Several years ago, the apricot tree in our front yard yielded so much fruit that we couldn’t use or give it all away. It was a favorite of the Department of Agriculture, who annually set small traps in its limbs to monitor for the presence of Mediterranean fruit flies.
Then, without warning, branches started to wither. Within two years, there was no more fruit and there were no more leaves. Two hundred dollars removed the dead tree from our yard, but not from our affections.
One felled tree tells a history in the rings. In them, one can see the emerging story of a life, first as a young sapling, then as an adolescent and finally as a tree with a mature trunk, limbs and leaves providing refuge from the sun and generous fruit.
Our vocations are like trees. As we grow in expertise, they provide maturing experiences and increasing financial rewards. Eventually, they bloom and yield fruit in our lives.
Maybe that’s the way things used to be.
Increasingly, vocations and the workplace have become far less secure. Like trees being felled, many friends have had their employment cut from under them, and we wonder if we can hear the same chainsaws approaching us. If we’re fortunate, the saws come close and pass by. They’re after a different tree, for now at least.
Mushrooms proliferate in the decaying tree stump, feasting on the nutrients that were once a tree.
Those who have suffered the loss of a vocation wistfully examine the remains, hoping to find a green shoot that will offer a new future and source of provision. In place of the tree, however, there are only mushrooms.
But mushrooms are fragile things that come and go quickly, leaving behind no limbs, no leaves, no shade, and no fruit.
A remarkable face stared at me from an isolated garage window behind a dilapidated apartment complex. It gaped from behind bars, forlorn and hopeless. His impassive and imprisoned gaze locked onto the outside world.
This is Buster Keaton, icon of the motion picture industry in its infancy. The icy stare and cocked hat are borrowed directly from a scene in Keaton’s 1921 movie, The Goat, in which Keaton’s face is substituted on a “wanted” poster by a clever escaped convict, thereby managing to conceal the criminal’s own identity.
Stop the press!
Closer scrutiny of the artwork reveals far more. Gradually, we come to recognize the form of the face, the sculpted nose and the overdrawn eyes. They don’t belong to Keaton. Had the artist drawn a single glove on one hand, we would recognize that this is Michael Jackson gazing out at us!
Usually, most of us don’t feel imprisoned.
But standing before a mirror, sometimes we can see an image resembling one or both of our parents, or grandparents, peering back at us.
If this sculpture were in a museum, it’s uncertain how it would be judged. Apart from its obvious automotive origin, how would we view it?
In some respects, this 1958 Oldsmobile, parked outside a grocery store, is laughable – too much chrome? Too overstated? Yup, maybe so. But also perhaps forgivable, in an age absorbed with rocket technology, fins and dreams of futuristic ideals.
As an overstatement, it’s a bit like Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral; there’s way too much going on here.
But maybe that’s why we find this treatment so fascinating. Unlike the ubiquitous boxes of today’s identical-DNA automotive generation (and, likewise, many standard-boxed non-Crystal Cathedral churches appearing in strip centers), it shouts “There is no other one like this!”
And, after all, isn’t that what we’re all wishing for?
It’s like nothing else. It soars. It’s unforgettable. Just what we’d want from a car and a cathedral.
The Cowboys Stadium’s 80,000 folded seats resembled bats with wings neatly tucked, awaiting their night flight from a grand cave. It was barren as an abandoned Roman coliseum.
Food vendors tried hawking their wares to — no one. Team paraphernalia bedecked with logos and favorite player numbers remained boxed and unsold. Even the women’s restrooms, with their customary interminably long lines, were empty and silent, save the incessant dripping of leaking faucets. Pigeons, expecting crumbs from the crowds, lurched awkwardly, pecking at nothing. Scoreboards displayed scores of zero, awaiting digital signals that would never come.
This year, no one attended the Super Bowl. The looming question is: “Why?”
Everyone who should have been there stayed home. Instead of pouring into their cars and clogging the roadways, they reneged. Rare as a Super Lotto winner, the odds of everybody deciding – the same day – that they, like me, would stay home, were long odds indeed.
Some say this year’s Bowl was cursed. Freezing weather across the center of the country, including a rare ice and snowstorm in Dallas, made traveling foreboding, even hazardous.
Perhaps the stay-at-home populous staged a silent protest of the Super Bowl venue, NFL’s newest football shrine, the $1.15 billion Dallas Cowboys Stadium that lined the pockets of the wealthy while homeless squatters huddled in the shadows of the nearby metropolis.
Some said it was because would-be fans had grown weary of watching hired guns, football behemoths who had no natural linkage, except for their paychecks, to the respective teams and cities that employed them.
