Understanding generosity

If you turn to page 643 of the 1955 edition of Milton Cross' Complete Stories of the Great Operas, you'll find an interesting little essay entitled 'How to Enjoy an Opera.' And if you read the first sentence, you'll see this: "To enjoy anything, you must first understand it."

One simple sentence in, and we're already skating, it seems to me, on thin conceptual ice. Is enjoyment really predicated, so neatly, upon understanding? Can the child who enjoys the heat of a summer day really be said to understand it? Is my enjoyment of motoring, on an autumn afternoon, the thinner because I've never mastered the mechanical logic of an automobile? And, if we assume that Cross enjoyed, at some point in his rich life, an evening of complete romance, would he really have claimed to have understood all of the dances, feints, innuendos, and notional distances and genetic tugs that comprise passion?

No. One can enjoy, I think, without understanding. And here's a brief proof, in the form of a first-person account. Today is the anniversary of my grandmother's birthday. Of Scottish descent, and proud of that fact, she was stereotypically Scottish in several senses: she was firmly autonomous, a gifted storyteller, disciplined and hard-working, and always aware of the value of a dollar. Indeed, in the years that I knew her, some of these traits were on constant display, as she lived alone, in the wintry city of Albany, and on a fixed income. And yet, I understood almost nothing about the importance of these factors: after all, when I visited as a six- or ten-year-old boy, I'd never heard of Social Security, and Grandma always set out cocktail dishes full of cheese puffs and nuts, filled the diner table high with meatloaf, and often pushed a recent issue of Sport magazine into my hands when we shopped at Price Chopper. I rarely thought to call any of this generosity - I simply thought of such gestures as typical of Grandma - and I surely didn't understand what they cost her, in terms of her monthly income, or modest personal inclinations. But I know that I enjoyed them: indeed, I still miss them, and deeply.

In recent days, I've encountered a couple of corollary actions that have also centered around generosity, and   an enjoyment that is unfettered to understanding. Outside Starbucks on a recent morning, I sat near a man who begged money of every passerby. "Got coffee," he'd say, "trying to get breakfast." Almost sung, this refrain was repeated frequently, over about ten minutes, until he saw a young woman with a one-year-old, buckling her child into her car. He got up, and wandered over, and, in a tender voice, tried to push a quarter into the mother's hands. "Let me give him a quarter," he said. The mother, embarrassed, politely refused, but she also smiled. Who could have expected such generosity from a beggar? And who could understand such a sudden jettisoning of his immediate goal? But still, his action suggested that the city is not only always hard.

Two days later, I was pushing Cleo on a swing in our backyard, when an elderly neighbor - again, a woman of modest means - wandered over. We chatted about gardening, and weather, and summertime, and then she walked back to her house - only to return again, a minute later. She held a five-dollar bill in her hand, and extended it to me. "For her birthday," she said, nodding at Cleo. "Get her an ice cream." And when I told her that, no, she needn't, and that we simply appreciated her good thoughts, she dropped the bill at my feet and insisted that I take it, even as she apologized for the rudeness of the abrupt gesture.

So tell me, Milton Cross: do you really think that Cleo, who understood none of our exchange, won't enjoy that strawberry ice cream cone?