finally, something good to say

i'm excited. it's not often i get to say anything positive about people.
but i'm forced to put my general cynicism aside, at least momentarily, as a wonderful example of character crossed my path and broke me out of my negativity.

so, i was at work. we were doing inventory in a safeway. i was, as is notoriously my tradition, hiding in the back room so as not to have to count the freezers, which, for reasons i won't get into just now, i simply can not deal with.
the crew can't help but notice this absence.
it doesn't go over well with them.
they talk about me, when i'm not there. they complain. they gossip. they vent their anger in what they feel to be appropriate and justified ways.

i don't hold this against them, even when i come back and overhear trailing whisps of their conversations, because i know that i have been guilty on occasion of making the same kind of remarks, feeling and expressing the same bitterness at something i don't understand but which makes my efforts seem longer and harder.

so, we're a few aisles past the freezers now, and i'm working beside charlotte. she's a bit of a mystery to me, sometimes, the way she acts, the way she speaks. but this latest interraction would be the most mysterious of all.

i'm paraphrasing from memory, but i will try to be as accurate as possible, because the words and the ideal behind them deserve as much integrity as i can muster.

"i have to apologize to you" she says. "i was complaining with kevin about your avoiding the freezers. i don't know why you don't do them, i'm sure you have some kind of reason, but i shouldn't have talked about you like that, and i felt i had to apologize to you. i didn't say anything before because i don't want to seem like i'm prying, i'm curious about why you don't do them, but if it's personal then it's personal."

honestly, i didn't know what to say. about halfway through, i started absolving her, telling her that it was okay, i expected people to behave that way, that i knew they were talking about me (although she was one of the few i didn't know about, thinking she might be above that... and to an extent, she proved to be). finally, i stopped trying to talk her out of apologizing and just accepted it, because i didn't want to minimize it, didn't want to take away from her, from her curious and amazing level of personal responsibility, on which i complimented her before our conversation ended.

i'm not sure how to go on from here. part of me wants to say that this kind of thing should be so common that it doesn't warrant several paragraphs on a blog. part of me wants to get these words into as many hands as possible so that people will know that such actions, such a character, is possible, regardless of the world in which we live. most of me, however, is just wishing, as everyone wishes without doing much of anything to realize the wish, that i was a little more like that.

it can't be easy. to live that odd and displaced integrity. i would have found it terribly difficult to apologize to someone for something they knew i did. but there she was apologizing to me for something i most likely wouldn't have had any idea about, not because i needed to hear it, but because she didn't feel right about herself until she said something. that's what accountability looks like. real, actual, self-driven accountability.

really, really amazing.

and while i'm a little saddened that there's not much, much more of it in the world, the little fragments that i happen to see every now and again manage to renew my shaky faith in humanity, if not necessarily my own humanity, and i can see how a god might be able to love us, though i would still see the love as being more selective than necessarily true.

one step at a time.

thanks, charlotte.