All the Lonely People

I have been entirely fascinated by people in the past week or so. I've really kind of started to get settled into this maid job, and it gives me lots of contact with people. It's very interesting how people interact with us. There are basically three tiers:

(I.) Are friendly and kind to us--engage us in intelligent conversation and speak to us like normal human beings.
(II.) Let us in their homes and then promptly begin to pretend as though we aren't there, or they don't see us.
(III.) Speak disrespectfully to us (and ABOUT us when we are in earshot) and hover over our shoulders to ensure that we do our job.

You learn to really appreciate those who treat you like you're an actual person with thoughts and feelings and interests and aspirations. An interesting side note is that children, no matter what tier their parents are in, will most often fall into the first tier. They haven't yet learned the caste system.

Still, this situation has allowed for some interesting insights in the past week. One day, for example, there was a lady who was just being plain nasty. She kept breathing down our necks and telling us how we should be doing our jobs and how everyone messed up the last time they'd been there. She'd jump into the room and bark some command and then leave rolling her eyes. It was apparent that she thought we were idiots who were incapable of understanding any instruction at all. Incidentally, it made us all feel like crap, and made us mad. My two co-workers had been to her home before, and apparently she hadn't been much better then, so while my first inclination was to give her the benefit of the doubt and tell myself that she'd just been having a bad day, the fact that they attested to her habitual rudeness had me quickly assimilate to their belief that she was, in fact, just an evil woman.

As it turns out, though, she WAS having a pretty rough day. She later confided in us that she'd found out earlier (just before she came home and started wailing on us, actually) of a pretty serious--possibly terminal--medical condition in her life. I realized then that she wasn't really just a mean person. She was just feeling like crap herself, and it was easy to pass that along to us, since she didn't really see us as regular human beings anyway.

My fascination doesn't end there, though. I've just escaped from Happy Valley, where everyone is cut from kind of the same cloth (argue if you will, Provonians, that you are the exception to the rule, but let's face it: there's a pretty predictable demographic). The large majority of the population is upper-middle class, mostly Caucasian, Mormon, young, and attractive. Here in Texas, though, you find all different types. Many of my co-workers are involved in a few things that I had kind of forgotten people do outside of the Happy Valley: like smoking, partying, cohabitation, and employment of liberal use of words that earn "R" ratings by the MPAA, etc. In my current state of BYU narrow-mindedness, it seems natural that I should simply shun any persons involved in such activities. Obviously, they are terrible people.

As I've talked with some of these people, though, I find that they're actually pretty outstanding people. They're trying to do what's right. Lots of them have hit a snag or two along the way, but they want what's best for their families and loved ones.

One woman in particular got me thinking. She was talking about how she wanted to raise her sons to know better than she did--to teach them what her mother failed to teach her, to use herself as an example of what not to be. She had made lots of really hard, really positive changes in her life, and so she knows the consequences of the things against which she counsels her boys. I thought of the Biblical parable of the talents, but somewhat differently: she had perhaps not been given the blessings that many of us take for granted. She'd grown up in a home where certain values were not taught. Still, she's taken what she was given and improved upon it so greatly. I, on the other hand, have been given so many gifts and blessings, and what have I done to show for it? Am I a better person that I was yesterday? Will my children grow up to be better than I am?

It's not what you've been given that counts, but what you make of it.