HOW DO YOU SPELL R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

This is a story I heard—second- or third-hand . . . but who’s counting?—about a guy that I have met once or twice just in passing. The guy is Irish-born (not that it really matters), and he’s a contractor of some sort. So . . . a couple of years ago he was at a garden center on Rte 28 just south of Boston and he noticed an African-American man that he thought he knew from somewhere, so he approached him and greeted him. “Where do I know you from?” he asked. “Have I done some work for you? Built an addition on your house . . . put in a driveway?” The African-American man smiled, then paused for a second before saying, modestly, “Well . . . I’m your Governor.” And so he was—the newly-elected-at-the-time Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick! He was at the garden center buying some flowers to plant at his home. Obviously, the contractor just couldn’t quite place him outside of the context in which he would have seen him before—that is, on the TV screen by which most of us know politicians, public officials and other “celebrities.”

I remembered that story a week or so ago when I saw Governor Patrick “out of context” myself—in a local supermarket. Unlike the contractor, I recognized him immediately; but also unlike the contractor, I did not approach him (though I do admire him greatly and plan to vote for him again in the next State election). But lots of other people in the supermarket did approach him, and I was impressed by how accommodating he was to requests that he pose for cellphone photographs with shoppers and their children. When I went through the checkout about fifteen minutes after he did, the clerks were still buzzing about how exciting it was to see him live-and-in-person and close-up: one of them said, “It was almost like meeting Obama . . .”

Anyway, as I tend to do whenever anything even vaguely out of the ordinary punctuates my day, I text-messaged my three daughters with the news: “Just saw the guv’nah @ Shaw’s!” Were they impressed? Well, here’s what I got back in response:

Woooo pretty cool! :)
Whattaya know! Did you talk to him?
wow!!! big friday night for deval patrick

Hmmm. . . . They say that text messaging is “tone deaf,” but somehow I came away with the impression that someone was being “disrespected” by those messages. Knowing that my daughters admire the Governor as much as I do, I have to figure that I was the one being denied just a little bit of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Not so, though, a few months ago when I texted those same three sardonic ladies from the airport in Albuquerque (of all places) where I had just seen another, though considerably lesser, local politician: talk about “out of context”! (But don’t talk about him as “considerably lesser”: his very large ego would be very badly bruised . . .) This was a guy whom, as a family, we had actively—and successfully—worked to defeat a couple of years ago in a hotly-contested election. So how did my daughters respond to the news that I had just seen him?

wow! did you say hi?
that sucks…safe travels!
Oh goshhhh….what is he doing there???

Well, that’s not quite all that was written . . . but rather than risk a libel suit, I’ll stop right there. And right here.