It took me ten minutes to write it, and 45 minutes to post it, and it still doesn't have the formatting I want. ::Sigh!::
Photographs
little squares cut
from the past
windows
or doors
flat and neat
no dimension
no substance
no emotion
when I look at them
I’m there, but not
I see, but I don’t
through those little doors
little windows
forever sealed
“How many things did you try before you settled on owning a restaurant?” asked one of my young employees today.
“I was eighteen when I started working in restaurants,” I replied. “So I guess the answer to that is, ‘Not too many…’”
Earlier, I’d had a short conversation with a few of my other girls, about educational choices and my feelings about them. We had been discussing a former employee who aspires to become a surgeon. Smart as a whip, I have no doubt this girl could attain that goal. Unfortunately, she is also a little hoodlum. She’s achieved very little of note in her high school career. Histrionics, drama and a penchant for coming this close to running afoul of the law have been her hallmarks. But, you know, it seems unfair that, if a child aspires to a career as a doctor, she has to start minding her p’s and q’s at about age thirteen. High school performance is hugely important when it comes to getting into a good medical school. I personally think it’s ridiculous that a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old’s indiscretions could put a serious damper on her career aspirations. In fact, I think it’s criminal that fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds should be required to have career aspirations. Let them be children, for god’s sake. They have an entire lifetime to grow up and shoulder adult burdens.
What about me? What did I want to be when I grew up? I had no idea, which is how I ended up where I am. And it’s not a bad place. I could be worse off. But I could also be…somewhere else.
I’m smart. I have a good mind, a tremendous memory, and I know how to turn a phrase decently. When I was in high school, that meant I tended to excel in English. But nobody told me what I could DO with that. Continuing education, for me, appeared to be the opportunity to go to college, study my ass off at great expense to my parents and myself, and come out after four years with a degree in…English. Ugh! What the hell was I supposed to do with that? Teach? Not hardly. Go on to a masters and a doctorate? I was not a great lover of school…I wasn’t particularly attracted to the idea of becoming a professional student.
So, I didn’t go to college. I passed on that experience and went to work at the local pizza place instead. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Now….NOW, I know I could have…should have…gone to law school. I think I would have made a hell of a lawyer. But I came from the wrong social stratum…the idea of a law career wasn’t even on my radar screen. Ever. To me, college meant either liberal arts or biting the bullet to get some kind of degree I could “use.” Like accounting or something equally depressing (not to mention completely counter to any talent I possessed…) My family didn’t know any lawyers. We didn’t move in those circles. So studying law never, ever entered the picture.
Do I regret that now? Do I consider the option of dropping everything I’m doing to go to college and on to law school? I’d be, what? Sixty-two years old when I got my degree? What the hell would I do with it? Who wants to hire a bright, up-and-coming OLD lawyer?
No. It’s past time for those kinds of career upheavals. I’ve made my choices. I’m an entrepreneur now. I own a restaurant. And I’m here to tell you, it’s no less of a challenge than going back to college and getting that law degree would have been; but at least I have two years of it under my belt already. Owning a business uses a huge skill set; you have to wear more hats than you ever knew existed when you started out on the endeavor. It’s an uphill climb every day.
And I think that is precisely why I do what I do. Any regret I might feel that I didn’t do something more “worthwhile” is shouldered aside by the pressing reality of my never-ending to-do list. There are days that I am completely overwhelmed. But, for the first time in my life…I’m happy with what I do for a living. That has to count for something. In fact, I think it counts for everything.
Tomorrow, the last checks will be written and the account closed. The final disbursement of my parents’ worldly goods will be made. Mom has been gone since December, Dad since 1999. But this makes it all too final, somehow.
It underscores the fleetness and fragility of life. Retirement age is creeping up on me…yet it surely wasn’t that long ago that my parents retired. All I can think is that the time they had from the day they retired until they died was woefully short. Dad had seventeen years, and mom had almost a quarter century. But it wasn’t nearly long enough. I can’t help feeling, “What a gyp!” But I don’t know who was gypped: them or me?
