RESPECT

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Congressman Joe Wilson didn't have it when he shouted "You lie!" to President Obama in the middle of his speech to Congress.

Someone spray painted this word on a step going up to my university office building. I don't know why. Sometimes graffiti is art, but most of the time it's disrespectful.

Meditate on the word.

Respect.

Respect is the balm we hold in our hands every moment.

Some people believe if you treat someone with disrespect you lose the right to be treated with respect yourself.

I have a story that demonstrates what I feel about respect. The story belongs to a man - let's call him Vick - for whom I frankly don't have much respect. But this story, like an iridescent bubble, surrounds and protects him from my memories and wrath.

Vick was my boss for three years. While he treated me with respect, I cringed when he led our staff with a cold, condescending and dictatorial style. Out of a staff of 20, only a couple people liked him. I'll never forget in my first week on the job one secretary said she wished his plane would crash. Out of respect for his position, I found a way to be pleasant and cordial in our daily professional relationship, and at some level I respected his expertise in his field. But I would never want him for a friend, even though he could be charming and even warm at times. Charm on the heels of cold arrogance only increased the chill.

So, this is the story he told me, the bubble around him that embodies my definition of respect.

Vick went to France with his American wife, a professor of French, every summer for several weeks for her academic research. This was one realm where he felt intimidated, convinced the French people he encountered scoffed at his American accented French. How strange it was to picture him, Mr. I-RULE-THE-WORLD, feeling inferior. His robust physique, while perhaps lending itself to his power in the U.S., only increased his feeling of mortification in Paris. And isn't it rather charming that he revealed his vulnerability to me this way?

He explained to me that he learned from the French how to enter a restaurant: Walk in the door quietly. Listen to the room. Let the room receive you. Serenely, calmly, genteelly ask the host for a table. He was so careful about this it became his appeasement, his little sacrifice at the altar of the French gods, hoping he might be accepted in spite of his Americanized French.

One year Vick's parents-in-law visited them in Paris, and they had no clue about the "respect the room" rule he had learned and honored. All those years of showing deference entering a restaurant were blown away in a gust when the door opened and his mother-in-law chattered away full voice while everyone in the room gaped at them. Our tall, broad, bearded professorial Vick in a tweed sport coat held his head as high as he could while his innards melted in humiliation.

This is what I think of, what epitomizes respect for me. Entering quietly. Listening. Then proceeding.

Even the air we move through deserves our respect.

And now I am reminded of a little Mark Strand poem:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand
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