What Doesn't Kill You

The trite saying seems to say that "What doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger," and yet, for most of life, it doesn't even come close to feeling like that.

Since January 9 of this year, I returned to my former job making a nursery, owned by three coworkers, thrive.  Thrive is a code word for work your employees to death while demeaning them, creating a pyramid of favoritism that reminds one of high school, underestimate most of them and puff yourself up to look like a caring, helpful and somewhat less than totally fake retail human.  Huh.  Thrive indeed.

I have worked like a demon each week and especially creating the nursery into a place of beauty after a very cold winter.  Winter became Spring and people poured in with their checkbooks.  It looked good and an early start of gardening began to appear.  Some vampires skirted the sunshine to appear with their sunglasses on asking repeated questions like some kind of trial lawyer and instructing us to pick up plants for them as if we were Egyptian slaves.  Well, we are slaves but actually all white all now. 

I am tired.  Or rather, I became tired of the games, the drama, the shame and blame bestowed upon me by the three heads of a business built upon a 1941 farm stand that ended up at the busy corner where several new retail ventures threaten to close it down.  Location, location, location.  In the past month and a half, two people quit and one was fired.  Four new chickens were brought in to join Lucy and Gertie, much to their chicken chagrin.  Humans go, chickens enter.

I was horrified when, in April, the sharp comments and ensuing blame became the standard for my low paying job. A strange energy began to take up residence and the nursery workers became the pin cushion for barbed comments and overtly hostile criticism for efforts not commenced at lighting speed nor executed with the precision of a surgeon.  The slaves were becoming slackers?  Hardly.

For someone, like myself, who came to work as a favor for another coworker at death's door, gave all she had and about 20% beyond that, surely the smallest worker in residence, the hostile management traits began to make me fume and blister.  I wondered what I had done to deserve that kind of erratic harshness and I wondered what had happened to my "beautiful wife?"  When the spring was over, business slowed radically.  We all began to be bored and searching for projects and tasks to keep us employed. The slaves became restless or at least, I did.

First, one cashier fled to Wyoming, then another veteran moved off to Oregon and then a third was fired for some obscure reason still unfathomable.  I continued my search for a respite, each day wound up in knots and each day trying to see how I might act more generously.  In the end, I was just pissed and I didn't care how it looked.

I am not really excited though truthfully, a vacation would be something I could get behind.  I feel exhausted physically and emotionally.  It turns out that I walk about 30 miles a week there by my new pedometer and that is a slow day in the nursery.  I am not excited yet I am overly ready for calm and direct criticism of my efforts given without shame.  I am ready for a higher wage and medical benefits.  I am ready for P.T.O. and a chance to be something more than a pyramid slave.  Simple. Calm. Steady.

What doesn't kill you requires a brief hospital stay is more like what I imagine.  Stronger? Not so much. 

Adios.

Omi's 9th Birthday

It is hard to believe, yet true just the same, that our Greyhound, Omi will be nine years old on June 1st.  Yes, Omi has aged in body, meaning now she sports white around her amazing Cleopatra eyes, though not in spirit.  OK, maybe a slower gait during the morning walk but otherwise, still uncharacteristically hyper and frenetic in her fine self.

Omi talks.  She has a verbal language whose translation has eluded us for many years.  It sounds mournful at times or simply a question repeated over and over.  Whow, whow, whow or something like that.  Sometimes it makes you want to scream but mostly, you wonder what she has been saying?

Omi, an ex-racer who raced in Mexico, one of the worst Greyhound betting countries which still uses live lures to get the dogs to hurl themselves down the track towards their prey, sometimes hitting the wall and busting their skulls open, sometimes winning but mostly losing only to be shipped to the U.S. for more of the same.

Omi won a few races in Mexico but she was still shipped off to Arizona to be kept in squalid kennels at some run down track where humans came to bet on her chances. She is a beautiful red fawn Greyhound who appears to have had her eyebrows penciled in by a professional.  She is a Gemini after all.

Today, I bought new collars for Omi and Jade and because it is a hot, hot last day of May in our neck of the woods, a couple of dog baths in a few hours to cool down.  I remember the day that Jade and I travelled to Auburn, CA to meet Omi and she raced up to me and licked my ear.  We drove home a few hours later and the rest is our history.

