HANDSOME AND HONEST

The genius and I were discussing yesterday’s blog, and it occurred to both of us that I didn’t even mention qualities such as honesty and integrity when I was considering my choices. In thinking about it, I decided that omitting those was yet another sign of the times.

Characteristics like truthfulness and uprightness were traits we took for granted when growing up in the fifties in our part of Nashville. We just naively considered everyone to be like that and if people were not, they were outcasts. Classmates who cheated on tests or were disrespectful to adults or even drank were not well thought of, and we girls would not dream of going out with someone like that. And they didn’t seem to want anything to do with us either.

I remember dating a guy I met in college and we were becoming pretty serious. While I was visiting with him and his family in Memphis, he flagrantly lied to his mother in front of me. And the lie wasn’t even about a particularly important issue. It didn’t take me too long to figure out if he lied to his mother about something so trivial, he would do the same to his wife. It took a few more months for our relationship to disintegrate, but I always knew the beginning of the collapse started with that incident.

So those features were important to me, but as I said, I took it for granted that anyone I was attracted to for any length of time would have the same values I had.

Of course, the genius is as “honest as the day is long” as the old saying goes (I’m not sure what it means). But I remember his mother telling me that he didn’t believe in exaggerating or telling “little white lies” even if it meant hurting someone’s feelings. So I learned not to ask him questions that I didn’t want a completely truthful answer about.

One funny thing happened just after we began dating. He had to go away to engineering camp for a week or two and after he got back, we heard a song on the radio. He reached over and turned it up and said, “I like that song; I heard it on the way to town one night while I was gone.”

I looked at him kind of funny and said, “You didn’t have a car up there.”

BUSTED!!!

It so happened that he had borrowed a car to go into town to see a girl who was “Miss ________ County” at the local fair. I could tell he felt really bad and wanted no deceit in the matter. And what could I say anyway; we had only been dating a couple of weeks when he left and we had no “commitment” at all. We have laughed over that incident many times.

This June we will have been married forty-eight years, and he still values honesty as much as he ever did, but he is much more tolerant of those who don’t have such a high standard.

And besides, at our age, who can tell the difference between telling a lie and being forgetful?