The-Slight-Edge

introduction:
The Missing ingredient
The Shoeshine Woman
I arrived at the Phoenix airport about 6:30 in the morning. Having time
before my plane left, I looked around to see if there was a place where I could
get my shoes shined. There was hardly anybody in the airport at that time of the
morning. I strolled around.
Before long, I found a shoeshine stand. It was open; a woman in her mid to
late forties sat in one of the customer chairs, absorbed in a paperback book. She
was dressed in black stretch pants, a black apron and a white shirt. She seemed
like a nice, solid person.
I walked over to her stand.
The woman greeted me warmly. She was friendly and happy—not always an
easy way to be before the sun comes up, I thought. She got up, set down her book,
first carefully folding over the corner of the page she’d been reading, then took up
the tools of her trade and pleasantly ushered me into the chair.
Her stand was located right next to a service door through which a constant
stream of maintenance men and janitors came and went. Got to be at work by
seven, I guessed. As they passed by our shoeshine stand, every one of these men
stopped and exchanged greetings with the woman. She knew them all by name
and they knew hers, too. It was clear they were all friends.
She went to work on my shoes, and we started talking.
Her daughter, she told me, had just won a cheerleading contest. Boy was she
proud of her! The girl was hoping to go to a cheerleading camp in Dallas. “Tell
you the truth,” she confided, her voice dropping a bit, “I don’t know how in the