A Lesson from Aunt Bee

Aunt Bee, who “keeps house” for the widowed Andy and his son Opie, is at someone’s fancy house for a party of some kind.  (I had thought that this occurred when she, Andy and Opie went to Hollywood to watch the making of a film about Andy, the “sheriff without a gun,” but not so.  I don’t know where else the Taylors would attend an upscale affair.)  The hostess is one of those gracious and unpretentious people who puts people at their ease.  Aunt Bee is gushing over the house.  Imagine her fluting tones as she says, “Oh, what a lovely home you have!” I remember waiting interestedly for the hostess’s response.  What would she say?  In our home, compliments were always met with disclaimers and arguments:  “Oh, this old thing?”  I expected the woman to say something similar: “Oh, you’d never believe the mistakes the builder made” or “The paint didn’t come out the way we expected” or “The curtains don’t hang right.”  Some insult to the very thing that was being praised.  Of course!  That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?  Imagine my surprise when the hostess said, “Oh, thank you.  We’ve really enjoyed it.”  I was so taken aback.  Was that the sort of thing you were supposed to say?  Huh!

This is another of those “I wish I’d remembered this lesson” moments.  I was probably ten years old at the time. It’s pretty hard, though, to take one little incident and have it guide you in the face of unrelenting counter-examples.  My dear mother never met a compliment she liked, and so I just followed suit.  You thought my dinner was delicious?  How could you not have noticed that the gravy was lumpy and the vegetables underseasoned?  You enjoyed my performance?  Didn’t you realize that I had a memory slip?  On and on.  I discuss this issue in Intentional Happiness, where I tell the story of directing my first Vespers program at the university I attended and how I responded when people said they appreciated it:  “Oh, I didn’t really do much.  The stage crew, and the actual performers, did the real work.”  My grad school supervisor took me to task:  “Debi, people know that the stage crew did a lot of work.  They’re complimenting you.  Just say thank you.”

So, after lots of reminders about this principle, I’ve started trying to implement it.  “Why thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed it!” has become my go-to response to a compliment.  How much nicer it is to agree than to argue, especially when the speaker is trying to express appreciation!  Shouldn’t we encourage people to encourage us?  And the same idea is true when we talk about the accomplishments of others.  I remember saying once to my music-major roommate in grad school that I had really enjoyed an arrangement sung by one of the university choirs.  “The tenors were flat,” she said, flatly.  Oh.  I was kind of deflated.  (I felt sort of flat.)  How had I dared to like something so second-rate?  She pricked my balloon of enjoyment, making it go . . . flat.  (Okay, I’ll stop.)

So you want to do your best, but you want to give credit where credit is due.  You want to have the very highest standards, but you don’t want to nitpick.  You know that the performance, or the piece of writing, or even the meal, will never match the idealized version you have in your head.  I was struck with this idea last night at our rehearsal for the Cherry Creek Chorale’s performance of Mozart’s Reuiem.  (Get your tickets now!)  We were working with the director of the Arapahoe Philharmonic, Devin Patrick Hughes (who has the same middle name as our own director, Brian Patrick Leatherman–coincidence?).  We went over and over this one passage, trying to get it just the way he wanted it.  I thought, ‘What we’re doing will never quite reach what he’s aiming for.’  And he’s so much fun to work with that we don’t mind his, well, obsessiveness.  That’s what we pay him for, right?

​You know what?  As I was writing this post yet another reference to Gaudy Night popped into my head.  Regular readers of this blog just have to put up with this sort of thing.  The speaker is Miss de Vine, a scholar at Oxford college:

Dear me!’ said Miss de Vine, ‘who is that very uninspired young woman? She seems very much annoyed with my review of Mr. Winterlake’s book on Essex. She seems to think I ought to have torn the poor man to pieces because of a trifling error of a few months made in dealing, quite incidentally, with the early history of the Bacon family. She attaches no importance to the fact that the book is the most illuminating and scholarly handling to date of the interactions of two
most enigmatic characters.’

In other words, the tenors were flat!  Let us try to maintain a sense of proportion, about our own accomplishments or someone else’s.Save