My parents had a pleasant retirement. Dad got the cottage on the half-acre lot where he could play “Farmer Frank.” He planted fruit trees and a huge kitchen garden. Mom got her greenhouse and her front porch lush with the most beautiful begonias and fuchsias every summer. Dad had his boats and his garage full of man stuff. Mom had her crafts and her collections. They had their family close by, and they didn’t really suffer a lot of health problems until the very last. No…I guess it wasn’t they who were gypped.
It’s me. I was gypped. I don’t have a Mom and Dad anymore. I have yards and bolts and skeins of memories. But I don’t have them.
And I don’t want to believe that I’m as close as I am to the twilight of my own life. So I try not to ponder these things very often.
But when I look at that check…the very last I will see with my mother’s name on it…that tangle of wishes, sighs, memories and fears will bob to the surface for at least a few moments before I can jam it down and put a rock on it…
Sultry is not the word for tonight’s temperature. It’s downright hot as hell, and it’s after 10 pm. The weather has been so strange this summer. Right after this ridiculous heat wave, a cool front is supposed to roll in, bringing rain and temperatures barely brushing seventy degrees. This is not the Oregon summer climate I have come to know and love.
I remember the culture shock when we first moved to Oregon 24 years ago. What was with summer? We had been used to 95 degrees with 95% humidity in the Midwest. Hot days and hot, steamy nights. One lived in the shortest shorts and the skimpiest tanks or halter tops one could locate. Not because one was trying to be sexy, but because one could literally not tolerate anything else touching one’s skin. And you had to bring a coat to the grocery store…
I grew accustomed to Oregon weather after several years. But it still seemed bizarre to bundle up to watch the fireworks on the Fourth of July. I finally got used to carrying a sweater or sweatshirt around with me even on the hottest of days, because it always got chilly at night. Oh how I missed those balmy nights of my youth!
Well, I’m here to tell you, I don’t miss them anymore. Not every woman is besieged by hot flashes as she approaches age fifty and beyond. But they seem to run in my family. When my four sisters and I sit around the dinner table talking after a family get-together, it’s a cinch one after the other of us will goopen a window or whip off her sweater or start fanning herself with her napkin. We carry our personal summers with us year ‘round. And I cannot imagine having to deal with this particular feature of growing older in the heat and humidity of Chicago. I have truly grown attached to Oregon summers, where I can open wide my bedroom windows in the middle of August and be shivering under the covers by morning.
Most of the time. But not last night. And not tonight. Which is why I am sleeping in my driveway tonight. In our travel trailer. Which is the only bed we own with air conditioning.
And I think if we didn’t have that, I’d be sleeping in the car.
When I was younger, I was quite a sports fan. Dad didn’t really know what to make of me. Out of all his five daughters, I was the one who developed a love for the games. In high school, I belonged to the “GAA”—Girls Athletic Association. Basically we were a bunch of girls who availed ourselves of all the intramural sports the school had to offer—badminton, volleyball, archery, bowling. I was never hugely athletic, but I loved the competition. Saturday afternoons found me glued to every off-the-wall hairball competition the “Wide World of Sports” had to offer.
And the Olympics! Every four years, we got to just roll in sports. Almost every conceivable game. Ski jumping, the luge, fencing, weight lifting, boxing (one sport for which I never could muster much enthusiasm…that, and golf.) Mark Spitz and Olga Korbutt; Peggy Fleming and Ann Henning. Had I been born braver, prettier, and richer, I might have been one of the first female sportscasters on ESPN.
That’s all in the past, now. I can hardly stand to watch sports anymore. Just as I can hardly tolerate any “reality” tv—and that includes what passes for news these days. It’s all hyper emotion and over the top competitiveness. I remember when an Olympic medal—ANY Olympic medal— meant something. Now, it’s all about the gold. Silver and Bronze are not medals. They’re consolation prizes. Evidently, those lesser metals are forged into eternal reminders of having choked under pressure.
