USA. The woman handed me my receipt and said, “Have a nice day!” I froze. A command. From a stranger. With no time limit, and no clear conditions for success. In my country, no one tells you to have a nice day. You are simply released into whatever day the heavens send. But here, this woman had issued an order, kindly, and looked me in the eye, and meant it. I could not fail her. So I set out to have a nice day. On purpose. With everything I had. I noticed a bird, and thanked it. I let four cars merge. I told a man his hat was excellent — it was. I drank a coffee slowly enough to actually taste it, which I had not done in nineteen years. Each small good thing, I added to the report I was building in my heart. For her. By dusk I was exhausted from niceness. But I had done it. By direct order, I had had a nice day. So I went back. She was still at the register. I bowed deeply. “I have completed it,” I told her. “It was a nice day. I will remember it until the hour of my death.” She blinked. Then she laughed — the real kind — and said, “...aw. You just made MY day, man.” I had been sent to have a nice day. I returned having given one away. So tell me, America. You say it a hundred times a shift, and mean it lightly. I heard it once, and obeyed it with my whole life — and somehow we both ended the day a little better than we began it.