How Can I Be of Help?
IN THIS CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE, the sensibility is just, plain different.
“Is that part of your job description?” I asked the cashier at Bi-Mart, our go-to, employee-owned discount store down the hill from us.
“Yes Ma’am,” she answered.
I was checking out when a woman approached the cashier. She had come back for a receipt for purchases she had made a few minutes earlier. “I know I said you can throw it away,” the woman explained, “but I changed my mind.”
“No problem,” the cashier answered. “I’ll check the trash.”
The cashier, who was named Sheila, turned to me: “Do you mind if I help this customer?”
“Go for it,” I said, joining the flow.
A minute later, after searching through two large waste baskets, Sheila returned triumphant. “Found it,” she said, pumping her fist.
This never would have happened at Deals and Discounts on Ninth Avenue in Park Slope. Never.
A penchant for being of help is one of the first things a newcomer notices here. It takes the edge off of today’s national narrative where incivility takes prominence.
A trip to Walmart last spring to pick up patio furniture is a case in point. On the 25-minute drive there, Tony and I seethed as we listened to Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ latest press conference attacking reporters and “fake news.”
We pulled into the parking lot and reported to the service desk. “Can I help you take this to your car?” Walmart Associate Stan asked as he maneuvered a large cart with huge boxes our way.
Tony and I looked at each other. “Can I help you?” We were used to the unenthusiastic greeters at the entrance to our local Walmart in Rhode Island and the absence of “associates” thereafter.
“Sure,” Tony and I said.
We led Stan to our brand-new Subaru Forrester, once we remembered where we had parked it. (We drove a Honda Fit with almost 100K on it in Brooklyn.) “Do you mind if I help load these for you?” Stan asked. It wasn’t clear that our haul would fit.
“That would be great,” we said. Ten minutes later, the three of us had succeeded in reconfiguring the furniture packaging and squeezing it into the available trunk space.
When we were done, Stan asked: “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Oh, we wish,” we said.
Whimsy, too, seems to be a local trademark. At a town band concert on the 4thof July, the master of ceremonies warmed up the crowd with a series of questions. “And what’s the state bird?” he finally asked. Silence. Then someone in the audience of several hundred piped up: “The Prius!”
The other day the public bulletin board at Starbucks sported a new flyer. “LOST PUPPY” it said, below a cute dog photo. It went on: “Farm dog. Doesn’t know cars or strangers. Doesn’t answer to Lula. [My italics.] Last seen running south on East Main from Chase Bank. REWARD.”
A nearby farm posts this warning: “PLEASE Don’t Feed Fingers To The Horses.”
When you move to a new town and you’re a woman my age and still somewhat vain, finding a new hairdresser can be more important than finding a new doctor. After a couple of false starts, I located a hairdresser off the beaten path who supposedly was a hair whisperer. In Brooklyn, I’d gone to an upscale salon where a cut and color set you back $180.
Katie at Dkor Hair Design sat me down and asked me what I wanted, like all hairdressers do.“Something bouncy but smooth, the same color but with highlights,” I proposed. Most women in Ashland let their hair grow long and grey.
“I get it,” Katie said. “You want to look like Jane Fonda.
She gave me the best cut and color of my life.
Last time I went to see Katie, she told me that the weekend before she’d spied Jane Fonda in downtown Ashland, probably taking in a few plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I could imagine her going up to Fonda and saying, “Hey, you look like one of my clients!’”
The Pacific Northwest embraces informality, even in places where you expect it least. Yesterday, I went to get my teeth checked and cleaned by the dentist my friend Kathy favors. When Dr. Peter Schwarzer, DMD entered the room, a tall figure in neat scrubs, he shook my hand and said, “Please call me Pete.”
When we took Pesto to the vet for an inflamed ear, the routine was the same. The vet introduced himself saying, “Do call me by my first name, Aidan.” (I told him he could call our cat by his first name, too.)
I have a hereditary cornea disease and have suspected for years that corneal transplants were my destiny. The eye surgeon that invented today’s state-of-the-art procedure practices in Portland, Oregon, it turns out. Folks fly in from around the world to enter his care, as do young ophthalmologists wanting to train under him. In my case, an hour flight from Ashland put me in his exam room.
Still I was anxious, unsure how the visit would end. “I prefer that you call me Mark,” he said as we parted, confident we would see each other again in the operating theater. “Can I call you Barbara?”
An hour before, an unusual exchange had unfolded in the waiting room at the Devers Eye Institute (where Dr. Mark Terry has his office). Patients negotiating the eye insults of older age, like me, filled the room. In one corner, two couples sat facing each other and one man asked the other, “Do you have cataracts?”
“No,” the other gentleman answered with a grin. “What are cataracts?”
Then the man “without” cataracts started to go through the alphabet, assigning to each letter an illness that especially afflicts older people. Overhearing the man, I shouted “Fuchs Dystrophy,” the name for my cornea disease, when he came to “F.” Soon it became a free for all, with patients offering contributions in popcorn style. Only two letters stumped us: Q and X.
However, my favorite story—one that truly falls into the believe-it-or-not category—appeared in the town’s newspaper, The Daily Tidings, under the headline: “Pepper balls pry fugitive from blackberries.”
The fugitive in question had eluded California Highway Patrol on Interstate 5, abandoned his stolen car on a residential street in Ashland, and disappeared into a throng of blackberry bushes, reporter Caitlin Fowlkes notes. The Ashland police officer who spotted him called for back-up because the man had a knife. Fowlkes continues:
“Ashland police brought in a dog and made a perimeter around the man but didn’t release the dog due to the weapon. Eventually, tactical partners at the Medford Police Department were contacted to bring in their SWAT vehicle. They were able to drive in closer to the man and deploy pepper balls. Like pepper spray, once it is deployed, it releases an irritant.”
After a three-hour stand-off, the man emerged from the blackberries. Ashland police arrested him for possession of a stolen vehicle, disorderly conduct, and attempting to elude police on foot.
“He was booked into Jackson County Jail,” the article concludes, “then released at approximately 8:45 p.m. the same day due to overcrowding.”
In another city, he still might be in jail, unable to make bond.
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