I’m within ten percent of getting my budget to work. I confirmed this after two frustrating weeks of trying to upgrade to the next generation of personal financial software, which I’m discovering is not so different from the previous generation of my personal financial software. My budget was ten percent bloated on that one, too. I’ve resolved to somehow change my budgetary wandering ways.
I recently patronized the restaurant pictured above, and the revelation I received there could hold the answer to my dilemma. A small table sits in an awkward location connecting two parts of the dining room. The kitchen is adjacent to it. The persistent clinking of glasses and dishware, the murmurs of cooks and waiters, the constant hustle to serve an endless stream of customers, and the discomforting flushes emanating from the neighboring bathrooms conspire to make this a less-than-idyllic setting for a dining experience. To appease customers relegated to this forlorn table, a sign posted above it humanely announces a “Worst Table 10% Off” discount. The waiter affirmed the veracity of this incredible value, and it set my budget-busting wheels a-spinning.
By not snagging this table, I had narrowly missed a way to fractionally reduce my spending. I could have recovered a portion of my ten percent deficit by momentarily putting up with swearing cooks, harried waiters and the flushing of nearby commodes! So…why not redeem this lost opportunity by applying the ten percent reduction principle to all my future expenses, thereby achieving the so-far evasive goal of slashing my budget?
I’ve devised a plan:
Henceforth, I will reduce my job-related transportation expenses by disembarking from my train one stop earlier, thereby reducing my ticket expense by at least ten percent (and, incidentally, increasing my daily walking exercise routine by 15.8 miles).
Henceforth, when giving gifts, I will curtail spending wasted resources on fancy gift-wrap, choosing to use free plastic grocery bags instead. (Oops, I do this already….)
Henceforth, on the same theme, I will reduce by ten percent the actual number of presents I choose to give throughout the year—which will also effectively reduce my circle of friends by ten percent.
Henceforth, I will follow the trailblazing practices of UPS, making only right hand turns in order to reduce fuel costs. Calculating my fuel cost to the grocery store suggests I will save 4.5 cents. (My return trip home, however, will cost $6.32; making all right hand turns will result in traveling an additional 57 miles since I will be led down streets to a neighboring town before I arrive home.)
Henceforth, I will purchase only long-sleeved shirts and long-legged trousers. Over time, as my clothing develops holes in the knees and elbows, the sleeves and pant legs will be unceremoniously lopped off, providing me a breezy-cool summer wardrobe—and save myself the expense of buying summer clothes!
Henceforth, I will rent out ten percent of my house to the ever-increasing populous of neighborhood kids (for which, I will charge them ten percent of my mortgage payment). Their resultant 150 square feet of rental space may be used as they desire: a clubhouse and fort, or perhaps a small, kid-staffed veterinary facility to resuscitate highway-mangled rodents, frogs, and night-traveling marsupials.
I’m so confident in the success of my anticipated budgetary surplus that I’ve hired an investment consultant to handle the increased savings, which, unfortunately, sets my budget back–by about ten percent.
For seven of eight days in December, it rained every day in Morro Bay – not the sort of weather to be caught in. A person would surely not go camping in this weather – unless said person had planned a camping trip for months in advance, arranged time off work, and reserved tickets for the evening Hearst Castle tour.
In that case, such a person would obviously switch from lodging at a campground to a cheap motel – but not us. Instead, we made the best of our eight days of camping.
Here’s the countdown:
8 nights in the camper
7 days visiting the Black Horse Espresso and Bakery in San Luis Obispo
6 the number of those who played Chickenfoot dominoes in the camper
5 the number of the Hearst Castle evening tour we enjoyed
4 the number of our kids and their spouses who joined us for several days
3 movies at actual theaters (not Netflix!)
2 breakfast meals we enjoyed at The Coffee Pot in Morro Bay
Decades had passed since their wedding night at the humble motel in the cheap part of town. Ben and Anna had preserved the memories of their first night together, as if snapping an entire 12-shot roll of film on their Instamatic camera.
Now they wanted to see the place again, after so many years down life’s road together. Life had been busy – Ben, compactly-built and full of vigor, had become a practicing attorney. Anna, tall and lively, had successfully trained as a registered nurse. They had each rigorously worked their way through school. The eventual satisfaction of the professional payoff had been fleeting; their jobs were demanding, kids came along early, and time evaporated quickly.
Appointments to serve on various boards had rewarded them with satisfying recognition, and they had managed stepping into increasingly larger houses as family and prestige required and finances permitted. But the departure of each son and daughter, now in turn leaving the residence for places of their own, made its rooms increasingly echo, leaving little else behind but memories and the fading bumper stickers that heralded their status as honor roll students.
Life accelerated hard and had landed them, at times, where they had not expected. Friends and family had moved away. Without them along, the vacation cruises had been a bit flat. Plans for trips to serve in developing countries gathered dust. Their overly-enthusiastic faith in the stock market yanked the financial carpet from beneath their feet.
