Image by Myléne from Pixabay.
Here in Southern California where I’m visiting my son for a few days, it’s been raining, or rather misting, that coastal precipitation that moves easily from one form to the other and feels delightful on my desert-parched skin and hair. And so for my daily walk I borrowed a big black umbrella.
But—how to open it? A recalcitrant wooden button on the handle was the switch but either it was stuck or I simply didn’t have the finger strength to press it. I ended up stamping on the handle, which worked without damaging the big black umbrella itself, which opened with majestic slowness like a dark, wide-winged bird of prey. I didn’t consider how I would close it as I started out because it was raining.
After buying my coffee and avocado toast, and spending a while in the coffee shop observing the other inhabitants, I decided that no one under thirty was willing to speak or even to look at anyone else, even when standing shoulder to shoulder in line. I guess as children they’d never heard, “Say hello to the nice lady” or the equivalent, having learned instead to avoid all contact with strangers, potential kidnappers or rapists.
This was disheartening. Most of the people in the coffee shop were under thirty.
When I walked out, the rain had stopped. Now I was faced with the question of how I was going to close the big black umbrella—or walk back under it, pretending it was a parasol.
This seemed uncomfortable. So without hesitating, I walked into some kind of gym where a grey-haired man was sitting at a desk.
“Could you do me a favor?” I asked with my best smile. “Could you please close this umbrella?”
He sprang to his feet, seized the umbrella, pounced on the recalcitrant wooden button and closed it in gig time.
I thanked him, delighted with his response. As I walked away with the now subdued umbrella, he called after me, “I don’t have much chance to be chivalrous!”
He wanted that chance. Others, not all of them men, probably want it too. Even the cell-occupied teenagers in the coffee shop might spring to open a door or pick up a dropped napkin.
But they do need to be asked.
The term “chivalry” has this definition in the Wikipedia entry for that term: “Chivalry!—why, maiden, she is the nurse of pure and high affection—the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant—Nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in her lance and her sword. —Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)”