“And You Thought I Would Do What?”

I recently called a restaurant to make a dinner reservation for a few weeks hence, usually an unremarkable activity.

However, I was reserving for a party of twelve, on a Saturday night, at a deservedly popular restaurant (great food, great setting, great people working there), and, most significantly, in a resort town favored by the “elite,” by which I mean the wealthy, the powerful, and the influential.

To seat a party the size of twelve, my friend the manager had to follow a certain protocol called a “buyout.” I could indeed make the reservation, but I had to “buyout” a room with many more seats than twelve. I’d have to pay a minimum to compensate the restaurant for the business they would certainly lose.

Before I could contemplate the exorbitant cost of the buyout, my manager friend told me that a buyout meant he would need to call a number of parties with pre-existing reservations and cancel them. Because of my buyout.

My first thought was incredulous naivete. I couldn’t believe people would feel okay doing this to other people. This was quickly followed by prospective, horrible guilt at the thought of upsetting many people’s plans. Then relief at not having to even consider paying the buyout price.

I said, “Who would do that? I’d feel too guilty.”

“At last,” replied my manger friend, “someone in this town with a sense of humanity. It’s such a relief to hear you say that.”

This incident brought to mind two family stories, neither comparable but both touching various aspects of my reservation tale.

Note: In telling these particular stories I realize I am likely giving an unrealistically flattering impression of my family. Suffice to say, we are like any family in that we have stories of strife and flaws and various misdemeanors, some funny, some not. But I will not write about any of those, unless they are solely about me. (Or unless I get permission!)

First story: A few years ago, we were at a different restaurant waiting in line, clutching a buzzer device that would tell us when a table would be available to us. My daughter, 31 at the time, struck up a conversation with a couple and their two very young kids. She was taken with how well behaved and adorable the kids were. She found out from the host that the adorable family were in for a much longer wait than we were; their name was at the bottom of the waiting list while ours had moved to the top, about to be buzzed. So, my daughter traded our priceless, soon-to-be-buzzed buzzer for the young family’s nearly worthless buzzer of limitless waiting time.

I now look back on my daughter’s selflessness with admiration, but at the time I was hungry and angry (i.e., “hangry”) and thus quite displeased. Godfather lines about “never going against your family again” not only resounded in my head, but escaped my mouth, although that happened later and not in front of the adorable family who’d been lucky enough to have met my daughter.

Next story. During World War Two, my father’s grandfather had agreed to take custody of the American branch of a modest clothing business owned by his friend who was trapped in Europe. The friend survived and came back to America in the early 1950s. My great-grandfather Sam had kept records of the net profit of his friend’s business and when his friend asked about the fortunes of the business while he had been away, Sam promptly handed the profit over.

My father, then a teenager, heard about this from another relative and when next with his grandfather Sam told him what a wonderful thing he had done in giving his friend all the profit.

Sam peered over his spectacles at his grandson, my father, and said, “And you thought I would do what?” (My father has perfected a slight Yiddish intonation in telling this story countless times; if our family had a sigil, it would be of an elderly man peering over spectacles.)

So back to the restaurant buyout. After the manager complimented me for my “humanity,” I admit that I felt good about myself. But my self-satisfaction quickly slipped away. I was just being normally decent about a trivial matter. What else would I do?  

But then who were the people who would go through with the buyout? I thought about some of the people in this resort town and came to the sad realization that the answer to the question was “many.” Those for whom neither money nor manners were a concern. After all, they would not be breaking a law, and the choice between getting what they wanted and inconveniencing others might to them seem easy.

I’ve watched “Succession.” Twice. There are indeed people like that.

Decency is the minimum we should expect from ourselves and especially from our elites. I wish that everyone had a venerable ancestor residing in their head, asking, “And you thought I would do what?”

And one cannot underestimate the positive influence of random acts of kindness, like my daughter’s surrender of our place in line to the young family, an act that seemed to the “hangry” me of the moment to be radical, reckless, and wrong.

I was incorrect!