An Everyday Mercy
The significance of a single loving act
In the mid-2000’s I was living in Las Vegas and struggling to get a fledgling young company off the ground. I had recently met the former CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. We had spent a lot of time hanging out in the previous weeks. (Our blown-up business deal was still a ways off.)
My life had become chaotic, an unhealthy blur of work and play in which the two were sometimes indistinguishable. Lots of poker-playing, both in casinos and out; both with cards, and with other things.
Yet something was changing inside of me.
One healthy habit I developed was going each morning to the Starbucks on the corner of Stephanie and Horizon Ridge in Henderson, NV, between 5-7am. It was a short walk from my house.
On this particular morning—since it was a nice summer day, and I wanted to sit outside—I took my German Shepherd puppy, Axel, along with me.
It was the anniversary of 9/11. And while I had about a half-dozen of these under my belt at that point, this one hit me especially hard. I don’t know why. I had been a handful of blocks away from The World Trade Center when the first tower fell—I was a young student at Pace University—but, like many people, had only a “flash” of understanding. Then I went back to numbing myself, primarily through a form of “hustle” which had given me scarcely anytime for leisure or recreation.
Those pre-dawn trips to Starbucks were perhaps the first cracks in the facade, though—a transitional phase for me when I was starting to awaken from a meaning crisis. In my case, the aporia that was opening up in me was caused by a one-two punch: first, seeing the lives of quiet desperation being lived all around me, especially in the startup world (mine was one, too—but the difference is that I was becoming slightly more aware of it); and second, I was starting to read a lot of old books, which I was devouring like a starving child. Indeed I was.
Some places exist only in the vanishing moment. They’re only possible at a certain place and time. They depend on precisely the right cast of characters who frequent those places and create a specific type of experience, one unrepeatable and un-recreatable at any other time. They combined to create an emergent and unexpected culture. And you begin to realize that it’s special only right before is disbands and disappears forever.
Then you realize what it was.
I imagine Studio 54 may have been like this. The owner of a small neighborhood bar in West Michigan once told me: “This place, between June 1988 and September 1989, was unlike any other place on earth. If you ask me how it started or how it ended, I have no idea. Bob, Jim, Sandy, they all used to come in—before Sandy died. There was something magical about it during those days. Anyone who came in on a regular basis knew it. It was our little secret.”
I know it may seem silly to think that a coffee shop—a Starbucks, of all places—could have created some special experience or environment, but I remember roughly a six month period when I felt like I had discovered a secret meeting place of strangers who silently appreciated one another, who enjoyed those fleeting moments of peace during our morning routine, before we went about our business for the day.
In those pre-dawn hours, at that specific location in Green Valley, there was a group of people that showed up consistently. They had an energy about them. I remember their faces. There was a scruffy British man who drove a Ferrari (always parked in the same space, the far corner of the lot) and read the Wall Street Journal; a middle-aged man who wore a mechanic’s shirt and sat in the corner reading a bible, presumably on his way to an automotive shop; a mom with her two young children; an older man who sat alone and seemed to savor every sip of his latte, talking to anyone who made eye contact with him. I nicknamed him Micky Blue Eyes. One day, he told me about how he lost his wife.
And then there was me. I don’t know what they thought of me. I would walk in, bleary-eyed, with a book like Pseudo-Dionysius under my arm, and knock back two grande Americano’s in two hours.
I was recovering the spirit of a child (perhaps the amount of caffeine helped), rediscovering the ancient wisdom that I felt I had been deprived of. I was beginning to experience the first foretaste of freedom in the early dawn hours as I dove into my books.
There seemed to be a thick desire which I was pursuing during those hours—the only part of my life where I felt I had one. The rest of my desires all felt thin. And so I clung to those precious hours like my life depended on it. In fact, it did.
I needed to find out where that thick desire eventually led.
On that morning I brought Axel to the coffee shop like I would on any other morning when I planned to sit outside. He must have weighed around 50 pounds at the time—a far cry from the 120 monster he would one day grow into (see below). As usual, I tied him to a table outside while I went in to order.
I remember being particularly sad and confused that morning. I was struggling with some fundamental questions at the time, even though I would not have articulated them as such: Is the world good? Are people good? Are people indifferent? What is evil? Is evil real? Do people change? Questions like this were on my mind, or at least in my heart, even if I didn’t know it.
There was a man in front of me placing his order. Just as he was finishing up and being handed his coffee, I heard a loud yelp outside.
I spun around. Axel had jumped up and was running across the parking lot toward the main street, literally dragging the table behind him as a ran like he was pulling a dog sled. The whole thing seemed to be happening in slow motion. I thought this stuff only happened in movies like Beethoven—not to me.
