The Three Best Things I Got From My Father

24

As I had started during the nights when I first went to bed at the age of thirteen, I would reflect on a part of my life as I waited to fall asleep. Often it would be about the events of the day and what meaning they might have on my unfolding life. In the case of my third full year in Colorado, I decided to consider what were the three best things I had gotten from my father. In the case of my mother, it seemed pretty clear: Honesty about my mixed race background, Gutsiness to go out and try something new, and Resolve to continue on a path even if the day-to-day isn't fun.

While my mother and her father had kept their Native American ancestry a secret and denied it whenever their background was questioned, mother raised me to be accepting of my mixed race background and open about it. I had. And on the whole it had been a good choice. While a very few had made fun of that heritage, being open about it only gave them a specific label to use when they would otherwise have made fun of me for something else. It's better to be made fun of for something that is true rather than for something that is false, isn't it? Also, not being in denial about it never lead me into the trap of trying to prove to others that I was less accepting of mixed race people than them thus assuaging any suspicion about my own ancestry.

While I had not always been thrilled with my mother's choice to move to Colorado, leaving my New England childhood environment behind, I had to admire her courage. Her first move out of the family home during my parents' separation had been to a nearby town that was closer to where she already worked, not a big change in the scheme of things. But to move to Colorado in her mid-fifties without any job lined-up, no friends to welcome her here and help her get settled, that was inarguably gutsy and I had to admire her for it.

So too, for the resolve to see it through. I could tell by August of her first few months in Colorado that she was having second thoughts, fantasizing that someone from New England would come out and carry her back to the only homeland she had ever known. But as she had made the choice to move to Colorado, she steeled herself to stay and make that new life work, even if it didn't seem like the best decision during the first couple of years. Sure enough, after years of perseverance, she had found herself a better job than she had ever had when it came to pay and benefits, she had made new friends to replace the ones she had left behind, and had even had a string of new lovers, though ultimately none ever panned-out to that second chance of a lifelong relationship she had hoped for.

And now for my father, what had he given me...?

As I lay in bed racking my brain, I realized just how much of a discounted role he played in my life, with the negatives easily overshadowing the positives I was looking for, but then came the most obvious: A love of Science Fiction. While never intentionally introducing me to it, I grew up in a home with plenty of exposure. From science fiction television shows which tickled the imagination, to the many books on shelves of possible future lives, some aspirational, some forewarning, some simply an escape from the daily grind of today. All called to me and my heart answered back.

And a second thing?

I had to acknowledge one day in my later elementary school years when my father had taught me a valuable lesson. My friend Pete and I were practicing shots at the basket ball hoop in my family home's driveway. As we did this, Pete was teaching me a new rhyme he had learned at camp the previous summer that we could say in rhythm to the bouncing basket ball as we got ready for our next shots. I don't remember it now, but it was something about the relationship of whites and blacks and used the N-word as part of the rhyme. My father was home that day and bustling about the yard and over-heard this and called me over. He quietly explained to me that the N-word was a racist putdown and I shouldn't use it, even casually as part of what seemed a playful rhyme. It was not simply because it was a put down, but by using it and other racist terms in my life, it would limit the people I would meet and come to know and I would be the poorer for it. When I returned to Pete he asked me what that was about and I simply told him that we shouldn't use the rhyme anymore. Yet, following my father's advice, I've kept use of racial terms to a minimum, only when discussing matters of those terms with friends, but never casually for fun and never as a put down to anybody.

But what was the third lesson I had gotten from my father which had the most impact on my life?

I could only think of the time when I was with him at the ski area during the off season and he was discussing some new ideas with his boss. While my father managed the day-to-day activities at the park, he actually did have a supervisor of his own, appointed by the owner, to keep an eye on things and consider ways of enhancing the property. As his job wasn't hands-on, this supervisor was rarely there on site, at least during my years passively observing the operations of the ski area. I would hear about him from time to time, right down to how my family's first home had been across the street from his own before I was born. But his office was almost always vacant and I saw him maybe a total of five times in ten years. This was one of those times as he was in and wanting to discuss an idea he had for expanding the use of the ski area.

My father would listen to his idea, the pros & cons he had thought of on his own, and then asked my father for his thoughts. My father just reflected back the pros & cons the supervisor had already stated and asked the supervisor what he thought. I was surprised as, when asked for his opinion, my father had ended up adding nothing and tossed the question right back like a hot potato. The supervisor juggled the returning balls of the idea and the pros & cons he had already thought of for a bit, but then really wanted to know what my father thought. This time my father talked at length about the pros & cons the supervisor had expressed, debating each one in the same way the supervisor had then, after a thorough recounting, asked the supervisor what he was thinking, again adding nothing at all to the debate. I was appalled as my father seemed to lack either any original thoughts of his own on the matter, or lacked the courage to express them. Either way, even if the supervisor was holding his cool, I was feeling the frustration for him. He again restated his idea and how it might help or hurt the park and again asked my father for his thoughts on the matter. My father simply again waffled, rephrased, and ultimately gave nothing back.

I concluded at that moment that I would never fear giving my opinion about something I was asked about and to always be decisive and not wishy-washy when I had enough facts in front of me and a decision needed to be made. And I have stuck to that tenet and never regretted it.

Though I have since learned discretion...

While the three best things I had gotten from my mother were positive if sometimes hard learned examples, I've always been haunted that to get three out of my experience with my father, I've have to include a lesson I learned despite his example, not from it.

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Competition

23

While we weren't the first grocery store at the south end of town, we were the largest and thus able to offer lower prices than the much smaller grocery store nearby, so our large Home Depot sized grocery store was making money hand over fist into the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Five. Plans were being made for the owning Svenson family to build and open up a second location at the north end of town. While these stores were warehouse sized stores, we still had normal sized stock and shelves. Kind of the best of both worlds... Then the competition came.

