Our friend Don coaches the Ann Arbor Masters swim team. He has since 1984. The team practices five days a week at oh-dark-thirty. And although I never witnessed this myself, when I was at the pool for my group of swimmers–who met after the Masters at the relatively civilized hour of seven a.m.–it’s possible that hard workouts in close proximity to others at oh-dark-thirty do not always bring out the sunshine in people’s personalities.
I asked Don whether this could be the case. His response looked very much like an eye roll. After which, he began telling me about his late friend, Todd Mercer. Todd was a Nice Guy. Nice all the way through.
Don and Todd roomed and swam together in college. Todd never failed to encourage and support his teammates. “He was the sort of guy who’d walk a nervous swimmer to the starting block before a race,” Don says, lending confidence and cheering the swimmer on. He was a natural athlete who could be counted on to swim hard, too. According to Don, after a grueling workout, Todd would say to him, “Let’s do one more. C’mon, let’s do one more.” So they would.
Todd was, in fact, so outstandingly nice that his teammates made up backstories for him. The most popular was that Todd was secretly an assassin. His unfailing generosity of spirit was just a cover for his dark side. No one could be that nice all the time. He had to be a ringer.
Since Todd’s untimely death this year, the Masters will be voting, every six months, on who among them best emulates Todd’s character, and granting that person the Todd Mercer Award. It is, in effect, a niceness award, honoring both Todd and the recipient. And it carries monetary value in that the recipient gets to swim for six months free of charge. Don, who came in this morning shaking his head over politics within the team, said the Mercer Award will not just recognize niceness, it will act as an incentive for niceness.
Suddenly my eyes were opened. Just think of the possible applications of a niceness award. I shared the concept with the first people I saw, Mary and Isaac, who were walking their dog Willie when I was out with Rascal. If there were a niceness award for dogs, for instance, we felt neither Willie nor Rascal was likely to win it. Willie is still a puppy, adorable and an all-around good guy, but still working on his manners, and Rascal, alas, is fallible. Sue’s border collie Tesla, on the other hand, would probably win. It’s hard to imagine how a dog could be nicer than Tesla, although golden retrievers might need to be judged separately from other dogs.
Of the two of us, my husband would get the niceness award. Everywhere we go, people give it to him spontaneously. It is not unusual for us to be, say, at Barry Bagels, when some observer—always a woman—approaches me when I’m alone at the table, to tell me what a nice man my husband is. “He treats you so well,” she’ll say. “He’s a really nice man.” Our friend Cindy goes even farther, declaring him the nicest man she knows. When he’s out walking the dog, people—always women—comment on how well he treats our fallible mutt. “He’s a really nice man,” they’ll tell the friends standing next to them, who’ve not yet had the opportunity to observe this for themselves.
It would probably be impossible to choose a niceness award winner from among my husband’s large extended family: every one of them is nice. Niceness seems to run in the blood line, right down the generations. My sisters and I have been remarkably fortunate in the character of the families into which we married.
The elementary school where our daughter teaches recognizes nice behavior. A child who behaves kindly toward others, and is observed doing so, may be honored, in writing, as having been “caught being nice” and as a bucket filler. Bucket fillers behave positively and respectfully toward others, their kindness adding not only to other folks’ buckets of happiness but to their own.
Since CoVid imposed itself on us, our neighbors, and most especially their children, have done a fabulous job of filling the community’s buckets. They all deserve niceness awards. May they all have the happiest of holidays.
17 December 2021