Freshman Comp or F= happiness

The assignment from my first day of Freshman Composition was so easy I couldn’t believe it. Ha! This was college? I thought college was supposed to be difficult. The teacher had said to write a paragraph. Paragraphs were my strength. Just write five or six sentences, throw in some big words, and maybe even get fancy with some poetic devices, instant B+. And even more unbelievable she had said we could write about any topic. In high school I had to fight tooth and nail with my teacher for her to allow me to write my research paper on American poets about Jim Morrison. 

I was so excited. College was way better than high school. I went back to my room and quickly dispatched with scrawling out several sentences comparing eighties heavy metal to protest songs from the sixties. I was writing about Rock and Roll and the professor was going to be blown away. Hell, since I would turn it in on time, it would be an easy A! I eagerly delivered it to her mailbox. Everyone had always said I was a good writer. All I had to do now was sit back and wait for the A to be written at the top of my college ruled paper.

As Ms. White handed the papers back to my classmates I smugly sat in my seat as student after student slackened in their seats, bowed their heads, or let out audible groans. And then there she was, towering over me with a surprisingly big frown on her face. She dropped the paper on my desk with an air of disgust. And there at the top of my brilliant, analytical paragraph which clearly demonstrated the powerful messages in the music of Iron Maiden and Ozzy Ozborne was a big, fat F! And it had a circle around it, like she took glee in presenting me with the honor of being flunked on my first college assignment! This woman was wicked. I waited after class to protest as she busily gathered her things. She flatly said, “If you have questions about your grade you will need to make an appointment to see me in my office. There is a sign-up sheet on the door.” 

Then she was gone in a puff of smoke. 

I found the sign-up sheet on her office door and scheduled a conference for the next day. I planned to argue my way up at least to a C. When I arrived for the conference, her office door was open. Ms. White greeted me with a welcoming smile. “Come in”, she said warmly. This caught me off guard. The wicked witch was gone and I had prepared for an all-out war of words. But she was saying nice things to me as I sat down at her desk. She said that she liked my idea of trying to show that deeper meaning could still be found in popular music. However, my paragraph lacked cohesion and did not provide support for my position. She asked me if I really believed what I had written. I gave a weak yes as a reply. Then she said, “Let’s see how we can make this paragraph better.” She spent an entire hour with me gently explaining how I could have structured my thoughts more clearly. She talked to me about appropriate use of descriptive language. She asked me for more examples that supported my thesis. Then she told me to re-write it and she would take another look at it.

Not only did she give me a second chance, she gave me specifics on how to improve. I used her input to re-write the paragraph. The new grade was a B. I was happy with that. Ms. White told the class that when she gives us an assignment that she would always have the schedule on her door and we could sign up for extra help so that we could turn in our best work. She expected us to give our best effort. When she said these things to the class, it came out sounding mean. She was stern in her delivery. But after my experience in her office, I understood that she was sincere in her desire for us to be the best writers we could be. She saw the promise in us, but also that we needed to be pushed. I returned to her office before starting the next assignment. She gave advice and I made my first college A. In fact, it may have been the first time that I had ever made an A. I repeated this pattern for the remainder of the semester. By the time winter break arrived, I was an improved writer. I still had a long way to go, but I at least I had an idea of what I was doing when I sat down to write.

I learned not to judge people too quickly, as I had done with her when she barked at the class and gave me an F. Ms. White taught me how to be a better writer. But she also showed me why it was important to give my best effort. Earning a top grade was hard work. But more importantly I discovered that working hard and asking for help made me happy with the finished product. 

Happiness 

with a big circle around it. 

In Search of Glassy Water or Finding My Place in the Search for Justice

Glassy. That’s the kind of water we wanted to ski on. My friends and I were teenagers and lived on a lake with miles of shoreline. Hundreds of long fingers of water that led to other fingers. We could wait until the weekenders had winched their boats onto trailers and headed back to the city. The choppiness of the water created by the criss-crossing wakes of frenzied part-time boaters would dissipate faster than you might think. The lake was soothing and healing itself just as we would cut a seam straight down its middle.

The best coves were hidden deep into long channels and around a bend, invisible behind thick tree lines that covered the shoreline. The mirror-like surface would come into view. We throttled back, killed the engine, and drifted. I absorbed the quiet. The perfect surface tension resembled solid ice.

