Just less obvious and perhaps more difficult to find….. (CNN) — Graciousness can pay priceless dividends; And it doesn’t cost a thing.  You may have heard the story about what happened between White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and Four-star Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli at a recent Washington dinner. 
As reported by the website Daily Caller, Jarrett, a longtime Chicago friend of President Obama, was seated at the dinner when a general — later identified as Chiarelli, the No. 2-ranking general in the U.S. Army hierarchy, who was also a guest at the gathering — walked behind her. Chiarelli was in full dress uniform.
Jarrett, apparently only seeing Chiarelli’s striped uniform pants, thought that he was a waiter. She asked him to get her a glass of wine. She was said to be mortified as soon as she realized her mistake, and who wouldn’t be? But the instructive part of this tale is what Chiarelli did next.
Rather than take offense, or try to make Jarrett feel small for her blunder, the general, in good humor, went and poured her a glass of wine. It was evident that he wanted to defuse the awkward moment, and to let Jarrett know that she should not feel embarrassed.
As Chiarelli wrote in an e-mail to CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr: “It was an honest mistake that ANYONE could have made. She was sitting, I was standing and walking behind her and all she saw were the two stripes on my pants which were almost identical to the waiters’ pants — REALLY. She apologized and will come to the house for dinner if a date can be worked out in March.” (Full Article)
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(UPI)  HARVEY, Ill., Feb. 12 (UPI) — A man shoveling snow at a suburban Chicago train station said he was getting the sidewalk ready for his fiancee’s return from work.
Phyllis Jones, a legal assistant at a Chicago firm, said she was at the Harvey Metra station the day after nearly 2 feet of snow fell on the area when she spotted a lone man clearing the sidewalk, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Friday.  The man told her he was not working for Metra or the city, but rather was getting the sidewalk ready for his fiancee’s commute home from work.
“My fiancee had to come through here, and when she gets off from work, I want to make sure that she can get through without a problem,” she quoted the man as saying.
Jones put out flyers seeking to identify the “hero in Harvey” and they caught the attention of Sylvia Tookes, 43, who knew they were talking about her fiance, Charles Pryor, 35.
“Whatever it takes to make sure she’s OK, that is natural to me,” Pryor said of Tookes. “I’m supposed to make sure if it’s snowing, she has a path to walk down. Asking if she had a nice day or even trying to cook for her, whatever it takes.” The couple said the Harvey Metra station was where they first met.
“Everything that I love in a woman, she showed me right there when I met her,” he said.