Between semesters at college I needed a job so I answered an ad looking for a floater for a local bank.They sent us to teller training at their operations center where I was the only guy in the class. There was a girl in my class who took the bus to training but it was pouring down raining one Friday so she asked for a ride to the bus stop. I offered to take her all the way home. When I went for my car I drove around to the front door, I got out and walked her to my car using my suit jacket as an umbrella for her head, and opened the door for her to get in. I got completely soaked but thought nothing of it. But apparently by the time we got back to training the following Monday, a lot of people had noticed and everybody in the building heard about it. When I arrived at my training workstation, it was full of flowers with a card signed by every woman in the building. I was floored.
Some years later I met a young lady at a client’s office and we went to lunch together one day. We talked about our lives. She mentioned how her daughter complained that she had more stuffed animals than a kid and I laughed as she began to name them all. Some evenings she would call and we would chat and I would laugh as she told me how many were on her bed with her. It was just her and her daughter and she was taking care of her mother who had fallen ill. She had a great job, bought her own house, nice car, but had a skirt chasing man she had to just let go of. She was a plain girl who really did not know how to be an attractive woman. So she never turned heads with her looks even though she could if she knew even simple things to accentuate her positive qualities. But if you spent enough time, her beautiful spirit was easy to see. So she was shocked when I asked her to dinner. When we got to the table I gave her a little gift bag. Inside was a little stuffed animal I custom ordered. She cried because she said that she had never felt like a man had ever really listened to her before. I was shocked because she was a VP with a staff that included 35 men. As far as I know “Giggles” is still in her room. LOL
Even today I look at the things that I wear. I used to wear only solids. Even my suits had ties with no patterns. It was the way of business when I started at a young age. But I dated a girl who asked if she could buy me something and me not get mad about it. She bought me a few short and shirt sets for our weekend getaway that I would have never bought myself. Everybody around me loved it so much that I gave her my credit card and let her teach me how to change with the times. Letting her do that not only changed my outward look, it changed me and the perception of others toward me in a lot of ways as well.
My point is to the sistah who has asked where have all the flowers gone. The flowers of our time blossom differently with age. Be careful when looking for chivalry because such expectations on your part come with certain expectations that may not be worth the flowers. We give because we choose to. Giving is like a voice across a great canyon. When you hear no echo, you know there is no substance on the other side. It isn’t that you should expect the echo. Neither is it that you should ignore its absence. -NeoBlaqness