Soup and a Smile

My law school is on a separate plot of land, about two miles away, from the main campus of the larger university. The space exists for separate, some might say competing reasons: to house the law school and several large freshman dormitories. Basically, our grounds consist of a couple hundred high-achieving, probably hung-over, self-absorbed adults strung alongside another couple hundred still-pimply, probably hung-over, self-absorbed eighteen year-olds. We ignore each other as best we can, but are forced to share one central cafeteria. Set amidst our primal feeding grounds, the scene often looks like a sociologist's PhD candidate’s dissertation waiting to happen. It is absolutely us versus them.

We hate them for their pajama bottoms with Ugg boots, food fights and lack of parental units forcing them to shower in at least the last semester. They hate us for our uptight glares, unimaginably nerdy stacks of books and constantly holding up the cash-register line because we pay cash and must sort through our meager bills instead of breezing through with a meal card loaded up by mommy and daddy. We envy them their lithe bodies, carefree youth and their meal cards loaded up by mommy and daddy. They envy us our grown-up independence, the money we’ll be making in a few years while they’re still unpaid, thankless summer interns, and that’s probably about it. Case in point: last fall, they posted hundreds of copies of a ‘manifesto’ against us all over our entire campus, entitled “101 Reasons Why Law Students Suck”. So, yeah, it’s a little contentious.

But today, a peace was momentarily bartered. In a long-line for an afternoon snack, I ambled up to the register and had only a $20 bill to pay for the $3.53 cup of soup. Before I could begin to scrounge for exact change or just hand over the bill, a pert, red-headed freshman girl behind me had handed the cashier her card to pay for both her snack and mine. I didn’t have exact change to repay her I explained*, but she smilingly replied she had way too much left on her card anyway and it was her treat, not to worry, have a nice day. I thanked her genuinely and profusely but she was already on her way with a couple girlfriends, off to play Frisbee in the quad and enjoy her enviable youth, no doubt.

Even if her real motivation was only to move the line forward more quickly, I'm not so cynical that it makes a big difference. It was what it was: a random act of freshman magnanimity that momentarily halted my hostile, stereo-typical opinion of them, at least one of them, and really lit up my day. My cafeteria chicken noodle soup turned out to be not that delicious. But I was hungry and still enjoyed it. It tasted free. And it tasted kind.

* = in reference to the common enterprise among industrious freshman at the end of the year to turn excess meal-card $ into cold-hard cash their parents can never trace by offering to pay for law students’ food in exchange for a small discount in cash from us to them.