditioner. Such an abundance of healthy wildlife—elk, moose, deer—and often just outside our kitchen window, is what makes winter in Montana so breathtaking.
At the third turn, this one a steep, hairpin curve, the tires on the Tahoe started spinning. In spite of our four-wheel drive and snow tires, the wheels began sliding sideways to the right. There was no guard rail, no shoulder; in a foot or so, we’d be slipping off the road, tumbling down the mountain.
In that winter white radiance, the sun glared on all sides, except on that icy patch in the shade. I squinted for a safe place to turn around. The road had frozen to a sheet of black ice, and we were stranded, skidding, in the middle of it.
What do I do now? Abandon the car? Start walking? But there was no way Babe could walk down the mountain, even if we hadn’t left her walker behind in the garage. Lord knows what Ellen, who was from the Philippines and had never seen snow, thought about our dangerous predicament.
That was when I had the awful realization that I had no choice but to reverse down the mountain. I’m a fair-weather driver who learned to drive in Texas, and driving backward on black ice exceeds my expertise. But before the car slid to the side and we fell off the mountain, I cranked it in reverse. I opened my window to cool off and, focusing on the rearview mirror, inched us down. I’d gone a hundred yards or so, and backed us off the iciest patch, when I started breathing again.
That’s when Babe said, “You’re such a good driver, Jo Ann!”
Her comment registered profoundly because it was one of the rare, straight-out compliments Babe ever gave me. It took that much fear to prompt a compliment out of her (and for her to resort to my baby name).
During the last year I visited Babe, she was in her living room, sitting in front of the fireplace, where the mantel was crowded with Hummel figurines. Although it was summer in Houston and sweltering outside, Babe was wearing long underwear under her outfit, and I’d also just handed her a thick wool poncho-style shawl. The room thermostat was set at ninety, and the gas logs were switched on high for even more heat. Sometimes, if I thought she wasn’t looking, I’d turn it off to give myself a break, but not this time.
I was sitting directly in front of her, almost knee to knee, to give her the best chance of hearing me, either through her hearing aids or by reading my lips.
“How long are you going to let your hair grow?” she asked.
“Probably down to my waist.” I knew where this conversation was headed. This was in the same vein as when we used to play Scrabble and she’d look up from her tray of tiles, frown, and ask, “Since when did you stop wearing makeup? You used to look so pretty with blush and mascara.” A year ago it was makeup; today, hair. My friend Pamela had recently commented that my thick, shoulder-length hair (the good-hair gene another inheritance from Babe) had never looked better.
“I prefer short hair,” said Babe. A Clairol strawberry-blonde, she still had twice-weekly appointments with Able, who, down on the second floor, coiffed her thick hair in tight curls, which she insisted made her look younger. “Able just cut mine another two inches,” she said.
“Josie’s hair is beautiful!” my husband piped up from the far corner, where he was reading the Houston Chronicle. Bless Ed.
On weekends, my brother usually brought Babe a box of freshly baked sticky cinnamon buns. They were so large that her caregiver divided them into quarters. While I was at Central Market, restocking Babe’s supply of fresh berries and ice cream sandwiches, I spied small cinnamon rugelachs in the bakery. I sampled one, and it tasted as heavenly as the sweets my grandmother used to bake. I also thought their miniature size—only two inches long—was a perfect Babe size.
“Well?” I asked, as she took her first bite.
“I’ve tasted better,” she said.
See?
Now you understand why I always strive to speak to the positive. Another huge life lesson learned from Babe.
LESSON 12:
GO! WHILE YOU CAN
At ninety-five, Babe still had a valid US passport. But by then the most she could manage was a road trip to Montana, or a domestic flight from Houston to Los Angeles to visit me, and even that was a stretch. So I dreaded dropping the news that Ed and I were leaving for China. It didn’t seem fair that I could still up and go and she couldn’t.
I expected her to object—to complain that a month was too long, China was too far. Instead she said, “Go! while you can.”
Go?
She told me about Dr. Wendell, who had delivered her three babies and had wanted to travel. By the time he was ready to retire, his wife was in a wheelchair.
“Go!” she said, bestowing a mother’s blessing. “My travel days are getting shorter. I know that. I can’t go as far, as often. Gosh, Bessie and I’d be together, and she’d say, ‘Let’s go to Canada!’ and away we’d go. I can’t do that anymore.”
