Serving Like Michelangelo Paints Pictures

‘First drink of the day - Lemsip. I am missing the atttentative waiter at my beck and call. Guests might take the towels as a souvenir - me, I will take the waiter any day.’

We are just home from a cruise through the Norwegian fjords. We were cruise newbies but boarded full of tips gleaned from a brother-in-law and his wife who are experts. I would quite like to do it all again and properly immerse myself into the whole adventure. Too many things I did not do, although chilling and doing nothing is perhaps more me that flitting from one deck to another to cram the day with activity.

It was an ‘almost-everything-paid-for’ experience. There were one or two things we did that were not covered by the price, posh meals and so on. An absolute highlight was afternoon tea, not included. The whole ambiance of waiters floating by with teapots and sugar bowls was a first. I have had afternoon teas before, but not with the waiters doing their stuff. The tray of goodies was wonderful.

I keep wanting to use the word ‘servant’, but it feels a low-life kind of word, a second-class occupation perhaps, but these people served so well.

I worked for a while as a waitress. I also worked aas a chambermaid in a local hotel. Inverness is steeped in tourismn. I had completed a year working with a gospel outreach team. At the end of the year, finding a teaching job was not easy. I know I wasn’t a good waitress – I tipped a bowl of hot soup over a guest at a wedding, accidentally. He was soothes by a thumb or two of malt whisky and the soup wasn’t that hot.

The job was temporary. I knew it. They knew it. I was waiting for the teaching job to turn up. Did I think I was too good to get my hands dirty? No. Was the job beneath me? No. It was better than what used to be before universal credit. It was also better than the depression I had fell into with being unemployed. I was just so out of my comfort zone. With the waitressing, the managers had set up a challenge to learn a few words of welcome in different languages so we could greet the guests in something other than English. Had I been less crawling out of depression and less biding my time for a teaching job, I might have embraced it. Actually, I am learning just how un-embracing of life’s challenges I can be. Other waitresses won awards, but not me.

On the cruise there were so many people looking after our needs and I never got the impression that they would rather be doing something else instead. There was never a hint of impatience and never a quiet corner they gathered in to swap complaints. I sat on the balcony (yes, our cabin had a balcony) one morning and there was a man on deck sweeping and singing as he went. It called to mind a quotation from Martin Luther King…

‘If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.’

Maybe this is something P&O make every potential employer learn by heart before they added them to the pay roll, as every waiter and waitress, every cabin person, every canteen staff member lived up to it. They served well.

Now I am home, and I must needs serve myself. No one is at my elbow, tray in hand, to ask me what I need. I will have to make my own cups of tea and wash up afterwards. I will have to make my own bed and fold my own towels. I will have to make my own dinner, chop up my own vegetables and swish them around in a wok. But…

I will do these things singing, just like the man on the deck sweeping.

I will not meet in quiet corners with others to grizzle and complain.

And how will I serve others because I WILL serve others? Singing.