10/14/10-10/14/11: Not Exactly A Banner Year

I spent the one year anniversary of my last day as a public servant weeding, raking, sweeping, hauling mulch, making compost with rotten apples and household produce garbage, mowing and watering.  It was hotter than expected and as the sweat ran down my face while I was hanging onto the lawn mower, I mulled over this last year.  It has been much less than what I hoped for and yet it had many good parts too.  It was the anniversary of a divorce from my former profession that brought me to my very knees.

I could not say that I am done with my travails and it make get uglier before things seem more clear.  Like many people looking for work, I am glad to have been working the last month as there seem to be so few decent jobs out there that would actually consider me.  Although I was an exemplary employee with very good references, I could not even get a call back from my resume on most jobs.  Overqualified?  Guess again.  Not even considered.  And so it goes.  That was not what I thought would be at my feet when I stepped off the curb on 10/14/10 at 5:30 PM pacific standard time.

My day held some of the same ridiculousness of working as part of an all male crew that doesn't seem to want or know what to do with me.  5'2" and about 101 lbs.  In fact, it seems like they are entrenched and I don't seem to be the mousy woman they expected.  So, it could work out but it may not.  Each day can be a challenge and I don't mean the physical nature of gardening at my late age.  I work harder than the other gardener and it shows.  And so for me, on the anniversary of something that pulls back the image of a year unemployed, shocked, stressed, confused, disappointed, tenacious, determined and disappointed again, was spent with the same feelings inside of my head that covered my last year.

I can think of the many jobs-hundreds, that I applied for and never knew what happened.  I never will know and it doesn't seem like the past year brought any great revelations or lessons that make it all make sense today.  I feel just as confused about what I am doing or will do and wonder how long my body and my sense of self can take being belittled at a job.  Being employed has been held up to be something we the unemployed yearn for and when it comes it can feel like an oasis.

Be careful what you wish for though as it may just make you wonder anew at what that plane's banner really is trying to tell you.  Cryptic marketing tool or just bad grammar?

Not A Spiritual Giant And The Orange

The idea that "we are not saints" is a common thread to those of us familiar with twelve step programs.  For some of us who are also adult children of homes less than loving and less than safe, the idea that we can be less than perfect is a huge marble to swallow.  We can't actually.  We can only attempt to catch ourselves as we try so very hard to please others who cross our paths.  For me, there is a Cadillac sized gong that goes off for me when people are authority figures or scary or both.  The trick, for me, is to hear that vibrating sound before I start running my hamster around her wheel.

That said, some people who cross my path in twelve step meetings like to perform the illusion that they are now elevated to a kind of Buddha like status by spending time with the rest of us down here on earth.  They speak a line that sounds as if they have arrived and it smacks of a deceptive kind of grandiosity that is also a profound character flaw.  I suppose one could say that is the other side of the same hamster wheel and yet, it feels as if some of those folks will never see the wicked web they weave.

Last night, before the speaker began, she made sure to give me the "frosty treatment" and I was not sure what that meant.  Ah, my hamster stepped onto the wheel and paused.  I lowered my head and breathed.  The Tibetan monk was about to wail on that house sized gong in my head.  I listened as best I could for about twenty minutes to the woman claiming she had become a spiritual giant while sharpening her skills before her pitch on the "frosty treatment."  More like spiritual troll than giant.

The funny thing about lessons is that sometimes they just show up when you have let go of a hurt or a slight or a direct hit.  I often imagine Pema Chodron in my head smiling her leprechaun smile and waiting for me to get the irony in a situation.  So today, as I was giving an eight by eight garden patch a big face lift, down on my knee pads sweating and pulling with alternate hands, hot and focused and determined, one of those lessons came out the back door of the library.

One of the men that I work with, a man who escaped Guatemala years ago and most recently stopped a jumper on the Golden Gate bridge by talking to him, came by and offered me half of the orange he was about to eat.  That's right.  He didn't just offer me a piece, he gave me half of his orange.  We stood there in the hot sun and I devoured it.  It was juicy and sweet.  His gesture was not just generous, it was real without any strings. 

