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Forgiveness
Biscotti Diplomacy
Never underestimate the value of a face-to-face apology. Baked goods help, too.
Posted January 28, 2018
When I bought my first home in 2016, the townhouse complex I moved into seemed like a paradise on earth. The neighbors were friendly, the homeowners association was efficient but not overbearing, and the wooded setting at the base of a mountain seemed made for brisk walks and amateur observations of the native flora and fauna.
A little more than a year later, I still have warm feelings about my relatively new home and neighborhood. But a recent happy-ending incident involving one of my neighbors gave me a life lesson in the importance of owning up to one’s transgressions and making amends as swiftly and gracefully as possible.
This incident was both mundane and mortifying: It involved parking, an issue that likely has caused enmity among neighbors since the invention of the automobile. I think of myself as a peaceable soul—one who hates conflict, is slow to anger and prefers to turn the other cheek instead of immediately leaping to settle scores. My behavior in this instance suggested that I don’t know myself as well as I thought—or at least that there are limits to my preference for conflict avoidance.
Here are the facts: I have two parking spaces in front of my townhouse. Both are marked with the street number of my townhouse; the other 11 townhouses in my complex without garages also have two spaces each. Until several weeks ago, I had never had a problem with strangers parking in my assigned spaces. But on Christmas Eve, I drove home from a family celebration to find an unknown car in one of my spaces. On the theory that it was a special night, I didn’t try to find the car’s owner and ask him or her to move it. I merely parked my car in my other space and, sure enough, by Christmas morning the stranger's car was gone.
A few days later, I looked out my window and saw what looked like a different car parked in one of my spaces. This time the car was there for several hours—long enough for me to write a polite but firm note I left on the windshield, explaining that the car was parked in a private space and it would be towed if it happened again.
Ten days later, I left my home in what seemed like a light snow to drive to an appointment. I had gone only three or four miles before the snow turned to sleet and the driving became treacherous. I pulled into a parking lot, called to cancel my appointment, and then turned around and drove slowly home on the slippery roads.
When I got home, I saw to my dismay that yet another car had parked in one of my parking spaces. I wrote down the make, model and license plate number, verifying that it was indeed different from the two previous cars. By some weird coincidence, all of these cars were black sedans, so at first I couldn’t be sure they really were different. With my frustration rising, I wondered what to do.
At that moment I noticed a set of footprints clearly outlined in the icy snow covering the black macadam roadway in front of my house. They led directly from the car parked in my space to the door of the one of the townhouses opposite mine—a distance of perhaps 200 feet. And yes, the footprints practically begged me to follow them, with or without my magnifying glass, Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and meerschaum pipe.
The townhouses opposite mine have garages and driveways, and the four visitor spaces allotted to our complex of 18 townhouses are in front of these homes. Thus, I was even more steamed that a visitor to one of those townhouses had parked in my space. It seemed inexplicable and also incredibly rude.
Without taking the recommended count-to-10 time-out to allow my frustration to cool, I swiftly walked beside the footsteps in the snow to the door of the townhouse where the offending driver had apparently gone. I knocked on the glass storm door; when a young woman answered, I explained that I was her neighbor and it looked as if she had a visitor who had parked in one of my parking spaces.
Things might have gone well had I stopped there, but I was so agitated that I added, “This is the third time this has happened in the past two weeks!” In response, the young woman stared at me for a moment and then calmly explained that she had been away for two weeks, so she had nothing to do with the other two incidents.
Still full of frustration, I asked why her visitor had not parked in her driveway or one of the nearby visitor spaces. I must have looked threatening, because the young woman—who was several inches shorter than I—told me she would have her guest move his car and added that she did not need “attitude” from me. She then looked pointedly at my right forearm, which I was using to prop open her storm door as we talked. Her look clearly implied that she felt I was trying to physically intimidate her.
I was so stunned at how badly this brief exchange had gone that I could think of nothing more to say. I muttered a curt thank you and walked back across the slippery macadam to my house, where I proceeded to stew in a mixture of anger, frustration, shame and regret for the next 20 hours.
That evening I recounted the details of my encounter gone wrong in telephone calls to three friends and then spent a nearly sleepless night wondering (a) how I, a card-carrying milquetoast, could have turned into such a furious ogre and (b) whether it would be possible to avoid that neighbor for the rest of my time in my townhouse, which until that afternoon I had hoped to happily occupy for many years.
Sometime in the wee small hours it dawned on me that my neighbor’s visitor might not have been there before and thus had no idea the parking was assigned. It was just a bizarre coincidence that he was the third stranger in 14 days to pick my space to park in—a coincidence as bizarre as the fact that all three offending cars had been black sedans. As I considered this possibility, I felt even worse about the way I had behaved.
The next day I had lunch with my brother, and I told him the story, too. He offered a suggestion that none of my phone consultants had—possibly because they were all too busy trying to persuade me I was not the worst, most hateful neighbor who had ever lived. “Why don’t you apologize to her?” my brother asked.
In the midst of my scalding self-loathing, this suggestion came as a cool and soothing balm. My brother went on to say that I could write my neighbor a note and leave it on her door, thus avoiding another potentially hostile encounter. But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that an in-person apology was the only way to go. That way I could swiftly determine whether I really had redeemed myself in her eyes and restored harmony to the neighborhood.
Armed with a box of home-made biscotti from the coffee house where my brother and I had lunch, I drove home later that afternoon, screwed up my courage, walked the 200 feet over the now-dry macadam to my neighbor’s house and knocked on her storm door. After 15 or 20 seconds that seemed to last several minutes, she opened her front door, looking understandably wary when she saw me. Before she had a chance to say a word, I offered my box of biscotti—carefully balanced on my upturned palms—and blurted out, “Hi. I’m your scary neighbor, and I want to apologize for the way I behaved yesterday.”
Wonder of wonders, my apology did the trick—aided, no doubt, by the delectable biscotti. Within minutes, my neighbor and I were going over the events of the previous day and laughing together about what had transpired. She confirmed that her friend—who was visiting for the first time from out of town—had indeed been confused about where to park, and I hope I convinced her that I am not a hateful, unreasonable ogre with a hair-trigger temper. We parted as friends, and I walked back to my house with a light heart and an enormous sense of relief.
My experience reminded me that the perceptions we have of ourselves are not always true. I may be generally conflict-averse and peace-loving, but I do have a temper and apparently it can at times get the better of me. From now on I hope I can remember the count-to-10 rule before speaking or acting in anger—and extend it to 20 or 30 if I am still hopping mad. I also learned that summoning the courage to make amends can have surprisingly great results—especially when accompanied by a peace offering in the form of a box of freshly baked biscotti.
Copyright © 2018 by Susan Hooper
Photograph: A Plate of Biscotti by Stu Spivack via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