I remember when the amateur status of the Olympic games was jealously defended. Today, I read an article in the paper about how Speedo and Nike are knocking each other out trying to get the most camera time for their respective logos on the backs (fronts, crotches) of the US swim team. So and so athlete has a contract with Nike, so he has to wear his sweatshirt with the Swoosh at all award ceremonies, but his swimsuit is made by Speedo, and that’s causing some major angst in the ranks. Good lord! Is there a corner of our lives where rampant consumerism has not invaded?
And don’t get me started about professional athletes. Here are a bunch of guys who are paid more money than god to play kids’ games in front of a lot of people. And all they can do is whine about how mistreated, misunderstood, underpaid and overtaxed they are. It makes me sick. I can’t stand to watch it any more.
So every Fall, when I used to be getting pumped up for the onset of football season, now, I just punch a different button on the remote. And every two years (yeah, the media had to step in and screw up the Olympic schedule so more money could be made by networks and sponsors) I very pointedly tune out the Olympiad and her cold weather sister spectacle. Sport has been spoiled: over-exposed by the twenty-four hour news cameras and buried under tons of mindless consumerism. I have neither the time nor the desire to buy (literally) into it.
My mother had a method for teaching her daughters the finer arts of housekeeping. It wasn’t a good method…probably because my mother wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Her mother made a living cleaning houses for other people. Which is, perhaps, why Mom was not really into it. After all, how can your efforts ever measure up to someone who gets paid to do it?
Every Saturday, each of us girls was assigned an area of the house to clean One of us got the kitchen, one got the living room, one got the bathroom and the hallway, one got the dining room. Each of these areas presented its own challenges. And there were seven people living in about 1200 square feet of space. Just decluttering the place took half the day.
Anyway, we would be set to our tasks early in the day. Then Mom and Dad would go off grocery shopping, and we would proceed to plop ourselves in front of the television until about ten minutes before their expected return. At which time we would sigh, start throwing things in closets, grab the vacuum and the mop and the dustrag and get to it. Once in a while, if we felt like we really wanted to impress, we would actually dig in and DO a good job. Or as good as we knew how.
Mom would then come into each room on the inspection tour, look around and say, “What did you do in here?” Even if we had toiled for two or three hours, actually doing the work, she said the same thing. “What did you do in here?” Not once can I remember her coming in and saying, “This looks good. Great job!” Nor did she ever grab the broom or mop or dustrag and say, "Here, this is how it SHOULD be done." We were on our own to figure it out; and it was never going to be good enough, so why bother?
I’m pretty sure that led to my adult outlook toward housework. I’ve always been over-challenged by the magnitude of it. For the first ten years of my married life, my house looked like a tornado had struck. Simply because I knew I didn’t have the time or the energy to do it “right.” So I just didn’t do it.
Now, I’ve adopted the “It looks better than it did” method of housekeeping. If I hadn’t, I would have suffocated under a mountain of clutter, cat hair, mold and just plain dirt years ago. For instance, this morning, I had to tackle the shower in my bathroom. I won’t even say how long it has been since I scrubbed it. Suffice it to say there were things growing in there…
So I sprayed it and I scrubbed it and I suffocated in a cloud of bleach fumes. And I met with limited success. Nothing short of sandblasting is going to get that shower to look clean as new. But we don’t invite guests to shower in our master bath, so no one’s going to see it besides me and the hubs. And I’m sure he’ll be impressed that you can actually SEE that the walls are white. Or were at one time.
It looks better than it did.
I’ve subscribed to a daily email called “Daily Writing Tips.” One of the things they keep harping on is that one should make time to write something—ANYthing—every day. The tip I received yesterday had me carrying a notebook with me everywhere I went and jotting down stuff while I waited in line at the grocery store or was stuck in traffic. Okay…those are stupid ideas. But I got to thinking that maybe the “write something every day” thing might be a good idea. Surely I can carve out ten minutes a day to write something.