May all Greyhounds find their new homes, shedding the exploitation of track racing and horrifying conditions and may their humans all be as lucky as we are to have our birthday girl.

Happy Birthday Omi!

Time With The Buddha

I must work tomorrow, a paid holiday for many folks in our world.  For me, I try not to think about the families that will be gathering tomorrow eating dried out BBQ, macaroni salad dosed with enough fat to stop a beating heart, time together and dessert, ah dessert. It is Monday and I am going to work and no, it isn't time and a half I shall be earning.  Still, I have a job today.

The only benefits besides getting a paycheck that I receive is a helluva discount to purchase nursery items.  Working inside a thriving business means you walk by things, see plants delivered fresh out of the grower's grasp- stuff you think about buying with your very hard earned wages, at a discount.  It feels like something though not dental insurance exactly.

I began, weeks ago to walk by this Buddha statue and pause to rub his bald head.  Sure, one is supposed to rub his belly but his head is hip level for me.  A smiling Buddha, I began to ask for hope to visit my heart, for painful times to melt away, for release, for success, for a good day or just about any kind of magic that might help me understand how I got here. I passed him several times a day.  I rubbed his head, usually counterclockwise.

I know that The Buddha had a few things to say about suffering and so, he is an entity, though no less made mystical than Jesus or Joe Smith.  "Life is difficult, the Buddha said...The Buddha acknowledged the struggles of ordinary life-we age, we get sick, and eventually we die; we don't get what we want, we get what we don't want, and even the good times pass..."-Coffee With The Buddha by Joan Duncan Oliver.

Sometimes we do get what we want using our 40% discount on hard goods in the nursery like The Buddha himself planted on our patio at home!

 

Its Not Easy Being Green

I came home feeling pretty saggy after a day at work, in the sunshine where three humans called in sick.  True, sometimes you just need an extra day off, for a variety of reasons but my place of work is a small operation and so, there is a ripple effect.

It is true also that my perspective for quite a few months has been very dark and lacking genuine enthusiasm.  I put one foot in front of the other but it feels empty most days.  At what some people call too young to leave, I feel I have few choices left to me.  I am considered old enough for a senior discount where I work.  I often feel overly criticized or just under appreciated but don’t we all?

Maybe not.

I work with a young man who is the new golden boy.  He is a wonderful person to work with who often hums with energy and excitement for his job.  He is a joy, bright, strong, endlessly courteous and fun.  He is unusual in a way that makes everyone’s day better.  He is helpful and hopeful and has everything in front of him, at 20.  The bosses have noticed and I am thrilled to see that is happening for him.  My hope is that he has more and more of that in life. 

I cannot say that I know where we began to go wrong but somehow, I became less favored at work and that seemed to happen as my attitude for my life became less and less hopeful. I cannot seem to change that trend and  I accept the consequences of my place in life though it is hard to come home ebullient like the golden one. I might give it all up if there was a way to become more golden again and a little less green! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpiIWMWWVco

The Shortest Sister

Tomorrow is my oldest sister's birthday.  You would hardly see her as "old" if you met her on the street and most people, though fully cognizant of her powerful self, see the impish, fun-loving leprechaun beneath the porcelain skin and dark eyes.  Few people even notice that she is small.  No sirree.

My sister took me with her to Cloverleaf Ranch bonfires when I was very young and I got to experience being part of a summer camp that we could never afford.  My sister brought me along as she worked as a student nurse and her sweetness still makes me smile every time I drive past Cloverleaf.  I was so lucky to have gone backstage with her.  Free candy too!

I have been the fortunate one, to have had a sister who came when our mother's alcoholism was at it's bitter journey's end and attempted to help me escape the horrifying darkness under which I had lived while Helen cast off every single bit of humanity for some bourbon and coke.  My sister helped me crawl through the window and no one else would.

I was held up by my sister as I came to stand beside our father's bedside in intensive care as he struggled to come out of having one of his lung's removed due to cancer.  He was in so much pain, having had his sternum sawed open and then put back together with staples.  My knees went week and I was slayed that the man who was always so angry at the dinner table was crying out in pain.  My sister held me up and no one else did.

