The Compassionate Yankee

BY REBECCA RULE / ILLUSTRATION BY PETER NOONAN

Yankees* have a reputation for being hard nuts to crack: cool, remote, unfriendly, blunt, even lacking in compassion.

Hogwash.

Hardcore Yankees may not fawn, gush, hug or chit-chat. They may not exude warmth. Some of us don’t smile. Ever. (No need of it.) But Yankees can be just as mushy as anybody else. Inside.

Famously, Mark Twain (or maybe Will Rogers) regaled a North Country audience with his most hilarious stories only to be met with stone-faced silence. Afterward, as he slunk from the hall, he overheard two audience members discussing his performance:

“Wa’n’t he some funny?” one said. “Ayuh,” said the other. “T’was all I could do to hold back laughing.”

Yankees can be hard to read, but we still feel the feels.

When Warren burned the beans, his buddy Bob said, “Don’t worry about it. I like ‘em that way.”

Next time Warren served beans, they were burned again. Across the table, Bob spotted a bowl of beans that looked not-so-black as those on his plate.

“Warren,” he said, “what’s them beans over there?”

“Them’s my beans,” Warren said. “I took ‘em out of the pot before I burnt yours.”

We care for each other. Best we know how. If that’s not compassion, I don’t know what is.

Ed was born in Ashuelot just two weeks before the Hurricane of ’38. When the river rose and threatened the house, Mother held infant Ed, Father held Mother, and the little family waded through fast-moving water to the neighbors’ house up on the hill. The two maiden ladies who lived there welcomed them with open arms. The wind blew so hard in the night, they worried the center chimney might blow over, so they tucked Ed into a wicker doll carriage and pushed the carriage under the grand piano.

The chimney didn’t blow over. But for as long as they lived, whenever one of those maiden ladies spotted Ed around town, she’d say (with a twinkle), “Ed, have you slept in my doll carriage lately?”

In another tale of neighborly care, steep granite steps led up to the double doors of town hall where town meeting was in session. When Joe arrived late, all the seats were taken, so he stood at the back and leaned against the double doors, arms crossed tight. Unfortunately, someone arrived even later, opened the doors quick, and Joe tumbled backward down the steps.

Up front, the moderator banged his gavel: “I will entertain a motion to recess for five minutes to see if Joe is still alive.”

So moved, seconded, and passed on a voice vote. Joe was still alive.

Meanwhile, back in the North Country, a game warden pulled up to the pumps at a filling station very early one morning. This was back when filling stations sold only one thing: gas. A local pulled up on the other side of the pump. The warden and the local stood a pump’s width apart silently filling their vehicles.

Finally, the warden said wistfully to nobody in particular, “I wonder where a fella could get a good cup of coffee around here this time of day.”

“Well sir,” said the local, “I guess you’ll just have to come home with me.”

* To be a Yankee, you don’t have to be born here, have a particular ethnicity, or suffer decades of New Hampshire winters. Yankee is an attitude. For example: four transplants are collecting roadside litter in Walpole. A stranger pulls up and calls out, “Do you know how to get to Peterborough?” “Yup,” say the transplants as one. That’s Yankee attitude.