A Commonplace Book

I recently had an exchange that wasn’t real. My longtime (20 years) hairdresser and friend, Kim, is going through some hard financial times. Her husband lost his job and the family’s health insurance, her son has been sick, and things seem a little bleak right now. So I pulled the sneak-some-extra-money-in trick, the way old ladies do when they want to help “the kids.” In retrospect, that move may not have come off as I had hoped.

It turned out that because Kim was rushing Mira’s haircut to fit in extra clients, the haircut came out a little crooked. I called her the next day to make arrangements to get Mira’s hair fixed. It wasn’t long into the conversation before I was on the end of a daytime-talk-T.V.-style rant about how I think I’m better than her, about how I was talking down to her. She then said, “and I’m going to send you that money back.”

We needed the “keep it real”guy.

I spent too many fruitless minutes trying to explain that I didn’t “have an attitude” and that I wasn’t upset. Kim yelled “I wish all I had to worry about was an eight-year-old’s haircut.” Finally, I ended the call by telling Kim that she had it all wrong and that I couldn’t accept that kind of treatment. I said, “I won’t be back,” and I hung up the phone. I HATE this kind of theater, but she wouldn’t let me speak long enough to end the call properly, and at that point, enough had been said.

Why did money have to complicate things so much? Why was Kim unable to see that money is just money? That human relationships are more important than money? Or was it my fault for sneaking the money. Why was I so uncomfortable with just handing her the money and telling her that I wanted to help? My intentions were to be generous without embarrassing Kim, so on some level, sneaking her the money says that I had to know it was going to offend her.

It was all just so unreal.

But then, when someone who works for tips discusses her overwhelming financial fears with a client, isn’t she kind of asking for money? Wouldn’t it be a little inhuman not to tip more than usual? Or was it the size of the snuck-in tip, twice the cost of the haircuts (or 100%), that was the problem?

And here’s the thing, the real thing—now, after this incident, I do feel better than Kim. I feel superior about the way I handled our conflict. I feel superior that I wasn’t the person who brought up the issue of the money, which, in my opinion, was a little crass.

And if I’m really being real, I have to admit that I arrived at this place of superiority a little too quickly for my own comfort. Because, truth be told, it’s easy for someone who isn’t struggling to support a family with three kids to have a healthier and more spiritual, let’s-just-all-share-it-man attitude about money.

Still, I know that my intentions behind the tip were real, as real as can be. I was connecting with Kim’s money troubles on the most basic of human levels—I knew that it could happen to me at any time. Really, for the typical American family, job loss is not out of the question and serious financial peril is always a possibility. And so I superstitiously felt that by giving Kim a little extra, I could somehow make myself luckier, less likely to suffer a similar reality.

If I could talk to Kim again, this is what I would say. This and, “let’s keep it real.”