I wished that our speaker last night could have understood that what was offered freely is not some kind of pedantic drivel about how evolved we can be. In fact what a spiritual giant really looks like is as simple as extending half an orange to a co-worker on a hot day in October without even thinking about it.

Remembering Working With Chris

I am struggling with my new job situation to find my own island of sanity.  I know some things about gardening or I would never have gotten this job.  However, someone forgot to tell my co-worker that I am not his slave.  So, still trying to figure out how to best tell him that in English.  It is a long day's journey from working nights with Chris in the mid 1990s when I was in college.

Remembering Chris, I was lucky perhaps to have made such a fine connection with a man who is very bright and very funny.  He liked me as much as I liked him and we both worked so well together.  In fact, we produced 25% of the work for the department.  That meant that eight other people did the remaining 75%.  They were a lovely bunch they were.

Chris and I used to pile in my car for dinner or his old Lincoln and go down to Subway for sandwiches.  He was fun and loving.  I really miss him.  We were like a couple of 14 year old boys making up life as we went along.  We worked nights fueled by "mead" which was Dr. Pepper out of the machine.  I can say that I loved Chris-hell I still do-and I know he feels the same.

We flew through that year and helped the company that later was going to lay off Chris and quite a few others one Friday.  Chris went onto other companies and a divorce and now lives in Independence, Missouri.  He is remarried and has other children.  He is still connected to me through the social media empire and made my Christmas last year by contacting me. I can say that my current co-worker doesn't hold any kind of candle to Chris.  That makes me miss him even more.

I can say that I am not a slave and any day now I will probably go off on my co-worker or just shine him on because he is a slacker with some knowledge.  It certainly is not the Star ship Enterprise at my new digs and there is no Jean Luc Piccard.  I could use a Klingon body guard right about now but I will have to settle for finding my own truth and direction when the time is right.

For me, there is no Number One but I can say with a clear conscience that if Jean Luc was on the bridge out there near Common C, he would be saying, "make it so!."

Not Margaret Atwood's World

We all may have those days in the week that are more of a travail than the rest.  I am not sure since I really don't have best friends with whom I sit around having coffee with each week reflecting on the past week like the four women who play Desperate Housewives.  I would love that kind of connection though maybe more of an Eddie Bauer version of Desperate Housewives.  The coffee without the glitz and lipstick.

For me that day is Sunday morning.  I love the quiet of the early morning hush on our urban street and it allows for my kind of melancholy to bubble up and then throw a Sunday morning pie in my face.  My family hurts and haunts or just that existential loneliness that I carry around in the world with me.  Having a job, though the minute I stepped onto the campus things were whirling and chaotic with change, is not the final answer.  There is no washer/dryer combo behind door number three that will make my life a cinch. I never thought it would as I accepted a job that was not my first choice.  For me, an overachiever by nature, this is a very hard thing to comprehend. 

For me, the last almost eight years has come and gone as if someone else were living my life and I was left in the wings watching another performance.  Strange and true or just belief emerging from unanswered questions.  Since I have never been someone with a calling or an inclination of what would be a good fit for me, I have walked into jobs, looked around, decided what would be the next promotion and worked by skinny butt off trying to get there.  I have done that several times and gained professional success and wages doing it.  I thought I was someone and yet arriving often felt empty. 

This morning as I write and keep making time to write as I toil away and find myself feeling melancholy, I imagine that someone out there is living my life though I shall never find a way back through time to find out where I made my fatal mistake and stepped into the time tunnel.  Instead, out there somewhere, maybe in a high desert viewpoint on a cloudy, grey day, a car has broken down and the inhabitants stand and stare off down the deserted highway looking for help from a passerby.  This is not like No Country For Old Men but rather a Margaret Atwood novel where our heroin is in peril but there is an underlying moral conundrum that not only makes our hair stand on end but feel like we have a stake in the happy ending.