Babe had been my accomplice on many adventures. When I got an assignment to write a travel story about the San Juan Islands, she was my sidekick as we grilled fresh oysters at an oyster farm on Orcas Island. All I needed to do was say the word. An expedition to look at quilts in the Amish country, or lunch with my friends at Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center (before it was destroyed by terrorists), and Babe was game. She asserted none of the scrutiny most companions would have insisted on—when, where, how long will we be gone? Babe’s go-with-the-flow attitude was the opposite of a nervous, uptight, easily flustered traveler. The only time I remember her objecting to any arrangement I made was in Pennsylvania, at a nineteenth-century inn. She did not appreciate it when the clerk indicated that the shared toilet was way down at the far end of a public hall.
Once, after I returned from India, I couldn’t stop raving about the Pushkar Camel Fair in Rajasthan and the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur. Fingering the saffron kurta with gold threads that I’d brought her, Babe said wistfully, “It’s too bad we didn’t know earlier how much you’d love India”—meaning, we could have gone together.
Babe, who loved her home but wasn’t a homebody, had always practiced “Go! while you can.”
At first, travel had meant those modest road trips up and down the West Coast where Dad went inside for a business meeting while she embroidered outside in the car. Later, with my brother and me tagging along, family travel meant piling in Dad’s Studebaker Golden Hawk and setting off from Seattle for some simple destination like Seaside or Roseburg, Oregon. While Dad drove, Babe, the navigator, flipped through one of those spiral-bound TripTiks from AAA. The quirky red-and-white Burma-Shave road signs posted along the edges of the highway—COVERS A MULTITUDE OF CHINS—passed for entertainment. When it got close to nightfall, my brother and I would pester our parents to pull over at any motel that AAA claimed had a swimming pool. Once, in Sun Valley (this was before it was Sun Valley), we swam in a steaming-hot pool with snow-flakes falling on our shoulders.
When air travel became a possibility—remember Pan Am?—Babe wore a gabardine suit that was nipped in at the waist, the kind of ultra-shapely, feminine suit you rarely see these days, sling-back pumps with an open toe, and a hat with a half veil (the original retro look) that dipped just so over her forehead. Even if roller bags had existed, Babe wouldn’t have been caught dead dragging one.
Eventually, my father’s business became successful enough that he and Babe were able to take business trips to Norway, Taiwan, and Singapore. In Hong Kong they bought an ornately carved green “jade” urn. Somehow my sister got the idea that it would be our parents’ funeral urn. Wendy inserted a divider—a piece of stiff cardboard from the dry cleaners—and on one side she had Dad write “Dad,” in his scratchy, sixth-grade handwritin
g, and on the other side Mom wrote “Mom” in her graceful Palmer cursive.
And remember how Babe took her own advice to Go! While Dad’s ashes were still warm (he hadn’t even made it to the urn yet), she renewed her passport and up and left with my sister for France. And after her own mother died, she bought herself that cool red convertible.
I’d felt suffocated in the Studebaker zooming past potato fields in Idaho when I longed to see Paris. To make up for lost time, in my twenties I traveled with a vengeance. Like an addict who had overdosed on National Geographics, I finagled trips—student travel and business trips—to Chile, Tokyo, East Berlin. I needed to see the Hong Kong Harbor before it deteriorated into just another industrial port and the taipans with their glorious red sails disappeared. I had to experience Margaret Mead’s Bali before it morphed into a glitzy, garbage-littered tourist destination. Mine were no idle, ho-hum, one-day-I’ll-see-Paris daydreams; mine was a full-blown, passionate, not-to-be-denied hunger.
I was so amped to experience the world that sometimes I charged out on cheap student tickets, too fast, too alone, with no rip cord to pull. One morning I was waiting anxiously by the phone in my dingy hotel room in Bogota for my friend to tell me when she’d be picking me up. Marcella was a native of Colombia, and during our many lunches at the Houston Post—she was in the art department, I was a reporter—we’d planned to meet in Bogota and stay at her family’s hacienda. When the phone finally rang, Marcella explained that they’d had a problem—the foreman at the hacienda had been beheaded (this was Colombia in the late ‘60s)—and she had to cancel our plans. When I hung up the phone in that dreary hotel room, I felt sick—sick for the foreman and the horror of his beheading, sick for Marcella and her family, but probably sickest for my own sorry self, a single traveler who was now stranded in a strange city. What was I supposed to do in that gray, rainy place where I didn’t know anyone?