You meet someone for the first time. They’re attractive, nice to everyone around them, have a really engaging personality, and seem like they could succeed at absolutely anything they try. In a word, they’re perfect.
You set this person up on a mantle, an object of envy, someone you wish you could be like. They have it all together in ways you don’t feel like you do.
But as you get to know them more, you see the cracks, those little flaws that bring them down from that cloud of seeming perfection. And yet, you find that as you see more of those nuances the person seems even better than you initially thought. There’s a more colorful story there, one that shoots through the highs and lows of life instead of cruising along at a constant one-note level.
As a character in Helen Simonson’s “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” puts it, “Everyone needs a few flaws to make them real.”
The story follows Major Pettigrew, a retired British army officer who lives in a small town characterized by proper social structures and country club attitude. The Major at once embraces the old set as a defense of traditional British ways against modern excess while also bristling at the lack of progress in cultural acceptance.
The Major strikes up a friendship with a Pakistani woman who runs a sort of convenience store in town, a relationship that brings out more than a few off-handed less-than-enlightened comments from his friends and country club colleagues. As they connect into a deeper and deeper friendship, the Major (a widower) and Mrs. Ali (a widow) find an unexpected renewal of the types of feelings they thought had long ago left their lives for good.
But life isn’t perfect, and when circumstances surrounding Mrs. Ali’s family force her to leave town, the Major is left to discuss the disappointment with a neighbor who pushes him to reach out to her and make sure she knows how he feels:
“You miss her,” she said. “You are not happy.”
“It is a moot point,” he said. “She made her choice very clear. One feels quite powerless.”
Whether it’s a slow realization or an overt rejection, this is one of the worst feelings we can experience. You care for someone who decides they don’t want you as that part of their life. They make a choice and you can’t help but feel powerless as they leave you wondering what it is about you that makes it so easy for them to say “no thanks.”
But sometimes we can save ourselves from that fate, or protect ourselves from that disappointment, if only we pay attention to the subtle and not-so-subtle signs, no matter at what stage a relationship may be. The Major, comforting his son who just had a fight with his girlfriend, offers some wisdom that a girl — or two, or 283 — in my past could identify with:
“You are not the first man to miss a woman’s more subtle communication,” he said. “They think they are waving when we see only the calm sea, and pretty soon everybody drowns.”
It’s really a sweet story about the Major and Mrs. Ali, the Major and his son, Mrs. Ali’s family, and how all of them interact in a community of differing goals, standards and ideas of how the world should work.
I’ll end with one of the Major’s many nuggets of wisdom: “But we, who can do anything, we refuse to live our dreams on the basis that they are not practical.”
[Note: I realize this is the kind of post some people may read too much into. Don’t.]
