Aloha, My Friend,

The other day I posted a sign on Facebook that read, “It is not that I am not a people person, it is that I am not a Stupid People Person.”

Some people clicked “Like”, some wrote to endorse the statement and some who know me even wrote to confirm that it was an appropriate self-descriptor. 

I’ll admit to you that sometimes I have a tolerance problem with certain species of people and barnyard smells and that I have a foible of speaking my mind once I open my mouth, a flaw for sometimes being too strident and a weakness for Laine’s smiles.

And all too often I push aside the maxim that I pretend guides me, “The most precious things that I possess are the words that I had never spoken.”

Coincidently enough, in today’s paper, the New York Times, there is a piece about the decline of Southern Charm and Civility.  Yankees moving to Atlanta are telling the teachers not to force their kids to say depreciating things like, “Yes, Sir” or, “No Ma’am” or even, “Please” and “Thank You” because it demeans the kids and stunts the growth of their self-actualization like some social non-filter cigarette.

I then began thinking about the person I consider the Matriarch of Southern Graces, nope, not Scarlett O’Hara, but Miss Lillian, the mother of Jimmy Carter.

Here was a scotch drinking, poker playing, baseball loving fanatic who missed more than one Sunday Service at the Plains Baptist Church though not many. She earned her degree in nursing in Atlanta and soon after married and moved to Plains to be the nurse practitioner for the whole community, Whites and Black as equals, during the dark Southern days of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s & ‘60s. At the tender age of 68 she went to the squalors of India with the Peace Corp to work with lepers.

One of the quotes that I ran across exposes her ability for soft, sassy riposte. On President Carter’s Inauguration Day he asks her, “Well, Momma, are you proud of your son today?” To which she replied, “Which one?”

But the one that I have liked for many the years shows the polish of Southern Charm while unleashing sarcasm, a mirror of the definition of Irish Charm being  “the ability to tell you to go to Hell in such a lovely fashion that you ask for directions.”

Just after Jimmy was elected President a reporter from The Washington Post with a big town attitude went down to Plains to interview Miss Lillian. At one point the reporter asked if Jimmy could be trusted to always tell the truth once he took office. Lillian replied that Jimmy was occasionally known to tell “little white lies.” Sensing that she was getting an angle to her story the reporter asked what did Lillian mean by a little white lie. Without pausing Miss Lillian replied, “Well, you remember when you first arrived at my house and I said that you looked good and that it was a pleasure to meet you?”

I should practice harder to speak with some of that southern honey and vinegar instead of falling back on my usual combination with vinegar.

When I was a stockbroker a speaker at one of our training seminars told us that to be successful in life and in business you had to see the world through the others person’s eyes, you have to emphasize with that other person, truly understand that they have their own fears and troubles, you have to genuinely feel what is in their hearts even if you have to fake it.

Or simply look and learn from my 4 dogs, Wag More – Bark Less.

Best Wishes & Peace,

Elaine & Bill Grace
BALI HI Trading Company