For Love and Not Money: How to Be the Richest Man in Town

For Love and Not Money: How to Be the Richest Man in Town July 28, 2017

Frank Capra - It's a Wonderful Life

People will do great good for love that they would never do for money. That is one thing Frank Capra taught me.

Frank Capra loved us, regular people, even though he was an extraordinary man. He used his great gifts to celebrate our simple lives, but he also taught some truths that we need just now. Capra knew that a man will sacrifice for love what he would never give up for money. He also knew that money could not buy friendship and that friends are a great asset.

My favorite Capra film on that theme is You Can’t Take it With You, in which the daughter of an eccentric family marries into a rich, socially elite family. Eventually, the sheer power of the wise grandfather’s many friendships outweighs the power of the banker’s money.

Frank Capra taught me how to be the richest man in town.

And then there is the one most people have seen, that classic of the Capra oeuvre, It’s a Wonderful Life. In this film, Capra again puts a value on friendship and finds it more profitable than owning a bank.

Who would want to be Potter, the lonely Scrooge and Bedford Falls’ tyrant, when you could marry Donna Reed and live a wonderful life?  No man is a failure who has friends—or so the angel tells George. George’s brother toasts him as, “The richest man in town. . . ” Frank Capra is not subtle, but he is right.

He is right in a way I once struggled to understand: literally and not just metaphorically.

When I was a boy, I rooted for the Baileys and their Building and Loan, because George’s dad is like my dad. You can, as the movie says, “Ask Dad, he knows.”  I assumed, however, that financially speaking, friendship was a bad deal. You were happy, but you were not (actually) rich.

I was dead wrong.

The longer I live the more I see that friends do for us what nobody could pay them to do.

When Aunt Karen and Mom transformed a gym floor into a set of sitting rooms using their own furniture and that of friends, they saved us thousands of real dollars and made something beautiful and authentic to us for our wedding reception. Money would not have bought us something better.

When my daughter got married, the families rallied and friends came to us and created beauty that money could not buy. Have a crisis? Call Kris and Lily. Need world-class wedding day planning? Find Megan and Cate. Actually, you cannot call them, because they did for their friends Jacob and Jane what they would never do for money.

It was remarkable, wonderful, and valuable. Why?

Work done because of friendship rather than money is done with a care and authenticity that money cannot match.

Who has not seen the difference between a room lovingly decorated (with insights from trained friends!) and decor that comes from the mere expenditure of coin?

My grandmother gave my grandfather care that money could not buy as long as she could. Then, my parents gave her care while they could. Again: there is nothing wrong with money, but it cannot replace friendship. Even when care had to shift to professionals, and sometimes it does, then friendship and love can provide the priceless addition that makes professional care palatable.

I now work in a college program and school with a budget one-thirtieth of that I last handled. The people with whom I work left similar positions and yet are doing more with less. At the same time, we have found a community of awesome people, people of means who are friends, who stand with us. They prove that a man need not be either Potter or George: you can have both sorts of wealth and do remarkable things.

Sometimes I look at the chums that stretch all over the world, at my adult children (now friends!), and at our Saint Constantine Family (Bedford Falls as a k-college) and I think: I am the richest man in H-town.

Rachel Motte edited this essay.


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