When I was a kid, one of the great treats in my life was a Good Humor bar, something that resembled chocolate cake stuffed in ice cream. I had not had one in 20 years when the subject, somehow, came up in conversation with Russell Plunk. He smiled and said, “I can get that for you.”
Plunk, who managed the Lakewood Minyard’s for 13 years, died a few weeks ago. No doubt some reading this are thinking, “Enough with the Minyard’s already.” And there have been the obituaries, including one in Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper. But this is about more than the facts of his death or the grocery store or that he worked there. It’s about someone who was a decent human being in a world where there aren’t nearly enough of them, about a man who understood what needed to be done to be a decent human being. It’s a goal that not enough of us aspire to.
One of the most difficult things to do in this life is to live each day with a minimum of fuss and trauma, to take up as little space in the world as possible. It’s easy to do the other — just turn on the news or listen to the radio or go to the Internet, and you’ll see plenty of examples, even among people whose lives should be quite ordinary. The hollering, the screaming, the self-pity, the demands for attention — it’s a chorus that never ends.
The sad thing is that so many of us seem to enjoy those lives, feed off of them or even emulate them. The idea that it’s actually better to do your job, to take care of your family, to try to do the things you’re supposed to do to make this a better place to live seems irrelevant. But it wasn’t to Russell Plunk. I have no doubt there were days when he hated his job, hated being in charge of teenage bag boys whose raging hormones focused their minds on everything but their work, days when he was sick and tired of checkers showing up late, and times when he was fed up with the bosses. But I never saw any of this get to him, and I don’t know that anyone else did, either. And, in this, I admired him. That sort of equanimity is hardly what I do best.
All of us who knew Russell had a story, whether it was about Good Humor bars or something more serious. Teena Zihlman, the Plunks’ next door neighbor, tells many funny stories about Russell — about his faith or about his family, and all between tears, of course. During his illness, she lined up volunteers to cook dinner for the family.
“You’ve never seen so many people help in your life,” Zihlman says. “I never had one person tell me ‘no’ when I asked them to help.”
This in itself is telling. How many stories do we have about employees at any of the other places we shop, unless they’re bad stories? How many employees at other places would even find out — let alone care — that a 13-year-old boy had once liked Good Humor bars? Russell didn’t ask whether we had found what we were looking for because the company told him to say it. He did it because he was genuinely interested.
What’s even more telling is how he died. He waited, his wife Lisa said, until no one was around. “We had been crying over him and holding his hand,” she told the News. “He chose to go when we had taken a break.” That’s a dignity I can only hope for. How many of us could have done that? How many of us would even have thought of doing that?
I missed Russell the minute he told me he was switching stores. I still miss him. But, at least, every time I see a box of Good Humor bars, I’ll smile. I’ll remember what they tasted like after he ordered them for me, and, though it may not sound like much, it will do.
