A Matter of Trust

Chris, the guy from whom we rented a condo put me to shame. He put me to shame with his implicit trust in us.

On Monday, after landing in Kauai, he was one of the 10 or so people we called looking for accommodation. We went to his property in the town of Kalaheo to see if he had vacancies. He was full, but offered us a place in Poipu instead. Poipu was a seaside town eight miles away and a much more upscale area in the island. He asked us to follow his truck and so we drove following him.

He showed us one large unit that he hadn't planned on renting out, which he said we could have. He said there were two problems – the dishwasher was not working, so we’d have to hand-wash the dishes if we used the kitchen. And one faucet in the bathtub leaked a little, so we had to put a towel below while we showered. For these “inconveniences”, on his own, he knocked 50% off the price that we had seen in his website. We loved the place (much bigger and better equipped than our Chicago apartment back home) and so we took it up on the spot.

“Oh, we can do that later,” he said, when I asked about registration and paperwork. He showed us where everything was, shared a couple of housekeeping rules, handed me the keys and rushed off to play tennis with his buddies.

He didn’t have our credit card number or even our names. All he had was the cell phone number from which we called him.

And based just on our word that we’d stay for four nights, he had handed over to us the entire upstairs portion fully furnished (1100 sq feet) with a kitchen, a dining room, a living room including a wrap-around balcony.

What surprised me was how many things there were. It was a place that had been furnished with care and attention to detail. There were 2 TV’s, at least 2 DVD/VCR’s, a full dining table set, 2 phone handsets, lots of good furniture, several wall hangings and at least 10 fans and numerous lamps. The kitchen appliances were of excellent quality. I found bookcases full of books and CD’s and video cassettes. Dozens and dozens of them. Many were still shrink-wrapped, unopened. (One example: I saw a coffee-table book titled Bathrooms, which had photos of over 100 beautiful bathrooms in it.)

His unquestioning trust that we'd take care of all of this shamed me a little because I know I probably couldn’t trust a stranger if all of that was my stuff. In Zen Buddhism there is a teaching about making sure that one doesn’t get too attached to one’s own possessions. Your possessions shouldn’t possess you, they say. Our absent-landlord Chris embodied that completely. I am pretty sure that he doesn’t even know all that he possesses.

After two days of staying there without hearing from him, I began to get agitated. We hadn’t still paid him a penny. It was as if we were living in someone else’s fully furnished home. So I called him up to ask about where and how to pay him.

“Oh, when you are ready to check out, just leave the money or the check on the kitchen counter. And leave the keys there too when you leave,” was all he said.

And that’s exactly what we did.

A Scottish-American success story

On yesterday's flight back from Kauai, the lady sitting next to me was petrified of flying. She was 74, had been born in Scotland and had then immigrated to the US 51 years ago and was living south of San Francisco.

I learned all this before the flight had even taken off from Lihue, and it dawned on me that she was chatting away as one way to alleviate her fear of flying. I later saw that her other way was to order a $6-gin-and-tonic to calm her nerves.
“I have been through so much in life, and flying still gets me,” she said, shaking her head. She said that she had been through childbirth (thrice) and had been held at gun point at her own home (once, for 45 minutes) but flying was what really terrified her.
“But in a way, I see this fear as a good thing,” she said, putting a positive spin by psychoanalyzing herself. “I am 74 and I am still afraid. That means that I have more to live for, so much more I still have to do.”

After we were airborne, she said she was very proud of what her youngest daughter had accomplished. This daughter had started to slowly turn deaf in her early teen years. And then, for a couple of decades the deafness was practically total. Undaunted, the daughter had gotten degrees and even started her own company with a couple of other people. And then, thanks to the miracle of modern technological advances, at the age of 39, her deafness was cured.
“It doesn’t work for everybody, but my daughter is a poster-child for cochlear implants!”
This daughter had sold her company to a bigger firm for “many, many millions.” The timing had been perfect. Two weeks later, we were all hit with this recent economic crisis. She felt that there was no way anyone would buy the company in the current economic situation.

She talked of growing up in Scotland with very little. She was dismissive of what everyone calls smog in the big cities nowadays. “You haven’t seen smog until you have seen what it was like in Lanarakshire in those days. It was because of all the coal burning.”
Because her parents had struggled financially, for the first 23 years of her life there hadn’t been an indoor toilet where she lived.
Clearly, in the US she and her husband had done very well. Her husband was sitting somewhere else in the airplane. I learned that she and her husband owned not one but two timeshare condos with a guaranteed view of the ocean in Poipu, a very upscale part of Kauai island.
“I actually think it helps to have had so little when growing up,” she said, because she felt that it helped her value and savor what she now had more.

“And now I have a home with five bathrooms. And you know what?” She paused for effect before continuing, “I absolutely love having all of them!”