A Scarf by Any Other Name: Be Curious, Not Judgmental

From a very early age, for reasons I still don't completely understand, I found myself defending people.

Maybe it was because of the chaos at home. Maybe it was simply who I was. Whatever the reason, if someone was being picked on, threatened, or treated unfairly, people seemed to know to come get me.

That was pretty amusing in elementary and middle school because I wasn't exactly an intimidating kid. I was slight, wiry, always moving, and probably more fiery than was good for me. I didn't get into many fights growing up unless someone was mistreating someone else. Then all bets were off.

Unfortunately, today I don't really feel like I'm in much of a position to be that defender anymore. Physically, mentally, emotionally...I'm just not the same person I once was. But people being mistreated still bothers me just as much as it ever did, and probably far more! I think that's why lately I've been trying to help people by writing my stories and sharing them.

The title of this essay comes from two very different places.

Last summer we lost my mother. A few days later my sister, my niece, and I were at her house looking through things, memories, clutter. We laughed a little. We cried a lot. Mostly we wandered from room to room trying to decide what to keep, what to donate, and what to throw away. At one point my sister and niece were standing in Mom's closet going through her clothes. This bothered me more than it should have, and so, to be a smart ass, I walked between them, reached up toward a row of scarves hanging on pegs and said, "I'll take this one."

It was a joke. Or at least I thought it was. I wrapped it around my neck and wore it for a while. The next day I put it on again. Then the next. Now, almost a year later, I still wear it every day. Every time I leave the house.

Not because it's fashionable, which it is, and not because it matches anything, which it does wonderfully, but because it reminds me of my mother.

The second half of the title comes from Ted Lasso.

A few Christmases ago we were all home for Dad's Celebration of Life. While we were there my sister and niece insisted I watch it with them. Every evening we'd sit upstairs at Mom's house with my sister's laptop and binge-watch Ted Lasso. My sister was convinced I'd love it, and convinced Ted and I had some similarities.

I can't say I loved every minute of the show. I can say I loved many of its messages.

One scene in particular has stayed with me.

Ted challenges his boss's ex-husband to a game of darts. He makes a bet. Ted loses and the ex-husband, who is a complete ass and also co-owner of the team, gets to pick the lineup the rest of the year. Ted wins, and the ass of an ex-husband can't go near the owner's box the rest of the year.

As Ted calmly throws dart after dart, he talks about a quote he saw once while walking his son to school. He attributes it to Whitman, but that may not be accurate. The quote is simply, "Be curious, not judgmental." He explains that people have underestimated him his whole life. If they had simply been curious enough to ask questions instead of making assumptions, they would have discovered he had spent years playing darts every Sunday with his father.

I've thought about that scene a lot this past year. Especially while wearing Mom's scarf.

The first funny encounter happened while I was walking through downtown Boise. A gentleman selling jewelry on the sidewalk, something that happens a lot more here now that Boise has grown so much, stopped me and asked, "Are you Jewish?" I laughed and said, "Well...sort of." I then explained that my mother was Jewish, which technically made me Jewish as well.

Without missing a beat he proceeded to ask me a financial question.

It was almost impressive. An assumption built on top of a stereotype built on top of another assumption. I walked away chuckling.

Not all the encounters have been funny.

A few weeks ago I was walking through my neighborhood when I passed a roofing crew working on a house. One of the workers looked down from the roof, waved dramatically, turned to his coworkers and yelled, "Look! Another gay guy!"

I just shook my head and kept walking.

Growing up as an athlete, and later as a coach, I spent much of my life surrounded by people from every background imaginable. Football, soccer, lacrosse, skiing, and later, coaching. I had Black teammates, Jewish teammates, gay teammates, Native American teammates. Players from families and backgrounds very different from my own. It wasn't that we didn't know who people were. Of course we did. It's just that to me, to us, they were teammates, classmates, friends, and where they were from or who they were with didn't matter.

When I got my first engineering job in downtown Boston, there was a nice young man in our office who happened to be gay. People talked about him, gossiped, whispered.

Toward the end of our first year he left the company. Before he left he handed me a handwritten letter. He thanked me for being the only person in the office who treated him as simply another coworker and for standing up for him.

I've thought about that letter many times over the years.

Ironically, the one time assumptions directed at me really got under my skin happened shortly after I moved to Chicago.

I had just finished graduate school at Dartmouth and moved to Chicago straight from Vermont. Before I headed west in the rental truck my dad gave me one piece of advice that was actually useful. Not like when I was deciding between the Hartford office and the Chicago office and his only advice was, "Move to Chicago, find a nice Midwestern girl and have a bunch of kids." This time he said, "Remember...Chicago is a big city. Take a deep breath before you react." This turned out to be excellent advice that I needed my first weekend in Chicago.

When I visited Chicago I had chosen the most secure and modern building I could find that, unbeknownst to me, was on the edge of Boys Town. This building was tall and beautiful and right on the lake, just four blocks from Wrigley. I had no idea about the rest.

My first Saturday in Chicago, having just moved from Vermont, I put on a pair of cut-off blue jeans, flip-flops, and a tank top to go explore my new neighborhood. I stopped at an intersection waiting for the light to change when a pickup truck pulled up. The two men inside began yelling things at me. Every instinct I had wanted to yell back and yank the passenger out through the open window, but I remembered Dad's advice. I grabbed the bus stop sign behind me, wrapped my arms around it, took a deep breath, and said nothing.

That was probably the only time comments directed at me truly hurt.

Not because they thought I was gay.

Because they had decided who I was without knowing the first thing about me.

A few nights ago I watched Mississippi Burning again. I had forgotten how difficult it was to watch, and I had to stop it and then come back to it a few times. Near the end of the film one of the junior FBI agents asks the agent in charge why the mayor took his own life when he hadn't actually been named as one of the men involved. He says he doesn't understand why he'd do that if he wasn't guilty. The agent in charge replies, in essence, "He was guilty. Anyone who watches something wrong happening and pretends it isn't happening shares in that guilt." That line struck me. It appears to be the perfect sentiment at the perfect time.

In a similar fashion to how social media has made us less connected as a society instead of more, as was intended, I think political correctness has made people more judgmental and reactionary, with a huge help from some prominent folks who have been working really hard to divide us for the last fifteen or twenty years.

Here's what I don't understand, and never will. Why is any one color of skin more or less than any other? Why is any one religion? Why does anyone care who someone falls in love with or sleeps with? Why would anyone think that all white, all male, all straight, all Christian is how the world is supposed to be?

And just in case anyone was wondering, the Christian answer would be that everyone is equally loved in God's eyes. Not that there aren't a whole collection of people out there claiming to be Christian while working to eliminate anyone who is "different."

No, I didn't want this to be political, so I'll stop here. Suffice it to say that I will never understand people who hate solely based on skin color, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation, nor will I ever understand how someone can see someone wearing a scarf and assume anything, aside from maybe, "Nice scarf."

One last funny thought I had on that same walk with the roofers: an attractive, well-dressed male in Idaho "must" be gay. In the Northeast, maybe, maybe not, but who cares? In Europe, he's French, named François, and when he walks into a room women swoon.