Sure, we’ve all heard the positivity sayings:
Life is short. Carpe diem. Make every minute count.
I have one to add. Live like Eddie, my dry cleaner. He made a difference in his community through his generosity and kindness. Eddie died in June of a sudden brain aneurysm at age 41. I will always remember him. He’d be blown away to know I’m writing this about him.
Eddie opened his dry cleaning shop, Vardhan Brothers, near my house twenty years ago. He was young, slightly built, high-energy, irreverent, determined to work as hard as he could in his 20s and 30s, then retire in his 40s. Forget school, he became an entrepreneur. There was no brother – it just sounded good.
Eddie was smart, talkative, and knew everyone’s name and phone number who came into his shop. He had been accepted to a top school in India, but when his family immigrated to the US, he came too. Ironically, Eddie wasn’t even his real name. He explained the reference to me once. His name was Neal Aditya Vardhan Kedia. But he answered to anything. “I am Eddie, I am Neal, I am Munna, I am Aditya Sir, I am Aadit, and the kids closest to me call me Uncle Dickey. One customer will call me Jay forever as he has for twenty years and I hope no one tells him.”
You couldn’t just drop off cleaning – Eddie talked and got to know you. If a few customers gave him grief, he was like “Look dude, you don’t have to come here. I gave you my best.” Oh yes, he’d share stories with me.
I trusted Eddie with an heirloom quilt, wine stains on good linen tablecloths, and everything in between. He knew his fabrics and the answers to cleaning things. Not once in twenty years did he lose or ruin anything. “Katrina, I have a reputation – and if people can’t trust you, you shouldn’t be in business.”
At one point, Eddie had four locations. He couldn’t be in four places at once, so he consolidated and focused on his first store near us. Then COVID happened. No one left the house, so no one had dry cleaning to bring in. But the rent was still due. The lights needed to stay on, even without customers. Rather than quit, Eddie stayed open, running down savings. By the end of COVID, he was back to where he first started.
After COVID, he began to rebuild – but even then, people didn’t have as much dry cleaning. But he never stopped giving back.
Hundreds of comments in a community Facebook forum told a much broader story.
>He dry cleaned and pressed the tablecloths for every fundraiser of a local organization.
>He graduated from the local high school and offered to dry clean all the marching band members’ uniforms for free.
>He collected and cleaned wedding dresses for groups that sewed them into infant burial gowns.
And dozens more instances, none of which he ever bragged about. Except he’d say “it’s the right thing to do, man. That’s what life is about.”
Being a dry cleaner isn’t glamorous, fancy, or a common career goal. But in his corner of the world, Eddie cared. People mattered. He connected. He worked hard and gave generously. I still miss him and the stories he could tell.
It’s still true – when you take time to listen to people, everyone has a story. (Eddie had lots of stories.) And like skipping a stone across the water, none of us knows the ripples of impact we have on others around us.
#positivity #bekind #carpediem #begenerous
