Humanity’s goodness will melt your heart
It’s going to be like this for a while.
The better angels of our nature butting up against our on-demand culture, leaving tempers high, nerves shot and a teenage ice cream server fleeing her post under a hail of F-bombs.
So it went in Mashpee, Massachusetts, recently, when Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour reopened under new guidelines: masks and gloves for employees, socially distanced lines, a request that all customers place orders an hour in advance.
It didn’t go well.
“One of my best workers quit yesterday at the end of her shift,” Polar Cave owner Mark Lawrence told Boston TV station WFXT. “She stuck it through her shift. But the words she was called and the language, you wouldn’t even say in a men’s locker room. And to say it to a 17-year-old kid, they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Lawrence told CNN “F-bombs were flying like snowflakes.”
“I’m not a trauma center,” he said. “It’s ice cream!”
Phyllis Fagell, a Washington, D.C.-based school counselor and author I have interviewed for guidance on coronavirus e-learning and more, said Polar Cave is a family tradition.
“I can’t remember not going,” she told me.
Fagell grew up in Massachusetts. She and her husband and three kids hit up the 19-year-old shop every summer when they’re in Cape Cod visiting family. Her youngest son, Alex, always begs for the 20-scoop “arctic circle,” which comes topped with four brownies, four bananas, walnuts, whip cream, sprinkles and cherries.
“We’ve always said no, but his uncle sent him a gift card to get it so what do you do?” she said. (You let your son get it.) “Everybody felt super sick afterward,” Fagell said, “but it was really fun.”
Fagell tweeted about her family’s love for Polar Cave in response to this weekend’s news coverage, and I called her to get a better flavor of the place.
Polar Cave, she said, is charming and delicious, but not fancy. It’s covered in Coca-Cola kitsch from around the world and signs that say, “Seven days without chocolate makes one weak,” and “Inside me lives a thin person, but I keep her sedated with chocolate,” and “Remember STRESSED spelled backwards is DESSERTS.”
“It’s a mom-and-pop kind of place that’s mostly staffed by teens who are very friendly,” she said. “There are a lot of ice cream places on the Cape, but we always end up going to Polar Cave because it’s head-and-shoulders above the others and it also has this unique spirit.”
Lawrence, the owner, wrote on Polar Cave’s Facebook page that the shop was closed indefinitely.
“As I turn the key in the lock tonight,” he wrote, “my thought is that we shall simply not open to the general public until something resembling normal returns.”
But a couple of news stories and an enormous outpouring of public support later, he had a change of heart and re-opened for business on Mother’s Day.
Hundreds of messages and comments and phone calls rolled in from around the country, mostly asking about the teenage employee and how to lend her some support. Lawrence started a GoFundMe to help her save for college. By May 15, the fund had raised more than $38,000.
Which is what I’m focusing on right now.
The day after Lawrence closed his shop, when he was being interviewed about customers berating his staff and his employee quitting, he told TV crews this: “People have forgotten how to treat other human beings in the six or seven weeks that they’ve been confined to their homes. They have no clue how to respect other human beings.”
And I’m sure that felt true at the time. What he had just witnessed left him no other conclusion to draw.
But then human beings showed him otherwise. With their messages and phone calls. With their donations. With their willingness to show up at his shop on Sunday and patiently wait for their ice cream to be prepared and served in a safe, pandemic-appropriate manner.
I was walking around my neighborhood the other day and I noticed a heart spray painted onto the sidewalk. Not a Valentine’s heart; a human heart — ventricles, veins, atria. Underneath it read, “Protect your heart.”
It would be so easy right now to harden our hearts. To shield them with cynicism and try to protect them from hurt. To take in all the inequity and illness and death and mean-spiritedness and federal ineptitude and decide, “That’s it. I’m done with humanity.”
But humanity can be so good. So ingenious. So funny. So generous. So kind. So resourceful. So resilient. We’re seeing it every day in the stories that grow and blossom out of the muck and mud of this pandemic. Watch John Krasinski’s “Some Good News” segments if you need a reminder.
It’s not a distraction or a diversion to look for the good. It’s not escapism. It’s a lifeline. It’s an investment in your own humanity — in everyone’s.
It’s going to be like this for a while. Protect your hearts.
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