Trusting people

Boyd’s Bicycle Shop down on 7th Street, smack dab in the heart of Bristol, is a real-life piece of Mayberry.

Boyd’s is not only a place of business, but a bona-fide Bristol gathering place (complete with loads of light-hearted fun and constant banter). The venerable Old Man Boyd operated this esteemed business for well over half a century, many of those years tending it right alongside his two sons, who run it now.

I spoke one day with Hal Boyd about how his father ran the business, and how he and his brother, Marty, still run it today.

By honor. By good faith. By trust in their fellow man and woman.

Hal told me that neither he nor Marty draws up nary a contract when selling a bike. A handshake agreement is all they need, just like their father before them.

Teaching at the Bristol Jail is where I learned the most about integrity. And I learned not by doubting people, but by trusting them.

My incarcerated GED students were rarely trusted by anyone for anything. So I gave them the answer sheets to their GED practice tests to take back to their cells with them. I shook their hands, looked them in the eye, and told them I trusted them to take not one gander at the answers ‘til they finished.

Since these men often ranked among the most masterful con artists of all-time (not with evil intent, but as a means of survival) they could easily “read me like a book”. I really did trust them, and they somehow knew it. So they virtually always honored my faith in them.

The same goes for children I’ve caught lying, cheating, or stealing when I taught elementary school. I found that this type of behavior is rarely a moral failure (as it is treated 99% of the time by most adults) but is instead more likely a cry of pain or a disguised plea for help. Whenever this type of behavior is punished (with no hope of personal redemption or reconciliation) I’ve found it almost always serves only to make the perpetrator more “clever” in how they will continue to lie, cheat, and steal, etc. Mere punishment, no matter how severe, does nothing to make one a better person.

So I usually gave such a child a position of trust…like maybe taking care of a special gemstone for me for a day or two.

But what if they happened to “lose” my trust?

I trusted them again, and made it an even more valued gemstone or fossil the next time. (It’s amazing how “lost” things get “found” when one believes in a child.) Grace is the greatest teacher of all.

And if I ever showed even the slightest doubt, as I sometimes did in my younger years, then the child (or inmate) would pick up on it somehow, and go on lying, cheating and stealing…only worse than ever before. Grace must go all in, or it is not grace at all.

This is a test of faith, pure and simple. But it can be done - at least when dealing face-to-face and not online (more about that in a moment). People like the Boyds prove it every day.

My own father was much the same. I remember the whipped look on his face when he came home one day and said an old friend wouldn’t do business with him unless he signed a contract. “My word and a handshake were always good before. What has changed?”

Well, the world does change.

And it has.

Even yours truly here (who, like my father before me, loves to trust everybody) never trusts anyone or anything online. I will still trust people face-to-face in my hometown of Bristol, but not online. I have learned. Too many times. The hard way.

Since as much as 95% of human communication is “body” language, put me in front of someone and I can pretty much “read” them when we are face-to-face. Not so online - where so much business is done these days.

The world has changed that much - in just a few short years.

Meantime, if you’d like to travel back in time to how it was done in “the good old days”, then stop in to see my friends, Hal and Marty Boyd.