Axel must have been spooked by something. Maybe he saw a dog walking along the sidewalk. To this day, I don’t know. I had no idea that he could pull the full weight of the table. But there he was, galloping across the parking lot with the table (which was now on its side) dragging behind him. The metal legs of it were making an ear-splitting screeching sound as they slid across the pavement.
I sprinted out the door. Axel had now made it to the other side of the parking lot and headed for the sidewalk, which was on the other side of a row of cars. He paused to look back at me running after him, then he took off running again alongside one of the parked cars. As he did, the table smacked into the back of a car and dragged along the side of it, scratching it badly the entire way.
By the time Axel made it to the sidewalk, I had caught up with him and smothered him in my arms to calm him down. He was scared and struggling to catch his breath. I unhooked the leash from the table and sat with him in the grass for a few seconds, petting him and telling him that everything was alright.
I looked up and saw the front door open. Out came the man who had been standing in front of me to order. He was an older gentlemen with gray hair, very nicely (but casually) dressed. I had never seen him before. He certainly wasn’t part of the morning crew.
He seemed incredibly calm. “Is that your car?” I shouted at him. “I’m so sorry.”
“Good morning,” he said, waving his hand as he walked toward me and Axel.
I got up and started walking Axel back up toward the storefront to meet the man halfway. I turned around to examine the damage. That’s when I saw what kind of vehicle it was: a top-of-the-line BMW that probably ran $100,000. The back side had a massive dent in it, and the table had scratched the side of the car from the back tire to the front driver’s side mirror, like someone had keyed it but far worse.
“Yes, it’s my car,” the man said. “Is your dog okay?” He bent down to pet him. “What’s his name?”
“Axel.” I continued to apologize profusely. I come here all of the time, this has never happened before, I don’t know what happened, he must have been spooked—"Can I get him some water?” the man interrupted. He nodded in agreement to himself, as if to answer to his own question. He walked back inside and emerged a minute later with a couple cups of water. We both knelt down and helped Axel drink, without speaking a word to one another.
This man and I were probably only together for a total of three minutes that morning. I spent the last minute fumbling around again for solutions to the problem. I offered to give him my number. I said something non-sensical about my insurance—in truth, I had no way what one is supposed to do in a situation like that.
The man simply smiled warmly and put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But—”
“Have a good day,” he said, standing up. He looked at me intently, as if he needed me to understand something. “I’ve got to get going.” With his coffee in hand, he walked to the driver’s side door. He gave me one last re-assuring nod before he got in, then smiled again and gave me one of those casual salutes with a wink. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeated.
I took Axel back inside and watched him drive off.
That level of kindness is something I had never been experienced before from a stranger. When he said “Don’t worry about it,” I couldn’t accept that he really meant it. But he meant it.
It is truly a wonderful feeling to be forgiven. It is a wonderful feeling to hear those words—but even more so to know that they’re true. To believe them.
In our litigious world—in which now even our words are minced and scrutinized, and we are held accountable for things we may not even mean—how often do we hear, or say, the words: “Don’t worry about it?” How often do we truly mean it?
In the big scheme of things, the morning incident with Axel was a small one. Nobody got hurt. Axel was fine. The mysterious man who showed compassion to me probably had the best insurance money could buy. Still, taking your car to the body shop is an inconvenience that nobody enjoys.
But whatever happened in those three minutes on that summer morning in Las Vegas had a profound influence on my life from that moment forward. I realized that there was more at stake.
I sensed that that single moment of grace created and brought forth more goodness in the world, and in my own heart, than the prior 80 hours of work that week which I had put into building my young business. It was a creation of a different order. It was far more powerful, far more generative, and powerfully human.
My friend John Souder would tell me, years later: “A child doesn’t learn metaphysics by reading books. He learns it by looking into his father’s eyes during a thunderstorm.” He sees that the world is good. And he comes to know that everything is going to be alright.
Perhaps that was one of my looking-into-my-father’s-eyes-during-a thunderstorm moments. We need these moments as adults, too.
They help us understanding the meaning of the words: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”1 I have found this to be a thick desire worth pursuing—because here I am, writing about it nearly two decades later, drinking from the well.
Taken from the prophet Hosea (6:6)
What a beautiful, touching story. May we all have the opportunity in our lives – and recognize it, in the moment – to offer someone a moment of grace like that.
Having read other Substack articles this morning re moments of grace and serendipity, I want to thank you for sharing your story. I feel it brings to light, inspires, aspects of our better nature and may encourage us all to be more merciful, grateful and willing to engage open heartedly with others, whether we know them or not. I know such is the impact on me, and thus appreciated.