Many years later all three daughters stood on a small yacht in the San Francisco bay, fog surrounding us as we ebbed in the tide below the Golden Gate and began to scatter my father's ashes.  We were all weeping, casting colorful, long-stemmed roses overboard with the last of Frank's remains and my sister began to read what she had written for our father.  She stopped, began to cry and asked me to read her words.  A freighter passed by and filled the air with her ship's horn and we all started laughing.  Yet, I remember that my sister had written that she was the shortest sister, after all.  At that moment, on the deck of that ship, in the fog, in the moment that was surreal in so many ways, I thought, "huh?"

Life has a way of changing course and some of us struggle.  That is my story to be sure.  However, my sister works so very hard in her profession, for her children who do not even seem to understand who has their back, for her friends and those she loves in spite of themselves.  My sister is big.  Very big. 

Happy Birthday Sis.  Thinking of you and looking up!

The View From Mrs. Oliva's Kitchen

Today is my day off and though I did many things before a Dr. appointment, I had a few moments that beckoned me towards Geary Dr., a street that I often pass by marveling at all the lovely homes that appear to represent an idyllic life, something we know little about at our corner.

I am exhausted at the end of each week, having dealt with humans in all their retail colors, some of whom either need an ass whooping or simply, a manners colonic, and the three owners for whom I work who seem to have forgotten what it is like to be "a worker among workers."  I was having a good hair day and taking care of business.  I was glad to be out of the drama zone. 

I turned the Mini down Geary, thinking I would just drive by and see.  What was I gonna see? What was I gonna feel? Putter, putter down a street lined with manicured lawns and tidy planter boxes in a suburb that held the rich kids of the high school where my sisters and I spent our not so great teen years.  I love this area, knowing that I once came close to buying a house here.  I still feel like it calls my name. Putter, putter to roll by the house I was looking for and see a small woman standing on a planter box, turn slightly and dismiss me.

I puttered past, my heart beating a bitter faster and thought, it must be her but do I have the address correct?  I flipped a U turn and decided to buck up and park across the street.  I got out and walked across the street to the driveway.  She did not turn from the window and I approached.  She stopped and turned to me when I asked, "Do you recognize me?"

And so began a reconnection of almost 50 years since I was my older sister's younger one and the friend she had who was The Homecoming Queen.  She was gracious and warm, even in her immense grief, and took me on a tour of her mother's house and backyard that are still sharp in my child's eye.  Her mother died this winter and I wrote a brief note out of great respect, sadness and gratitude for the woman who showed me love and kindness during a sorrowful time for our family. 

We sat in the kitchen, where Mrs. Oliva baked cookies for me and offered what may have seemed like a simple kindness to a shy, quiet me but was, indeed, a poultice for my broken heart.  Mrs. Oliva turned, saw me and loved me and I never forgot her presence.  Sitting in that kitchen, listening to stories about a family and a life, much different from mine, yet lived so close by, gave me wings today in order to see the view from Mrs. Oliva's kitchen. 

I am buoyed by the idea that what we do in life has lasting effects upon those we encounter.  A small act of kindess can last decades and perhaps, a lifetime.  Why not start now?

The Other F Word

Things have not been silent in my mind for the past month yet my fingers have refrained from reaching for the keyboard for various existential reasons.  However, today I was struck by yet another facet to the strange goings on where I work-a small business in a silly little town in not-so-golden California.  Home of the 10% sales tax.

Today, I watched while the psycho co-worker I share my Mondays and Tuesdays with chatted up one of the bosses as is often the case.  I often watch them as we wind our way through the day, clustering as a duo for 20 minutes at a time and it sure looks like some kind of fan club. Let's get matching hats shall we?

To an outsider, or maybe I should just say, to someone who is not part of the work "A" list, it looks to be that my co-worker is groomed for additional authority, special projects and of course, special consideration.  From where I stand with my non-existent stature, it appears that no one else at work is privy to that tryst nor will I ever see what they see in one another save preference and devotion.  Duh!

I always hoped that I would be able to "retire" after giving a Supervisor position a run past my own inner dialog about preference and fairness.  I wanted to test myself to look deeper than all the people for whom I have worked that have seemed to fail the litmus test of fairness and equality in management.  I have begun to feel that I shall not find a way in life to be the kind of Supervisor who instills greatness in those less fortunate.  I wanted to be a part of others being recognized accurately and also to encourage with some authority behind that hope.

Alas, I am part of the grunt class and yet, I have eyes and I see so many things.  For me, that kind of favoritism is the other "F" word.