This particular kind of gift — the gift of skill, transferred person to person through sustained attention — is neither rare nor remarkable in the abstract. Teachers do it. Parents do it. Coaches do it. What is unusual in this case is the context: the setting was not an institution designed for the transfer of skill. The recipient was not enrolled in a program. The giver had no formal role as teacher or mentor. The whole thing happened in the margins of two people’s working lives, in the hours after the restaurant closed, between a waiter and a dishwasher who would otherwise have had no particular connection.
It happened because one person noticed another person’s difficulty, and offered to help, and the offer was accepted.
That is, when you strip away everything that followed, the whole of the event. A person noticed. A person offered. The offer was accepted. Six months of nights ensued. And then Poitier went on to the career he went on to.
The story asks those who tell it to hold both things: the smallness of the original act and the enormity of what it made possible. Neither element cancels the other. The smallness of the act — one old man, one newspaper, one empty restaurant, six months of evenings — does not diminish the enormity of what followed. The enormity of what followed does not retroactively make the act into something larger or more considered than it was.
It was a small act. It had very large consequences. Most small acts do not have very large consequences. This one did, partly because the person who received it was Sidney Poitier, with everything that Sidney Poitier was before the waiter ever sat down with him: the formation from Cat Island, the intelligence, the will, the specific quality of attention and ambition that would eventually make him remarkable.