When you live in the concrete jungle that is New York City, or just live in this area where a small amount of space costs loads of money, you start realizing how luxurious it must be to have space for things like gardens, vast open spaces for outdoor chairs, tables, and grills, fruit trees, and vegetable shrubs. A remote colleague who works out of his home office in Atlanta had a work meeting a couple weeks ago in Miami, and he’d told me that he and his daughters had spent a few hours that weekend picking peaches that were ripe and nearly falling off his peach tree in his garden. In total, they collected nearly 200 peaches; they had so much that they just couldn’t eat them all in time, so they went door to door handing them out to their neighbors. I jokingly suggested to my colleague that he share some peaches with another colleague coming down to Miami to join him for his meeting. My colleague actually took me seriously and gave my New York colleague a few peaches (and some plums from his other tree!). He presented a few to our New York colleague, who ate the fruit.

This New York colleague proceeded to text our mutual colleague here to complain about our Atlanta colleague’s generosity. “Why would he give me fruit? I’m traveling back to New York, and he wants me to cart fruit back?” he grumbled to our mutual colleague. When our mutual colleague told me this, I was livid. What is wrong with this guy? How can he not appreciate homegrown fruit; who in this area ever gets gifted anything that is homegrown or homemade? You’re lucky to ever get anything gifted to you for any reason!

There are fewer things worse to me than an inability to be grateful for what you have and are given, especially when someone has been so kind and generous to give you something for absolutely no reason at all other than for the sake of giving and sharing. It never fails to shock me how ungrateful and miserable people choose to be in their overly privileged lives that they take small acts of kindness like this for granted. He even ate the fruit, too, and said they were really good!!