The relative seriousness of work:

When I got back from my trip to Minnesota I was feeling very light. The job stress that is an integral part of my work environment kept provoking fits of laughter rather than the more typical jaw clenching, but now I can feel myself sliding back into that habit of dire seriousness, as though my very life might depend on the relative success of some irrelevant widget. I have to keep reminding myself that none of this matters and if I had a little more distance it would all in fact be terribly funny.

I have this memory that I keep coming back to. I am fourteen and we’ve moved to St. Louis. I have no friends so to get me out of the house my father gets me a summer job on the custodial crew at Concordia Seminary. I am on the second floor of Lober Hall with a team of summer help and we are getting instructions on stripping the floor of the second floor lounge. I have a small green Frisbee with me, the kind that you get in a box of cereal, and I plan to play with it on one of our fifteen minute breaks. My boss Leroy is in mid sentence giving orders when he sees the Frisbee and he erupts with wide eyed anger, “You got a Frisbee there? What you think this is a game!?!” He was furious. Here I am thirty one years old, more than half a lifetime away from that moment and his anger is still stuck to me. (Makes you think about all your anger out there, stuck to other people.)

I sometimes think of myself in that moment where I cringed and stammered, “No”. I think of myself now older and calm, unthreatened, saying, “Of course it’s a game & not a very good one at that. Except running the power buffer, that is in fact a good game and I hope it’s my turn again soon.”

What was Leroy really angry about? He was a fifty five year old man managing a custodial crew made up of seminary students, lifelong custodians, and the teenage children of faculty (I wasn’t the only one). I remember an older employee saying to me with resentment, “You wouldn’t have this job if it wasn’t for your father.” Talk about an introduction to the horizon of possibility. My summer fling, that I of course had no interest in, was a stopping point for so many of my fellow workers, and sometimes they actively resented me for what I embodied. Mostly we just got our work done, found a quiet place (unoccupied dorm room) and played a little four point pitch while we waited for the floor wax to dry. Cards: always the game within the game, teaching both the luck of the draw and the skill to play what you got.