The Shiny Floor Story

Can people be completely different and still love one another? That’s a question worth asking, given the divisiveness that’s tearing the world apart today.

If there’s any hope for different sides to come together, we might view the warm relationship between me and my brother Steve as a template for love and acceptance.

Steve and I are like day and night, or perhaps more like ground and sky. We’re as different as two people could be politically, spiritually and personality-wise. Yet we’ve maintained an intimate bond of friendship and brotherhood that's lasted since childhood.

Steve is a grounded pragmatist who loves working with his hands; he’s a master at building and fixing things. I’m the opposite: a head-in-the-clouds dreamer who’s been banned by my wife from ever touching another piece of plumbing because I destroyed the few faucets and toilets I tried to fix.

Steve loves racing high-performance cars with roaring engines on the track under the Friday night lights. I love taking photographs under soft early morning light.

Since we're so far apart in so many ways, how can my brother and I be so close? Author Paul Rogat Loeb gives an answer in his book of inspiring essays, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times.

Loeb wrote, “What brings humans together can be stronger than what divides us.”

And that brings us to the photograph you see at the top of this post.

While Bonnie and I were visiting family back in Buffalo one summer, I went to the grocery store with Steve to pick up a few things. As we walked down the beverage aisle, I stopped and stared at the highly reflective floor in front of me. I tilted my head one way, then another, transfixed. I finally pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and took a picture.

Noticing my fascination with the floor, Steve said, “That’s quite a shine, isn’t it? Do you know how hard it is to get a gloss like that?”

He assumed I’d been thinking (as he was) about the cleaning products applied, the type of buffer machine used and the number of hours it took to achieve that perfect shine throughout the whole store.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought the reflections of the bottles on the floor looked really cool.”

We laughed about our different ways of appreciating the floor – a shining example of how unalike the two of us are. Then we went back to his house and had a wonderful Sunday family dinner.

My two takeaways from The Shiny Floor Story are these: (1) We all see and think about the world differently. (2) Despite our differences, it’s possible for us to love each other for what we are underneath.

Those are two lessons the world could desperately use right now.

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