Conservatives can be kind

Having a chat with Elizabeth Miller

One day, we’ll be calling the Park Street area in Glens Falls “Millerton,” after all the development by Elizabeth Miller and her son Ben.

With the Park Theater and the new Park & Elm restaurant and deli (with apartments upstairs) and her purchase this summer of 126 Glen St. at the corner, Miller is creating an upscale entertainment and dining neighborhood.

Her projects rival the scope of the city’s $10 million downtown revitalization initiative on South Street, with the difference that hers are actually getting done.

If it were a competition — private development on Park Street versus public development on South — Park would be winning.

The big state grants for downtown development haven’t worked too well, in Glens Falls and elsewhere, because the local officials trying their best to make them happen have to haggle with the state bureaucracy first, while private developers like Miller follow the market or their instinct or their vision.

So while the empty lots on South Street have stayed empty, crews have been busy stripping the guts out of classic old buildings on Park and getting new businesses ready to open in them.

It’s an unfair comparison, because if Miller needs more money, she just dips into her own deep pockets as the owner of two successful manufacturing businesses — Miller Mechanical Services and Doty Machine Works. She has a vision of the downtown she wants Glens Falls, with its elegant old bones, to be again, and she can afford to be patient.

I got together for a chat with her this week over a cup of coffee, following a vague notion I had when I worked at the Post-Star of reaching out to conservatives in the community and trying as hard as I could to keep my mouth shut and listen to them. It was my own little effort at reaching across the gap between groups that has gripped the country and an attempt to learn something.

I had a nice chat with Nick Caimano a couple of years ago and a tense one with another man whose name I forget, but the talk with Elizabeth Miller was the most pleasant one.

She has a disarming habit of crediting other people for her success, and her assessment of Donald Trump as “a narcissistic idiot” didn’t hurt in winning me over — not only that she feels that way but that she says it loud.

Her kindness charmed me, as she she expressed concern for my wife, Bella, who has Alzheimer’s disease, and for me as her caregiver, and asked with a sincerity I believed whether there was anything she could do.

“Just getting out and talking with someone, having a cup of coffee like this, means a lot to me,” I said. “It helps.”

“I can do that,” she said.

All of us can bring a little light into someone else’s day, and it may take only a minute or two.

There is too much of “putting people into buckets,” Miller said, creating caricatures out of individuals based upon an opinion or two.

The caricatures get in the way of making human connections that could make us happy.

Miller has a simple strategy for overcoming that.

“Just be kind to the people around you,” she said.

Readings

I read “The Long Fall” by Walter Mosley, published in 2009. This is the first Mosley novel starring private eye Leonid McGill, an ex-boxer and fixer trying his best, after a trauma, to stay away from the criminal work that used to be his specialty. The “Also by Walter Mosley” page lists 11 Easy Rawlins novels and 16 other novels, plus four works of nonfiction, more evidence for my belief that the best writers are prolific. I’ve read several of the Easy Rawlins novels (and have seen the excellent movie adaption of “Devil in a Blue Dress,” with Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle), one or two of the Socrates Fortlow series and one, I think, of the Fearless Jones stories. All of them have Mosley’s insouciant style that can, at first, give you the impression he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I started “The Long Fall,” as with other Mosley books, thinking that it wasn’t much good, that success had made him lazy, but within 50 or 60 pages I was drawn in, once again, by the accumulation of compelling personal detail to care about the characters and want to know the rest of their story.