This will be a challenge though. It will be hard enough to find those ten minutes somewhere in my day. But the real test will be to limit myself to those ten minutes. Because once I sit down to write, it’s almost impossible for me to pry myself away from it until I have something I consider worth looking at. Which is not to say it really IS worth looking at, but at least in my mind it is…
So, here is my first attempt. And I’m going to sit down and write a ten-minute blurb for the next…well, however many days I can keep this going. It ought to be interesting to see what kind of brain-droppings I can squeeze out of my head with this little exercise…
I’ve been incommunicado this week because it has been Scandi Week. Husband is half Polish, half German…I am half Hungarian/Romanian and half WASP. But for four days each August, for most of the last twenty years, we become honorary Scandinavians—in order to serve up mass quantities of food to large numbers of Oregon residents who are either genuine or, like us, temporary Scandinavians who gather every year in Junction City, Oregon. Anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time is familiar with our annual cultural transformation.
For the past six weeks, we have been investing evenings and weekends stockpiling product destined for sale at this gig. We’ve begged, borrowed and stolen freezer space for the more than 4000 puff pastry pockets we produced. Even some of our regular customers at the café ponied up freezers for us. We towed “Big Red” the trailer out of storage for its annual starring role. We hung lights, arranged equipment, assembled costumes and ran around making last-minute purchases. I spent five whole days away from the café. (That was probably the hardest part of the whole thing…)
I had some trepidation about how the economy was going to affect our sales this year. With gas still hovering around $4 per gallon, and the price of everything (including my product) going up accordingly, it was very possible that any less-than-affluent Scandinavian wannabes were going to have to take a pass on the festival this year. Fortunately, there is no charge for admission, so if they just wanted to show up and walk around, they were welcome to do so. Of course, that wouldn’t have meant a whole lot of profit for US… But with a history of more sales in four days than we do in some months at the café, we could hardly afford to take a pass on the thing. So we went for it.
At times, it looked like events were going to combine to guarantee failure. Crappy weather was predicted for the weekend. My insurance company “forgot” to send the proper forms to the event management. Event management “forgot” to assign us a move-in time. Up until two weeks before the festival, I was not sure I was going to have a source for one of the major ingredients in one of our best-selling items. Why does something that we’ve done so many times for so many years—we should be able to do this with one hand tied behind our backs—have to be fraught with so many unknowns? Just to make sure I get that ulcer I’ve been working on for the past two years, I guess…
In the end, the weather was perfect, attendance was down only a little, and we almost matched last years sales. Missed it by a couple hundred bucks. It could have been worse, I know. Many of the other vendors were very vocal about the lack of sales this year So for me to see almost a carbon copy of last year’s numbers did not break my heart.
So now, I’m home. It’s almost midnight, but I’m too wound up to sleep. Which will come back to bite me in the ass tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off at 6:15. But, all in all, the week went well. And I learned some things, which I plan to write about in future posts.
Good night, all. I’ve got about 6 ½ hours before I have to be up and at ‘em.
Religious clashes have led to some of the most heinous human behaviors in recorded history. For whatever reason, once a group of modern homo sapiens has crafted a set of beliefs based on its perception of the Source of All Things, it has felt obligated to use those beliefs as a club with which to beat other groups into submission. We’ve gone so far as to weave the concept of "blood sacrifice" into our religious fabric, as a means of sanctifying our primal and uniquely human drive to kill large numbers of our own species. Oceans of blood have soaked the pages of history in the name of "God." The overriding question that comes to my mind in view of all this is, "What the hell is wrong with us???"
Clearly, I am no fan of organized religion. And I’ve often thought that if we could purge religion from modern society, the world would be immeasurably better off. Which is not to say that we could then live in blissful moral anarchy. There need to be rules, need to be codes of ethics in order for human beings to coexist peacefully. Yes, religion has traditionally bade us slit the throat of the guy who doesn’t believe as we do, but it has also passed down admonitions to feed the hungry, care for the indigent, honor our elders, and "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." If we do away with religion, what delivery system are we going to use to express and pass on those codes?
My own recent experience has led me to wonder about this. In the past two years, I’ve had the chance to work with young people of varying religious and social backgrounds. Some of the girls who work for me have had little or no religious training. Others were raised in strictly religious households. And there are marked differences in the way these two groups function.
