The Transportation Security Administration lady at the Nashville airport said, “Thank you, sweetheart” as she handed back my ticket and driver’s license – which sort of amazed me. It made me feel good. Up north where I’m from, it is very seldom that a federal officer expresses affection to me. I’m sure the TSA did not train her to do that, but her upbringing won out over indoctrination. Her mother told her to Be Sweet and she was.

Not to make too much of a nicety, but Nashville is a welcoming city where hospitality is palpable, and maybe economists can’t measure sweetness but I say it’s one reason the economy there is booming: new construction everywhere you look, jobs are growing faster than population. Warmth is a factor: Outsiders don’t feel there are all sorts of passwords and secret handshakes to learn before you’re accepted. If not for the wretched humidity, even I could be happy there.

Not to make even more of it, but let me point out that Tennessee joined the Confederacy reluctantly, the last state aboard, and Nashville was a divided city through the war, with Union sympathizers, Confederate draft dodgers, escaped slaves, Northern businessmen, moving freely about, mingling, making their arrangements.

Talk about diversity – elsewhere men were slaughtering each other on blood-soaked fields and those in this city were avoiding the subject, sticking to business, wheeling and dealing, biting their tongues. They came because there was money here. The city prospered during the war, even boomed, thanks to good rail and river transportation. When it fell to the Union Army in December 1864, life went on as before, the businessmen simply switched accounts. It was a city unwilling to die for a lost cause, preferring to adapt and move on.

There ought to be a national holiday when we celebrate the willingness to back down, compromise, tolerate difference, get along, hush your mouth, be sweet. Not saying it should be Jan. 14, Benedict Arnold’s birthday, but maybe April 12, in honor of Henry Clay, the man who agitated for the War of 1812 and then negotiated the peace, the man who worked out a compromise between slave states and free and died when the nation needed him most, before the Civil War.

Clay Day would honor the art of negotiation, recognize that as human beings we have feet of clay, and honor the clay that goes into making bricks which are so much better for building than rocks. I’ve been in stone houses. People who live in stone houses long for glass.

I grew up among hardshell fundamentalists who held to revealed Scriptural truth, every jot and tittle, and tolerated no deviation, so don’t tell me about principle, I’ve been there, I saw the wreckage. Now I go to a church where we recite the Nicene Creed, but look around the sanctuary and you’ll see some lips aren’t moving. That’s quite all right.

I have moments of principle. I disapprove of wearing baseball caps backward if you are older than 11, of big tattoos, of people who are like “he was like” instead of “he said” and they’re like “What?” if I am like “That sounds so stupid.” I despair of those who get their news from Twitter.

But I keep my mouth shut. Back in the mid-20th century, we in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade class sang, “Oh the E-ri-e was a-risin’ and the gin was a-gettin’ low, and I scarcely think we’ll get a drink till we come to Buffalo” and we also sang “Frankie and Johnny” with the wonderful verse, “The first time she shot him he staggered, the second time she shot him he fell. The third time there was a southwest wind from the northeast corner of hell.”

We knew it was wrong for 10-year-olds to sing about gin and homicide, it was terribly wrong, and nowadays Mrs. Moehlenbrock would be hauled in for inflicting emotional distress and we kids would go straight into therapy, but we didn’t rat on her. We liked her, wrong though it was to encourage children to drink gin. As it says in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to keep silent and a time to speak. We kept our lips zipped.

Clay Day, April 12, will be about reconciliation, buttercup. Anger is poison. Meet hostility with courtesy. Don’t spit into the wind. We’ve got to live with each other, angel cakes. Be sweet.