On top of the water, the ski made a skittering sound across the white water being churned by the propeller. The wake opened into a V shape on either side. I would lean to the right, cut through the wake, and onto the glassy water. Now this is what I wanted to feel. The outside edge of the ski cut quietly through the H2O molecules that had just managed to regroup themselves after the weekend rush.

I was tethered to a boat, but alone. Everything else seemed to fall away. All that existed in the moment was me and the water. The hum of the engine seemed like distant white noise. I would lose myself in the joy of skating over a lake at 30 miles per hour. It felt like 60 miles per hour. At this speed, the water was as solid as it appeared.  I could trust it to hold me up. And I could push myself and test the limits of the surface tension to hold me as I made deeper and deeper turns back toward the center of the wake.

When I cut back hard, physics ceased to exist. My physical self was lost for a millisecond. I felt weightless.

My full weight returned when I clambered back on the boat with rubber legs. I was exhausted. Beautiful exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that puts an inerasable smile on your face.

As a grown-up man I find myself in search of glassy waters. The disturbances of adult life are more complex than the weekend boater churning up the smooth surface of the lake.

The choppiness of bigotry, bureaucracy, bias, greed, and entrenched interests do not dissipate at the end of each weekend. These rough waters are stubborn. Even the best Captain would have a difficult time finding perfect water no matter how many coves he explores.

But I am the Captain. I must cut a seam through hate and intolerance. I must make deep cuts in the social order. I must trust in the moral arc of the universe to hold me up so I can make deeper cuts into my own psyche in order to find those moments where my physical self dissolves, leaving only love and glassy water in its wake. I will search for those smooth spaces between injustice and violence until I am smiling and exhausted.

The National Anthem of Perspective and Light

Oh, say can you see

With perspective and light

How profoundly we failed

At the morning’s first gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars

Gave the slaveholders’ right

O’er the oppressed while we watched

Via Facebook live streaming?

And the bullets’ blue glare

Lives vanishing in air

Gave proof by the night

That our flag was still there

Oh, say will that star spangled banner yet wave

O’er equality

All free and all brave?

Copyright filed 9/25/2016

Imagine

I'm just imagining a scene. I'm sitting in my car in front of my house reading a book and waiting for my daughter to get home. I may or may not have a gun in my car. It would make no difference. The police would wave as they drove by. I'm white and in a middle class neighborhood. They are here for crime prevention, not crime fighting. But if I let my imagination go a little further, I can see some other scenarios. Let's say I suffered lingering effects from a traumatic brain injury. I had just taken my medicine that makes me a little despondent. Some police drive by on their way to serve a warrant on someone that lives up the street. They think that I seem strange. They think that I might have a gun. They call for back-up. As back-up arrives, my wife walks out of the door and yells to the police that I have a TBI and had just taken my medication. I can clearly see in my mind just how one officer would fall back and respectfully approach my wife. He would ask for more information. As he saw the fear in her eyes he would yell to the other officers to hold tight. She would explain my despondency. They would ask her to talk to me. She would be allowed to yell to me while the police backed up just a bit. I would gain a moment to clear my head and realize the intensity of the situation. If I had a gun I would drop it. If I did not, I would slowly raise my hands. The officers would arrest me only if I had actually held the gun in a threatening way. If it had merely been in my lap, that would have been seen as legal and they would have left me alone. They might tell my wife that I should be more careful. If I did not have a gun, they would have apologized. Under no circumstance within my near infinite imagination can I arrive at a scenario in which the officers ignore my wife and I end up dead. This, my friends, is white privilege. And it stinks.



Reality can be found here.

The Casual Employee or How Many Grandmothers Can One Man Have?

Thomas was never on time for work. There were days when he would call in to say he was running late, and then never actually make it in. And as time went on, there were days when he did not call or show up for work at all.

I was the Director of Manufacturing at the medical device plant where Thomas was employed. I know what you are thinking. And believe me, everyone who worked at the company was thinking the same thing. 

Thomas should be fired. 

But none of us wanted to do it.

His absenteeism became chronic. He started making up excuses for why he was late or why he had missed the last day or three days. Or the last two weeks. There were times that he missed work for so long that we assumed he had quit. Then he would show up with some cockamamie story about why he had not been able to make it or get in touch. We should have fired him by every reasonable and objective measure. But we didn’t.