The non-churched group has real problems with moral ambiguity. Having never been instilled with the codes of behavior that are part and parcel of our human "faith," they’ve been left to their own devices to create the filters through which they view their own behavior and make decisions. They’ve been forced to rely upon something else which permeates every aspect of their lives to form their moral foundations: the media. The media have assumed the role of moral compass. Bounced upon the knee of modern media, these children absorb such credos as "Does it work for me?" "How do I get mine?" and "What’s in it for me?" The idea that their behavior and their choices might have real consequences for other people is entirely secondary, if it’s considered at all.
In contrast, the young people who have been raised in a strict religious atmosphere have been endowed with a completely different set of filters through which they view the world. They were born into a belief system that set forth specific rules of behavior. They were brought up believing that they answered to a higher authority than themselves—higher yet than their parents, teachers or other earthly authorities. They’ve understood almost from infancy that any decision they made needed to be made in the context of that authority. They understand that their actions have implications that go far beyond themselves.
I see this in my own life. I was born and raised Catholic. By the time I reached high school, I had almost entirely rejected the confines of the faith in which I was raised. The bigoted, unimaginative written-in-stone-ness of the dogma drove me away as I grew old enough to chafe at the restrictions of it. But the moral foundation I received as a child of the church—any church—was mine for a lifetime. Catholicism and Judaism have been half-jokingly called religions of guilt. We joke about the knee-jerk guilt we experience whenever we try to color outside the lines of our upbringing. But I’m beginning to think that guilt is not entirely a bad thing. A little guilt—a twinge of understanding that what I do creates ripples that go far beyond myself—can be a healthy and necessary thing.
Those young people I encounter who were given a religious upbringing are now at the age where they are questioning, and in some cases, rejecting, their parents’ religious views. But they will carry the moral imprint with them for the rest of their lives. It will serve them well. It will make them more compassionate, more generous, more respectful and more aware of their duty to others than their unchurched peers. Viewed simply from my own little corner of the world, it certainly has made them better employees!
There are those of my generation who bear some responsibility for the lack of moral upbringing of the youngsters I’m working with now. Our churchy childhoods clashed head-on with the social changes of the sixties and seventies. We had to reject the conservative confines of the faiths in which we had been raised in order to embrace loftier ideals like civil rights, world peace, women’s rights, gay rights… As a result, many of us made the conscious decision NOT to church our children. Let them go on their own voyage of spiritual discovery, we thought, when they reached the age of reason (whatever that is.) It seemed like a logical and fair line of thinking. But in the end, it backfired.
Evidently a spiritual quest is best performed from the platform of having rules in place to accept, reject or build upon. We will seek to change or improve upon the moral code handed us by previous generations; but if we were never given any kind of ethics, we don’t seem inclined to go looking for them. At least, not in the right places. If parents leave the void, it will be filled with whatever pop culture jams into it. So by the time our children reached "the age of reason," they were perfectly satisfied with the self-absorbed me-first lifestyle with which they had been stuffed since they were old enough to watch their first television commercial. They were not inclined to go out looking for a new set of rules.
I have heard young couples say that, though they don’t go to church now, they will start going as soon as they have kids, because "kids need that." And I have thought, "How hypocritical!" But now, I’m not so sure they aren’t correct. Kids DO need that. Some of it, anyway. So how do we go about rejecting the negatives of organized religion while preserving the benefits? How many centuries will it take mankind to come up with some other way to codify positive moral values and pass them on to succeeding generations, while leaving out the mumbo jumbo of blood sacrifice and the admonishment to beat the snot out of those who don’t view the Almighty in exactly the same way?
I don’t think we have that much time.
Although July has been a blessedly restful month for me at the café, it has not been without its dramas. The “I want hours, no I don’t” scenario has continued to play out with several of my longer tenured employees. Fortunately, I am over-staffed at the moment, so when they decide to crap out on me at the last minute, I either have so many people on the schedule that we won’t miss the miscreant, or there are plenty of people available to call to cover a shift. For a short time, that fact alone seemed to have caused the old staff to get religion. Knowing that there were others available and willing to step in when they flaked out gave them a little something to think about. Sadly, that seems to be wearing off, now, and they are back to their old ways.
