From levity to heavy handed Paul Harvey-isms (a variation on the Garrison form)

Alternately, an impressive rationalization:

7:45 am:

My wardrobe is under attack. I was walking downstairs to do laundry in my freshly pressed shirt and I hooked the shoulder on the door such that the sleeve ripped off. So that’s how my day has started let’s see if we can improve it from there. Blah. Car didn’t fit = new car. Clothes don’t fit = new clothes. Job… We need to see some motion here Karl. I hired a new front desk person yesterday and am training her today – or assisting Anne in her training. I have a long list of work tasks to make my blood pressure rise. “You seem like you are in that cycle again where your job is getting you down.” Yup.

We watched a good movie last night – Dirty Pretty Things. – full recommendation if you like dark movies about people selling their internal organs, and I do.

Tonight is Paul’s last night here as a resident of circle K, he’ll be heading back to Columbia Thursday night to resume his duties as Quincy of Columbia on Friday and sorry to say will not make the housewarming party at Brad and Beth’s nor will he be able to help Vanessa move. What’s the plan there Vanessa & Chris? Are you renting a truck or am I taking the seats out of the van (or all of the above?).

I should tell you “the rest of the story” from yesterday ala Paul Harvey.

. . . Eventually after several years as a custodian for Concordia Seminary I spent a summer with Lober Hall as my assigned building. I don’t know if you ever had one of these jobs where you show up and do things in a pattern – clock in, unlock the doors, vacuum, empty the trash, turn on the lights, set the air conditioner or the heater, etc. I do the same things every morning at my current job (our custodian cleans once a week the rest of the time we do it – that is everyone on staff). It’s the sort of stuff that on the one hand keeps you grounded and on the other it can suck your soul out through a very thin straw; I guess it depends on your attitude.

One Sunday when I was still in High School, my father took me downtown for the opening of a new woman’s shelter for unwed mothers that the LCMS (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) was sponsoring. The man in charge of this facility, and several like it in East St. Louis, was one Otis Woodard. As part of the ceremony Otis told us something of his life story. He had been a part of the Civil Rights Movement and had worked directly with Dr. Martin Luther King, but after King’s assassination he and his pregnant wife fled to St. Louis and hid out, friendless and penniless, in the abandoned buildings on Washington Ave.

If you haven’t been to St. Louis there is a street that runs into the heart of downtown, most of the downtown dance clubs and bars, the convention center, the Rams stadium, these are all on Washington. If you continue to head west from the downtown you get into the burnt out buildings and the brown fields that look as decimated as any war torn city you can imagine.

---Anne calls informing Karl she will be late for work so he hastens his morning rite, saving what he’s writing to disk. Karl Leaves for work, functions the building as described above, students arrive for first day of level one and buy books and pay tuition, he goes to bank with paperwork and picks up Lattes and raspberry scones at Stratton’s Café, he develops a rough draft of a student calendar to be produced by local printing company to be given as a gift to new students, he interviews, hires and starts training Vickey, he goes home for lunch and walks dog, returns to work in time to send fellow employees down to the massage clinic, he resumes typing on story started this morning while discussing the differences in American and European culture with coworker Tanya. She gives him the card for a ballroom dance instructor. Hmmmmm…. but I already swing dance.

12:36 – scratch that – too busy
4:45

Without a means of support and in fact in hiding and fearing for his life, Otis turned to an area pastor who found him work at Concordia Seminary. He was hired as a custodian and, you guessed it, Lober Hall was his assignment. Twenty years apart, Otis & I managed the same space: the space that was his first source of income in St. Louis, the building that paid for the birth of his child, got him into a home, and set him on the path to the opening of that shelter. The empty building Otis and his wife stayed in is still standing. Then, as now, it has no windows and is open to the elements. They were not the last tenants I am sure.

There are unintended and often unknowable ripples that move out from every choice, every task, in all directions. Otis’ brief story, which came after and at the same time preceded my own experience, washes over all those custodial memories and changes them. Sanitation Engineer is not an improvement from Custodian and it reduces to “tasks” a much more important job, the job of being responsible for a space. People at my current work occasionally and quite seriously thank me for something that neither I nor they can quite explain. They thank me for “holding space” and I think writing this has helped me put a finger on that role. I am still a custodian of my workplace. I am responsible for it and everyone in it, such as I am able and invited to be.

Do I still think all working environments are games, yes, but games to children are not just the escapes that we think of as adults; games, while filled with “play,” are also serious experiments into how to be in the world, how to act, think and live. If we invite play into our serious roles we redeem them and renew them. What’s the existential mantra? We can’t control our “thrown-ness” in the world, but we are infinitely free to control how we feel about it. I had a good day at work today, in part because I decided to.