This is a funny story, I think. We’ll see.

It was a sleepy weekday in Pawling, New York, though that may be redundant. Pawling is never busy except during farmer’s market Saturdays in summer and the occasional street fair. Few people, little traffic, plenty of parking, no hurry. If there are two other customers in a store, it’s a lot (I except the CVS, where as many as half a dozen await the pleasant pharmacy assistants). People are more noticeable here, being fewer.

I needed some cash. I don’t often. I use credit cards mostly. Any day now I may graduate to paying with my smartphone but, oh, the tedium of new gadgetry. When we’re younger, innovations entice with their implicit promise of improvement. Older, we lose faith in progress: new and improved means learning some new process, which technology will soon obsolete.

I get my cash from a local bank, the name of which I will omit for reasons that will become evident. It was hardly their fault what happened. I could get cash from a machine but none of them belong to my bank of record, so they charge a fee, which annoys me. The local bank gives me cash as a courtesy. The saving isn’t material, a few bucks, but I like courtesies.

As I entered the bank this sunny weekday, there was some commotion as clerks placed a folding table in the middle of the lobby. “Don’t walk there!” they gestured urgently. I asked why. “A customer just peed there!” I was told. “This four-year old, he was standing there with his mother, he whipped out his thing and peed -- just like that.” The teller was a young woman – in her late twenties, I supposed. Her ire could not be suppressed. “I asked if she wanted a paper towel, to clean up. That’s OK, she said, you can do it. Not the least bit embarrassed. I could have – ” The teller beside her, a young man a few years her senior, signaled for his associate to take care. “The customer,” he murmured, “is always right.” “I know, I know,” her annoyance gusted on, “but I mean really. Four years old! What kind of – ” “Shhh,” her associate cautioned.

I left the bank with my cash but the episode lingered in mind. Maybe the sweetest of retirement’s charms is the chance to muse. So much happens every moment but who has time to notice! Whatever we observe has something to tell us if we listen.

The mom of the aqueous four-year-old had insulted my teller. Some might have deemed this episode comic, others shrugged if off, but this teller’s pride had been nicked. Less by the mishap’s occurrence (if it was a mishap!) than by the expectation she was expected to mop. The teller had worked hard to get this job. And now she was being treated like a – a – a –

It was funny. But poignant too. We forget how connected we are to one another, how much we depend, in Tennessee Williams’ famous line, “on the kindness of strangers.” And what chasms divide us! What was in this mother’s mind, letting her boy behave that way, then failing to apologize? And why couldn’t my teller treat this episode as humorous, not a slight? How easily we wound one another!

And whatever happened to courtesy? In my childhood, I was taught to treat everybody with respect and punished if I failed to. These days a coarse indifference seems to govern relations – from our sleepy neighborhood bank to the highest offices in the land.