If you’ve ever sat in a pediatrician’s waiting room, you’ve probably  met a pair of comic strip characters named Goofus and Gallant.

Goofus, a pudgy little miscreant with rebellious hair, has been behaving badly in the pages of Highlights magazine for more than half a century. His rap sheet includes everything from light plagiarism to felonious rudeness. The carefully coiffed Gallant, on the other hand, has spent the last fifty years being selfless, studious, compassionate, and squeaky clean.

The Goofus and Gallant strip showcases bad behavior next to good, the idea being that goodness or badness is a matter of choice. Each new situation — whether it be a tempting bowl of fruit, either to be raided or offered to grandma; or a shy new kid at school, either to be teased or offered the hand of friendship — is a test of character, one of an endless series of choices defining us as either a Goofus or a Gallant, a bad boy or a good one.

(Of course, the novelist in me, playing devil’s advocate, can’t resist pointing out that the unwavering behavior each boy exhibits, in countless comic strips stretching across decades, suggests a much more deterministic model of character; i.e., once a Goofus, always a Goofus. But I digress.)

You meet Goofuses and Gallants in real life. This week, I met a Goofus in the bakery section of a local grocery store. I was leaning on my cart, lost in thought. I’d pulled off the main aisle and was idling in front of a case of ice cream cakes while I brainstormed ingredients for a Thai spicy beef salad. That’s when Goofus appeared, a slovenly bald man with a graying soul patch under his lip.

Apparently, I was standing in the way of an urgently needed chocolate cake.

“Excuse you!” he said, crowding me aside.

Before his obnoxious words sunk in, I automatically apologized. After all, my cart was in the way, and I’d been cogitating, not shopping.

But then I realized he’d said, “Excuse you!” rather than, “Excuse me.” What a jerk! I was instantly in the grip of the grocery store equivalent of road rage.

Shana wisely herded me over to the produce section, where my grumbling could fall harmlessly on some Italian parsley.

“What kind of person says, ‘Excuse you?’” I muttered.

I was still fuming about that big buffoon later that day, standing in line at the pharmacy counter of the Shermans Dale Rite-Aid. And that’s when I had a classic Gallant moment.

The pharmacist was taking his time with an elderly customer, a paper-thin woman with a hunched spine and wispy white hair. I was standing behind the “privacy line,” but I couldn’t help overhearing the kindly tone the pharmacist took with her. In fact, she was slightly hard of hearing, and the pharmacist’s enunciation was excellent, so I heard more than I probably should have.

“I’m so glad to see you’re doing better,” he said. “You didn’t look like yourself the last time you were here.”

She was clearly going through a hard time. The big bag of medications in her hand spoke to that. She brightened when she heard that he was keeping an eye on her. “Yes,” she admitted, “lately there’s been a lot of stress.”

Then he did something altogether shocking in our world of corporatized medicine: he came out from behind the counter so he could share a few quiet words and give her arm a gentle encouraging squeeze.

For the record, this excellent pharmacist’s name is Mario Zuccaroli. Catch him in Shermans Dale while you can; he’s scheduled to be transferred to the Rite-Aid on York Road in Carlisle some time soon.

I called Mario when I got home that afternoon and warned him I’d be writing about him. He took the news with the slightly baffled good humor of a man who doesn’t think that kindness is anything out of the ordinary. He told me that even though he’s from a different country, he doesn’t feel like an outsider in Perry County. In his experience, communities always welcome someone who genuinely cares.

So there you have it. A Goofus and a Gallant.

By the way, I didn’t catch the real name of that cake-seeking Goofus. It’s probably just as well. Publishing the name of even a bona fide jerk is an invitation to a lawsuit. Who needs that kind of legal headache?

A legal headache. Hm. I wonder if Mario could suggest something OTC for one of those…

 

 

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 14 July 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com