please thank you by jonny
	Apparently I don’t say “please” enough. Apparently I bark orders all day long. This is according to my husband who apparently has been bossed around more than usual lately because I am often stuck in a chair breastfeeding our baby and I need things like water and the telephone and the TV remote and coffee and a snack and a book. So he hears a lot of: “Bring me that,” without a sweet little “please.” Finally he confronted me about this problem and requested that I be more polite, which I very nicely agreed to. Now I say “Refill my coffee. Please. Please refill my coffee.” And sometimes I say: “Refill my coffee. Please. Thank you. Por favor. Merci! Please thank you.” This is my hilarious way of being extra polite and making sure he knows I haven’t forgotten his request. I was surprised that I needed to be reminded of this. Being from Kansas I’ve always been a very polite person. This can be quite shocking when living in New York City where manners aren’t that noticeable. I have been called a “bitch” many times by strangers, often for doing things like causing someone to bump into me on a crowded train or making a fast taxi driver slow down in order not to hit me as I’m legally crossing the street. I feel like saying, “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means,” like the guy in The Princess Bride. Calling someone a “bitch” is not polite per se. You would never call a stranger a “bitch” in Kansas, for instance. When my dad visited a few years ago he was very disturbed that strangers passed each other on the sidewalk and didn’t say hello or even smile at one another. I explained to him that there are too many strangers and we don’t have time for that kind of thing. By the end of his visit he finally stopped tipping his hat and doing a fancy bow to my neighbors. He realized it would be exhausting to do that all day long. However, he never went so far as to call anyone a “bitch.” We Midwesterners have a reputation for being too nice and holding in our real feelings, but I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. I just don’t think it’s ever wrong to be nice. And I don’t mean the over the top, huge smile fake “May I help you?” kind of nice. I see some of that when I’m visiting Kansas or Texas and it’s disturbing. But even if polite manners are sometimes artificial, is that so bad? I had a teacher in graduate school who insisted that when we didn’t feel well we should try to overcome it by physically moving as if we felt very well. His philosophy was that if we make positive physical adjustments, it causes emotional and mental ones. I think the same can be said for being nice. In a bad mood? Be nice. Feeling angry? Be nice. I don’t know. But there’s got to be a way to honestly communicate how we feel and what we want while still being nice. Think of all the people you know who are bossy and aggressive. I bet you don’t like them that much. It’s because they’re not nice. I’ve always thought girls were nicer than boys. This has been my experience with almost every boy and girl I’ve ever known. I’ve heard people argue that we are raising girls wrong, making them too nice and submissive. Heaven knows I’m against the idea of females being submissive, unless they aren’t the only ones. Imagine if everyone submitted a little more often to another person’s will. Not the unhealthy kind of submission, but the good kind, the loving kind. For one thing, it would mean people would submit to you sometimes. I predict if everyone was a little nicer and a little more submissive, especially boys and men, we would all calm down a bit. That might even mean sticking a little please or thank you into conversations now and then. Living in New York City, I’ve found that polite words can go a long way in relieving potential tension. When someone pushes past me and says, “I’m sorry” or “Excuse me,” I immediately fall in love. When I see a stranger give up a seat on the train for an elderly or pregnant person, especially when that pregnant person was me, I want to marry that stranger. Horrible though September 11th was, it brought out the kindness in New Yorkers. Around 4:00 that day the subway slowly began running again, and I waited a long time before finally fitting into a train. There were several thousand more people than should have fit, so it was unbelievably crowded. And yet when people’s bodies shoved into each other as the train moved there was a chorus of very sincere “I’m sorrys” heard throughout the car. Why did such a tragic day bring out the niceness in everyone? I guess it’s because we all stepped outside our own lives and saw the bigger picture. We stopped putting such significance on small problems and started noticing other people around us. For about two weeks. Since then there have been a couple of other New York experiences that while not tragic were certainly inconvenient. Twice our neighborhood had a black-out in the middle of a hot summer, causing us to lose electricity and water for about 24 hours or so. Recently a huge stone wall near our building collapsed onto the highway and we were evacuated by fire fighters holding axes. Suddenly I was living in Mayberry, with everyone saying thank you and please and excuse me and are you all right and can I help you with that? Troubles make people nicer. I think this is very strange. I heard someone say once that the best reason not to be in a huge hurry is because people who are in a huge hurry are not nice. If you’re running late you probably aren’t going to stop and help someone who is asking for directions, say, or lying on the ground bleeding. This person told a story of a group of university students who unknowingly had an experiment performed on them. It was the end of the school year and they had a very important final project that would count for the majority of their grade. Out of the blue these students received urgent phone calls telling them the time of their oral presentations had been suddenly changed and they were expected at the location in 15 minutes. Throughout the campus were strategically placed actors pretending to be hurt, as the experiment was to see how many of the students would stop and help. About one percent of them did. Incidentally, these were all seminary students who were rushing off to give a sermon on The Good Samaritan. You know the story. A Jew is injured and left for dead on the street. The first two men that come along, both religious types, pass him by, while the third one, a man from Samaria, stops and helps him. Samaritans and Jews weren’t supposed to like each other, but you see, the Good Samaritan was very nice. Jesus told this story and ended it by telling his audience they should go and do likewise. I’m just saying. Lucky for us we don’t have a lot of opportunities to play the Good Samaritan in our daily lives. But what I do have is a worn out husband wanting some polite conversation and several million other New Yorkers to share the city with. And of course a little tiny human to raise. Being nice helps. Thank you merci beaucoup por favor.