There was once a positive and affirming tradition in retailing.  After the customer paid, the seller would say “Thank you” and the customer would reply “Thank you”.  Those “thank-you”s were full of meaning.  The customer was saying, “Thank you for having the goods and services I wanted ready and available for me at a price I thought was reasonable.  No one compelled you to do it, and I genuinely appreciate it.”  The retailer was saying, “Thank you for choosing this store to meet your needs when you have so many alternatives.  It means a lot that you freely chose us.”

It’s a fitting moment to acknowledge that we are making a voluntary exchange that benefits us both.  They know that I don’t have to shop there and I know that they don’t have to make sure that my favorite brand of salsa is on the shelf.  We have both sought each other out for mutual aid.

I notice that in the South, where courtesy is much more a part of everyday life than it is in other parts of the United States, people will substitute “Y’all come back and see us, now.”  I believe this is just as good as “Thank you”.  It underscores the voluntary nature of the momentary association between buyer and seller.  It encompasses the notion that the customer is free to go somewhere else and therefore an effort should be made to welcome him or her to return.

This moment of mutual acknowledgment has gone missing in the corner of the world I live in.  Usually, what I hear at checkout is “Have a nice day.”  This reminds me of the joke about how many New Yorkers it takes to screw in a light bulb.  The answer: None of your damn business.  How many Californians does it take?  None of your damn business, but have a nice day.

When I hear, “Have a nice day” I am tempted to say “You should be saying thank you.”  What I say instead is “You too.”  The expression has no sense of momentary voluntary association, no sense of mutual benefit, only a robotic wish that nothing will happen that will disturb you, but only for the rest of the day.

I have learned from my dear wife how important it is to acknowledge other people when they do something positive or when they demonstrate a character trait that is noteworthy.  I had a positive experience in my local QFC grocery a couple of weeks ago when an employee unexpectedly re-introduced the “thank you” tradition.  I went out of my way to acknowledge the action.

Gabriel was bagging my groceries.  I doubt he is more than 20 years old.  His lightly accented English suggests to me that he immigrated from east Africa as a teenager, although that’s a guess.  The cashier, an assistant manager no less, finished ringing me up and said “Have a nice day.”  But Gabriel said, “Thank you for shopping with us.”  I made a point of telling Gabriel how much I appreciated that he had said that.  He smiled.  I smiled.

A week later, I was back at my neighborhood QFC.  I avoided the line of the slowest, most inaccurate checker in the store and glided into the line of what turned out to be the second slowest checker in the store.  But the compensation was that Gabriel was there, bagging groceries like mad.  I looked forward to our mutual recognition of the voluntary beneficial exchange in which we were participating.  As he finished he said to me, “Have a nice day.”  There is still work to do.

Well-deserved congratulations to those of us who watched every episode of Downton.  Those who missed a few episodes might consider a visit to the gift shop.  You could buy a brightly colored T-shirt with the legend:  My Friends Watched Downton Abbey and All I Got Was This Stupid Shirt.

I think it was a mistake for Mr. Fellowes to announce beforehand that this would be the last season.  Had he kept both audience and writers in the dark, both groups might have gotten more out of this final season.  As early as the first episode, I did not feel that we were getting the writers’ best work.  Who can blame them?  They had to keep an eye on monster.com and then go running off for interviews with the BBC and ITV.  These are not conditions likely to produce really gripping dramatic material week to week.  And we in the audience began to lower our expectations accordingly.  It became clear early on that the writers were just arranging pieces on the board in order to maneuver as many happy endings as time would allow.

And with a two-hour finale, there was time enough for happy endings out to the horizon.  When the lovely editor caught Edith’s bouquet just moments after Tom openly flirted with her, I felt I was approaching my limit for treacly sentimentality.  The only slight shadow is Mr. Carson’s infirmity[1], but even his happiness will be accommodated by a cottage on the estate, a pension, and the honor of being the advisor to family and staff on matters that come within his deep, although not very broad, knowledge and experience.

The whole episode reminded me of a movie I have mentioned before, The Secret Life of Bees.  That story is set in the Jim Crow South.  A pre-adolescent girl, white, ends up at a farm run by an African-American woman who keeps bees and lives in the eye of the segregationist storm that surrounds her.  In fact, in her capacity to dispense folk wisdom, she is very much like Mr. Mason except that he is male, white, and English where she is female, black, and American.  But other than that.  They are both deeply rooted to the soil – pigs, bees – which enables them to see into the future, counsel those around them, and maintain a cheerful outlook on life in all circumstances.

It wasn’t just that connection that put me in mind of the Bees movie.  It was the cheerful way everyone interacted with everyone else.  Atticus spies Tom and Henry talking about the changes they plan to make and says with a deep back-bending chuckle, “But I like you just the way you are!”  Ditto Robert and Cora, Violet and Spratt, Rose and the downstairs staff, and practically everyone else involved in this episode.

In the Bees movie, there is one moment when the Jim Crow system intrudes into the story.  The pre-teen adolescent white girl and a pre-teen adolescent black boy are sweet on each other.  They go to a movie theater to hold hands, but of course they have to go to the “Colored” area up in the balcony.  The kids don’t mind, but the evil killjoy segregationists spot them and break up their date.