Their bucket lists containing all they wished to accomplish in life remained, they believed, largely undone.
This day, for better or worse, Ben and Anna would recall where it all started in the motel room decades ago.
Pulling into the motel’s drive, they recognized the building on the left. Newly painted in beige with lively colored trim, it had fared well over the years, giving temporary shelter to lives on-the-go and in-the-making.
Next to it, it seemed, was a newly constructed addition. Or was it? It shared the older building’s substance and color, but it seemed curiously flat. Slowly, they perceived its meaning. A mural had been whimsically painter over the bare wall on the existing building, depicting an expanded motel. The mural’s fantasy ended only when parked cars beneath interrupted it.
Momentarily, Ben and Anna caught their breath. On the mural’s second floor stood a man of Ben’s stature, arm raised to waive, several decades younger. On his right, tall and attractive, Anna stood beside him. They appeared optimistic, eager, as if challenging the future.
The mystery of how the mural came to be remained unsolved. But Ben and Jennifer puzzled over the greater mystery all the long way home. Was the mural an apparition of what had already been, or a vision of what could yet be?
I first became aware of the existence of San Luis Obispo, California, in 1969. It was my freshman year in college near Chicago. My brand new roommate thrust his hand into mine and declared, “Hi, I’m Rob, and I’m from San Luis Obispo.” Hailing from the picturesquely named Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the odd name of the California town stayed with me.
Neither of us could know that less than two years later I myself would visit SLO, not on a lark of a trip to the west coast, but on a mission. Rob had been hitchhiking home for Christmas vacation in 1971. The convertible veered off the road and flipped. The owner was killed outright, and Rob was comatose.
Rob and I had sung together in glee club. When the club toured California in the spring of 1972, 25 club members crowded into his hospital room. As his closest friend at the time, I was ushered to his bedside. He appeared to be taking a nap, hair neatly combed; I shouted into his ear as if that would break the coma’s hold. Still, he slept on. Eventually, we all vacated the hospital room.
My next visit to SLO was in 1974. Rob had continued to sleep on. When the nursing staff at the long term care facility rolled him onto the grass, strapped into his wheelchair, they had to reassure me that the person I saw was indeed my former roommate. Pale, blind and curled in a fetal position, I made a vigorous attempt to rouse him. Instead, Rob would sleep on for another 12 years before his light would finally be extinguished.
Tonight we are again in San Luis Obispo, waiting for the start of the movie, “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould”. The theater looks tiny because it is. There are exactly 47 seats. I sit in one of those seats, reviewing my own inner life, and a consequential chapter that started playing here in San Luis Obispo, what now seems so long ago.
One day last week, before the alarm interrupted my sleep, a dream played through my mind:
I entered a house of massive, temple-like dimensions. Inside, I was greeted by the wealthy owner’s wife, who showed me around the gigantic rooms. The vista from the kitchen window revealed an expansive view of a large swimming pool and, beyond it, a clear view to the ocean below. As we exited the kitchen, I encountered, almost incidentally, her husband, the wealthy owner of the house. He stood tall and straight, dressed in an elegant sports coat and neatly pressed slacks. His greeting was polite, but for a man of his financial stature it was surprisingly gentle, almost understated and deferring. His wife escorted me to the spacious entryway as I made my way out of the mansion.
My second visit to the house confirmed the prosperity of the owner. Major renovations and construction were underway. New plaster was being applied to what seemed to be acres of walls, making the house appear even more cavernous. Again, the fashionably-dressed owner bid me a courteous but restrained welcome, and I wondered what currents ran beneath his calm demeanor.
During my final visit to the house, the gracious owner sat in an office with the proportions of a large game room. Long and hard, the owner and his two adult sons earnestly discussed strategy for the family business. After some length, the sons rose from their chairs, their opinions firm, their gestures passionate. Their views conflicted with those of their father; I expected the father to respond with some animation to defend his own assessment. Instead, unflinching and stirring only slightly in his chair, his demeanor remained placid and relaxed as he took it all in and deferred to their views. I recognized by now the qualities of the man and his mastery of the craft of listening, how to step aside from superficial irrelevancies, and how to maintain the principles that governed him, like the steadying rudder of a ship at sea.
His ever easy and gracious manner seemed to bloom from the congruence his life held with his values. He shed that which was petty, trivial and distracting.
After my departure, I saw the owner once again, this time as a picture: a piece of shiny steel, pressed between two opposing forces, compelling him to conform to their pattern. He bent and unbent again and again, but always retained the integrity of the metal’s true shape.
And that allowed him to conform only, but fully, to that Power which governed his life and purposes, and to graciously let go of the rest.