Thomas was a nice guy. I know that sounds lame. He was nice, so we let him get away with being slack. But there is so much more to it. There are layers of complexity to every situation. Some of these complexities are known or obvious, while some might be buried deep or yet to be revealed. Thomas was a uniquely nice guy and his life was filled with complexities. Or complications. Some of them self-imposed, but some landed in his lap by the nature of the home, the race, and the culture of poverty he was born into. Some were delivered to him by an inherently biased society.

Thomas had a smile that could kill. He was lanky and a bit socially odd. He wore a hairstyle that was always about ten years behind the current trend. His glasses were like that too; large and gold framed, they never seemed to fit quite right. He would constantly have to push them back up into place. He was a bit of a nerd. But a flash of that smile would make all of that disappear.

Thomas was naturally curious. He knew enough to be dangerous on everything from philosophy to black holes in space. However, he had difficulty discerning a phony conspiracy theory from real science or fact. His favorite topic of conversation was professional wrestling. Thomas was convinced that the matches he watched on TV were real. He believed all the soap opera storylines that were woven into the commentary between grudge matches and cage matches. He wanted us to believe too.

Thomas was smart and creative. His excuses for being absent or late became a source of entertainment. Our HR Manager began to compile a list. He was stung by a jellyfish. He could not find his umbrella and it was raining. He ate a sour hot dog. If it had snowed within three states of where we lived, he had happened to be there and found himself snowed in. I think he had at least eleven grandmothers die. And having more grandmothers than any one person could have is where Thomas screwed up.

Why didn’t he keep his own list of excuses to make sure he had not gone over the M.A.G. (Maximum Allowed Grandmothers)?

So, the Production Manager came to me and said that something needed to be done about Thomas. He was creating problems by causing gaps in labor when we needed it. He was causing morale issues because if other workers were expected to show up on time, they felt that we should expect the same from Thomas.  I agreed, but reminded him that the owner of the company reserved the right to fire employees. We could not take action without his input.

The Production Manager happened to be a creative genius, a poet, a humanitarian, and an all-around guru of sorts. He said that he had not meant to propose that Thomas be fired. He had another idea. He went on to explain that firing Thomas would not really benefit anyone. Thomas had proven to be unemployable by any other typical organization. Firing him just meant that he would end up on public assistance. The job gave Thomas some purpose and a sense of self-worth. And besides, Thomas was a good worker when he showed up. He was diligent and cared about the quality of the product. He was also well-liked by everyone despite the resentment some had for his unreliability.

So here was the plan. Thomas did not need to make up excuses anymore. (He did not have another Grandma to sacrifice anyway.) He could come to work whenever he wanted. We would send him home if we did not need him. It would be in his interest to call first so that he would not waste time coming in just to be sent home. That way we would be able to hire an extra person that was reliable and only use Thomas if we were busy, or someone was out sick, etc.

You might think that seems unfair; that we conformed to Thomas’s inability to get to work rather than making him conform to our schedule. Yep. That was the plan.

We took it to the owner. He listened and rubbed his chin. “I like it”, he said. However, he suggested that as part of the arrangement that Thomas would get no raises, no bonuses, and no benefits. That way if any other employees complained we could tell them that they could have that same deal if they wanted.  Our HR manager pitched in by creating the official category of “Casual Employee”.  It was brilliant.

Thomas would be able to have all benefits reinstated if he could demonstrate that he could reliably work a full-time schedule for three months in a row. The truth is Thomas was thrilled with the arrangement. I had to remind him a few times that I did not need a reason for why he had not made it to work on a particular day.

As the years passed, Thomas stayed on as a casual employee. We rarely sent him home. The company had grown to the size that someone was absent most days and he could just fill in that spot. As a long term employee, Thomas understood the job and had all the proficiency that you would expect from someone who has repeated a task over and over. But he had only received cost of living increases. That made him one of the most cost efficient employees we had.

Thomas kept his job. He was a taxpayer instead of being reliant on Government assistance. I believe that whatever issues had kept him from being able to cope with a full time schedule would have been worse if he had been perpetually unemployed. Our workplace had adapted in a way that benefited the company and the employee. It was unconventional. And if I am ever in a job interview and they ask me about a moment that I am proud of from my work experience, I will tell the story of Thomas. I’m proud that I was open-minded, that I recognized the strengths of everyone involved, and facilitated the series of decisions that allowed Thomas to keep knocking us out with his smile for a few more years.

Post Script:  Thomas later passed away from complications of HIV. I will never forget him.  May he rest in peace.