Cook in Training No. 1 continues to be the star of this particular show. Back in June, after graduating from her high school completion class, she left me a long, impassioned note about how she was now available to work any hours, wanted to work forty hours and, in fact, needed the hours/money in order to pay her bills. And then she requested a week’s vacation.
After her return about four weeks ago, I took her at her word and started giving her as many hours as I could send her way. None of my girls works a forty-hour schedule, not even the good and faithful “D,” who is the closest thing I have to a manager. Hours of operation and the timing of rush hours, coupled with the fact that these guys seem to burn out if I give them any more than 35 hours a week, have dictated this policy. So Cook No. 1 got between 30 and 40 hours on the next three schedules. Essentially, she got exactly what she asked for, within my ability to grant it.
By the end of the first week of her new schedule, Cook No. 1 was already draggin’ her wagon. All we heard when she showed up for work was how tired she was, and she was the first one to raise her hand if the need arose to send someone home early. Odd behavior for someone who needed the money so badly, but I figured perhaps it would take a few weeks for her to get used to working so many hours. (This in itself is crazy to me…when I was her age, I was working 45 to 50 hours with one day off a week. AND I was young and in love, and future husband and I still seemed to have time to have a life and advance our relationship. Yes, I know, this smacks of “I walked to school uphill both ways in the snow when I was your age…”)
Long story short, after three weeks of working what passes for full-time these days, young Cook had apparently had her fill. She went home sick two days in a row the fourth week. But found time to research and register for some school program for which she will begin classes August 11. And left me a note about how she was sorry, but she needed to go back to school and would only be available to work Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays after school started. Was I surprised? Not really. Was I disappointed? Not really. I knew in my heart that young Cook did not want what she was asking me for.
In another life, I would have been proud to fill the role of mentor in her life. She’s a smart, talented girl, and if she wasinclined, she could have become an important part of our team. Working at the café could have been a valuable learning experience for her, instead of a constant tug-of-war between her issues and her desire to rise above them. It’s been obvious for some time that the issues were winning.
At least someone has turned this into a learning experience: ME. I’ve learned something about these young girls who have grown up in single-parent households, the kind of young women who, for good or ill, constitute a large percentage of the labor pool available to me. These girls have one huge handicap: young, irresponsible Gen-X mothers. Who have raised their daughters, especially the older ones, mostly as free day-care for younger siblings, and handy shoulders upon which to unload their messed-up parents’ dramas. There's more of a co-dependent relationship going on here than a parent/child relationship. More often than not, the daughter has had to take on the role of the adult.
In the olden days, our drive to become autonomous human beings caused us to lash out against the traditional authority figures in our lives: our parents. They got the brunt of our teenage angst—that torturous time of life when adulthood is both the prize and the punishment toward which we are hurtling hell bent for leather. But for these girls—who are essentially parentless, and were royally gypped when it came to childhood—that angst, that “Here, give me a hand…no, don’t touch me” stuff needs to find another outlet. So folks like teachers and, unfortunately, bosses, get smacked in the face with it.
Yet that in itself wouldn’t be enough to deter me. I mean, I get it. I understand that, as a business owner, I’m set up to play the “Evil Boss” role in people’s lives. And I have been largely successful in combating that stereotype. But these goofy mothers throw up yet another roadblock for me: They viciously defend their title of “mother,” and they are extremely threatened by the existence of another competent woman taking any kind of role in their daughters’ lives. In short, the mothers hate me (no, they don’t know me personally, but they hate the idea of me…) and are not shy about letting their daughters know it in no uncertain terms.
I’ve made it a personal policy to be available to help and mentor any employee who should so desire, but I’m not trying to BE anyone's mother (though heaven knows many of these girls could use one…) If I can contribute to a young person’s long-term welfare, I am happy to do it. In fact, it’s one of the rewards of the job. But I’m not about to play tug-of-war with some deranged parent for the affections of her daughter. That’s sad for me…but it’s a disaster for these young girls.
I wish things could be different.
