Everyone loves Molly.
If you’ve met her, then you agree.
We can’t walk a block without some serendipitous meeting. Yesterday, we were in a HomeGoods parking lot 3 cities away, and we ran into someone cutting across the credit union drive-thru. She gets along with everyone. Her commitment to making you feel important is unparalleled.
She Cares with a capital C.
Indeed, she got a degree in Caring.
One of the joys I have as a work-from-home dad is that I get to eavesdrop on Molly making calls to clients. Her job requires that she check in with senior citizens and dependent adults to make sure they’re taken care of and to evaluate their cognitive state.
The task itself is a series of questions that make up a formal psych assessment. It’s quite clinical, but the way Molly delivers it, you wouldn’t even know the person’s being evaluated.
The work is invisible.
She turns a cut-and-dry checkup into casual I’ve-known-you-my-whole-life conversation, where the questions are almost a parenthetical aside, not the main event. In passing, I hear talks of WWII, gay pride, civil rights, old department stores, shipyards, the Depression, hiking the Himalayas, walking the Pettus Bridge, pie baking, tree trimming, race car driving, Wall Street trading, county fairs, and pig-roasting barbecues.
You can tell the person feels heard. And you can tell Molly’s having as much fun as they are.
One time, I was in the sunroom watching TV with my daughter, and Molly was doing her thing on the phone. I grabbed the remote and turned the TV down.
“Listen,” I said. “Listen to mom.”
Hazel stopped and looked at me, excited to have a directive she didn’t quite understand.
“Do you hear mom’s voice? Listen to it. Really listen.”
Hazel had that faraway look in her eye that kids have when they’re really listening.
Here that? That’s kindness in action.”
It’s profound: a lesson we can all learn. This person on the other end of the phone, who has most of their life behind them, who is mostly overlooked by the majority of society, is being treated with such respect and reverence. To Molly, every client is royalty; every person matters.
She sneaks in her questions. From the mmm hmms and yes, yesses I can tell she’s jotting down notes on the lined notebook next to her laptop. I turn the TV back up. Hazel gives me a thumbs up.
You see, I told you. Everyone loves Molly. Even people who just met her, people in other cities and counties who picked up the phone to listen to a stranger, even those folks, by the end of a 20-minute call, they love Molly too.
It’s impossible not to.
—
Happy Birthday, babe. You’re the best.