Stay Positive

I set myself the challenge of writing about each of the 10 Tools on the LiveYourLifeWell.org site.  These are research-based strategies for maintaining and improving your mental health and they seemed like something we should be talking about.

The first one "Connect with Others" is pretty straightforward and something I have written about several times on this blog, but Number Two, "Stay Positive" is a real challenge.

Anyone who knows me would laugh at the idea of me taking on this topic.  In a world of glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people, I am left looking for the glass.

It's no use my pretending to be a positive person, but I can write about someone who was.

But first, a joke:

This Anglican minister was on vacation in Ireland.  It was a foggy day and he was driving one one of the twisty-turny country roads that inspire poetry and accidents when he felt a bump.  He stopped the car and got out to discover that he had struck a rabbit.  The minister was beside himself for killing one of God's creatures when this priest came walking by.

"Father," said the minister.  "What's to be done, I've killed this poor, defenseless animal."

"Oh have you know," said the priest.  "Let's have a look."

The priest bends down over the body and after a careful look, pulls a small vial from inside his coat and sprinkles a few drops over the bunny.  A few seconds later, the animal leaps to its feat and scampers away.

"Oh father," said the minister.  "I had always heard about the miraculous properties of the Holy Water, but I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself."

"It's not Holy Water," said the priest.  "It's hare restorer."

It's appropriate to open with a joke because that's what he would have done.  He lived to tell his stories and he told them with the practiced skill of a life-long performer.  It's many years since I last heard Bobby tell this story and I can still hear his delicate Scottish accent ("scotch is liquid") and the rhythm of his razor-sharp timing.

For five decades, Bobby worked in the retail food business.  When he started, selling provisions was a much different trade than it is today.  When he began as an apprentice, customers came to the counter with a list and the grocer would pull their order from the shelves.  In a set-up like that, the grocer really got to know his customers.  He would know what they liked and didn't like and could recommend new items.  This was knowledge gained not from a print-out based on barcode scanning, but from real conversations.

After emigrating to Canada following his WW I service, Bobby again took up the food business and was eventually able to open his own shop where he specialized in cheese and other gourmet items.  The Cheese Shoppe was the place to go for lemon squash concentrate, real orange marmelade and Toblerone chocolate. And for the more adventuresome there were tinned oysters, jars of capers and chocolate covered ants.

Over the years Bobby built a loyal customer base.  People came from all over to give him their business and he always seemed to know each of them by name.  And if you were a first time customer, Bobby had a way of making you feel, by the time you left, as if you had known him your whole life.

He was justifiably proud of the many packages he sent overseas during World War II.

There is a story, and I'm no longer certain I remember the details correctly, of Bobby sending a package to my Uncle George who was a POW in Germany.  The package was alleged to have contained some whiskey, although I am not certain how it would have escaped notice.  In any event, it was sent by a Mr. J.B. Corn, as in John Barleycorn.  Bobby always talked about getting a thank-you note from my Uncle addressed to Mr. Corn.

They did a thriving business in gift packages for many, many years.  One of my clearest memories is of the walls of the store being piled high with stacks of their rich burgundy colored boxes waiting patiently to be filled.  These stacks rose from the tops of every shelf right up to the ceiling.  (I was never clear how they could get even one down without setting off a Jenga-like chain reaction.)

Once filled with an assortment of cheeses and crackers, bacon and jams, those packages would end up in some pretty remarkable places.  Bobby was proud of serving people like President Nixon, the Kennedys of Massachusetts and even the great Broadway impresario Flo Ziegfeld.

And like Ziegfeld, Bobby knew a thing or two about putting on a good show.  He was the absolute master of his domain and six days a week he would put that show for anyone and everyone who walked through his doors.

With his white butcher's apron, he would buzz back and forth from the counter to the cheese cooler, from the cash to the front door.  He would welcome each of his customers, help them with their selections, offer them some samples of this, or that cheese, tally up their bill by hand on the edge of a sheet of butcher paper that he would then use to wrap their purchases.  And all the while, he was either telling one of his stories, or whistling, or humming, or trading remarks with other customers, or staff, or both.

To really appreciate what a positive force Bobby was, you have to understand that being an immigrant business owner in Montreal during the 20th century meant that you primarily did business with your own people.  The French with the French, the Greeks with the Greeks and the Scottish with the English.  Though founded by the French, Montreal's commercial pulse was controlled for more than a hundred years by the English.

Though never a comfortable relationship, beginning about WW II, the French speaking majority in Quebec began to agitate for greater self-determination and an increased importance was placed on French as the language of  the majority.  Against this backdrop of increasing cultural sovereignty, Bobby greeted everyone who came through his door the same way--as a friend he hadn't yet met.

He would often tell the story of a French-speaking couple who came into the store and asked him, "Parlez-vous francais? (Do you speak French?)"  To which he responded, "Non, parlez-vous ecossais?  (Do you speak Scottish?)"  Everyone had a laugh and then they transacted their business in English.

Having a laugh was important.  After he retired, which took a couple of attempts before it actually stuck, Bobby would love nothing more than to go to the neighborhood bank dressed as he always was in his shirt and tie and grey flannel slacks and pass his bank book to the teller.  She would open it and see it contained a larger than life plastic cockroach, or ant, or whatever he happened to have on him at the time.  The teller's expression of surprise meant everything to him.  It would start a conversation and before you knew it, other tellers who had also been "bugged" by Bobby would come over and they would all have a laugh.

As I think I have mentioned elsewhere, he would do the same sort of thing at restaurants where he would try and get a new waiter in trouble by "discovering" a fly in his soup.  (The old jokes never go out of style.)

I can remember him telling me about meeting other seniors in his apartment building and he commented on their sour expressions.  He said, "They must have been business men, because they looked so unhappy."

It was Confucius who said, "Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life."

It's true, Bobby was the most positive, happiest unemployed business man I ever knew.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director