We have a similar faux dark moment in this final episode when Robert, Cora, and Edith present themselves for inspection by Bertie’s redoubtable mother.  She has laid down the law that Bertie’s tenure is to be dedicated to a restoration of public morals, following the disgraceful trips to Tangiers by Bertie’s predecessor.  But it turns out that she is but a gingerbread moralist.  Edith discloses the Marigold story to her hoped for future mother-in-law, who adopts an attitude more typical of us Americans than of the British of the day.  Edith’s courage, honesty, and authenticity wipe away her fall from grace.  By confessing and (we assume, the scene was not shown to us) throwing herself on the mercy of Bertie’s mother (forgot her name), Edith has expunged the sin of “antenuptial fornication”.

But if Bertie’s mom is such a stern moralist, why does confession get Edith out of hot water?  (And if she is worried about appearances, little Marigold is going to have to be explained somehow.)  It appears that Bertie’s cousin, the Marques before him, didn’t try to hide his sexual orientation.  Why did his authenticity not earn him forgiveness?  Answer: We are going for happy endings here, thank you.

The choice of 1925 as the year in which to end the story is consistent with the general tone of happiness being ladled into overflowing cups.  The TV series that most closely resembles Downton is Upstairs, Downstairs, which ran in the 1970s.  According to Wikipedia, the series consisted of 68 episodes, starting in 1903 and ending with the stock market crash in 1929.  Downton must have had some 50 episodes (six seasons of eight or nine episodes each) and runs a shorter span, from the sinking of Titanic in 1912 to the last day of 1925.

The older series ended on a very dark note.  The heir of the family, James, has invested his own money heavily in the stock market.  One of the servants, Rose, trusted him to invest her savings as well.  He lost everything.  In the final scene, we hear a gunshot and see him lying face down on his bedroom floor.

Upstairs, Downstairs had far less action than Downton.  It was more like a stage play than a TV series.  Most of the action took place in the family’s drawing room or in the kitchen or servants’ quarters.  Even so, the glimpses we got of the family via the drawing room and the kitchen gave the viewer a better sense of the life of that time than did Downton.  Perhaps because the series touched on the lives of its characters more realistically than did Downton Abbey, the creators of Upstairs, Downstairs ended the series in the most dramatic way possible at a historic turning point for Britain.  The decade that began in 1930 was the beginning of a steep downhill slide for the British.

Possibly the same reasoning was at work in the Downton series for the opposite reason.  The more lighthearted orientation of Downton lent itself to a riot of happy endings brought to a close at a moment of peace and prosperity.  In 1925, the British Empire was in its Indian Summer, although that is apparent only with hindsight.  What happened in the following fifteen years shows how quickly a nation’s place in the world can change.  In the 1920s, Britain had the largest empire the world has ever known, if you add up the Commonwealth, the dominions, colonies, protectorates, etc., and it included about one in four people then living.  It was more than five times the size of the Roman Empire at its peak.  It was half again as large as the Soviet empire, including the eastern European Warsaw Pact countries on the Soviet side of the ledger.

Sitting comfortably at the hub of such a powerful enterprise, the residents of Downton Abbey and their fellow Britons might look back with pride on the accomplishments that they and their forebears in empire had achieved.  Britain abolished slavery voluntarily.  It abolished its own slave trade and took aggressive steps to suppress participation by other nations in that sickening commerce.  It advanced free trade and used the balance of power to maintain peace and calm, relatively speaking, in Europe for the century after Waterloo.  It has to be admitted that they did not always treat their colonies well and the Irish, the Indians, and the Africans can find much to complain of.  Even so, as Lord Merton might have put it, they had a good innings.  And in 1925, they had every reason to think that the progress and prosperity they had enjoyed would continue indefinitely.

So, as the story ends, Britain is just below the crest of the wave.  The horrors of the World War are fading into the past.  Everyone is as happy as his or her station in life permits as 1925 fades away.  Nearly everyone is paired up.  Those who aren’t – Violet, Denker, Spratt, Bertie’s Mom – are well satisfied with their situations.  Mr. Barrow is another exception but he at least has full time employment in his adopted home.  Robert can speak of the future as something to be faced with hope and the expectation of better things to come.  But how quickly things changed!  Only fifteen years after the story’s end, British cities would be in flames as bombs fell on them from German planes flying overhead.  Despite the peace and prosperity into which they were born, every child we have met in this story will come of age at a time when Britain’s continued existence as an independent nation will be in peril.

Well, we know what’s coming but there is no reason to spoil their pleasure.  Let them enjoy themselves while they can and as they can.  As Spanky said (and as Our Gang agreed) Sunday will never be the same.

[1] A loyal reader asked me to research Mr. Carson’s condition.  I entered his symptoms into WebMD.  They think he has “essential tremor”.  I understand that “essential” in this case means “not caused by an identified disease” such as Parkinson’s.  WebMD adds the helpful note that the condition can be treated through medication or brain surgery.  Consult your physician.