Another start-up grocery store chain in the same style as ours was being built and opened up by the Summer, but it was two and a half miles away and when they opened we hardly noticed the impact. As we had been first, our store had established the customer draw to our area and our side store spaces had all been filled-up, including a hardware store, and a fast food chain had opened at the far end of our parking lot along with a 'SwiftCare' branch location. We were the place to be and that's how our next competitor saw it, too, eying the empty field directly across the street.

Our chilled section of the store, which included dairy and frozen foods, had started out with our department head, Butch, plus one of the Svenson family nephews from Minnesota, and then the six of us who had started the weekend before opening. The six of us were all part-timers, as our hours were under thirty a week, but soon one left within the first few weeks and two more were gone by Spring. Rather than replace all three, the rest of us had our hours expanded to fill the gap with only one new employee hired to help cover the hours. Typically, four of our group would be working when the truck loads of groceries arrived in the early hours of the morning so we could more quickly empty the boxes and clear the aisles by eight in the morning. The remaining two would cover afternoon and evening hours which mostly entailed keeping the milk shelves filled and any special or other fast selling item topped-off throughout the day. As our hours expanded, I again had to remind Butch of my nighttime classes and existing Saturday computer job at the Business College. He thought he'd express his displeasure of having to schedule around these by giving me fewer hours than the rest, but it was only less by about two or three hours which was easily made up for with my eight hour Saturday job.

By August, a major chain grocery store was being built across the street from us, it was expected to open in time for the holiday season and, unlike our store, it was also unionized. I don't know if it was a coincidence or the major chain grocery store encouraged it, but the grocery workers union suddenly decided to organize our store. They first had representatives discover each employee's home address and visited us at home to warm us up to the idea of forcing our employer to become a unionized store, by September the Svenson family caught onto this and began lobbying the employees against it. They placed their plans to complete a second location on hold and the friendly, collaborative atmosphere between the family and us employees soon soured.

Butch decided to pass-on his displeasure by insisting I work any and all hours and force me to quit College and my associated Saturday job. When I told him College was my first priority, he apparently didn't want to fire me, but would instead reschedule my hours to be tightly against my college hours. Having me work the afternoon shift until five thirty, then I'd have to go straight to classes in my work clothes at six.

His attempted coup de grâce was realizing I didn't have classes on Friday evenings so he scheduled me to work Friday evenings, then had me come back five hours later in the wee hours of Saturday morning to help with the weekend truckload until it was time for me to go to the school and work my eight hour Saturday shift. Still I refused to give up my computer monitoring & tutoring job and was only given fifteen minutes to leave from the grocery to get to the school. What made this stunt silly was that having me come in so early on Saturday morning meant I was there two hours before the truck arrived with the new stock. As I had topped-off the rest of the shelves from back stock during my Friday evening shift, there was nothing for me to be doing with my return to work five hours later and so I would buy myself a microwavable breakfast and spend the first hours in the breakroom waiting for the truck to arrive. Butch wasn't going to come in that early in the morning himself to make sure I was fussing with the shelves, he'd just checked my time-card three hours later when he got in to make sure I'd punched-in at the scheduled time. Once the truck load arrived, I'd pull out the pallets to the various cases and they'd be in place with me having started on the frozen foods when the other employees came in with Butch. Sure enough, with this scheduling stunt, I was exhausted by the time I got to the Business College for my Saturday hours, but taking a few NoDoz pills helped me muddle through the hours on those days.

By late September, the union had organized enough of the workforce to demand a unionizing vote at the store and the Svensons, as we found out later, pocketed all the cash they could get out of the store just before the vote. Their plan was to simply close the store and walk away once the Union won. For the first time since the opening weekend eleven months earlier, all of us employees were in the store at the same time. The ballot box was in the middle of an open space at the back half of the store aisles where it could be clearly seen by both the Svensons and the Union Representatives as the votes were cast. One by one, we were to walk up with plenty of space between us to write down our vote on a slip of paper and carefully slip it into the box with one hand so all could see multiple votes weren't being stuffed in. Once the voting was done, the box was opened and the votes counted.

The store wasn't going to be unionized and the Union Reps walked out of the store stunned. But no more stunned then the Svensons who had pockets full of the store's operating money and yet still had a store to operate. All they had to do was take that money out of their pockets and put it back into the store's safe and bank account.

... that's all they had to do.

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Madonna & Whore

22

Have you ever had the experience where some people you meet for the first time immediately hate you? And some people you meet for the first time immediately trust you? About twice a year since I moved to Colorado this would happened to me and the first time I remember was when I went to get my second Colorado driver's license.

In New England we would get a renewed driver's license once every four years, so at the age of twenty, the previous year, I'd gotten my first Colorado driver's license only to discover it would last just one year. Colorado had 'restricted' driver's licenses until the age of twenty-one and thus on my twenty-first birthday I'd get the fun of doing the exam and driving test all over again just to get the unrestricted license. The paperwork and bubble test went by fine and then I had to wait for the driving test, having passed without issue the previous year I wasn't expecting any surprises, but when I walked-up to the smiling driving examiner his smile vanished and he barked, ''Where's you car?!?''

I took him to my car in the parking lot and we got in and he growled at me to drive out of the parking lot and turn right. He looked down to his clipboard and began filling in some details as I reached the curb, came to a stop, looked both ways, and turned right onto the clear road. He looked up from his clipboard and yelled, ''You didn't look to the left before you pulled out!!!'' Stunned, I assured him I had and he called me a liar and told me that, ''All people like you are liars.'' People like what? I didn't ask as I was expecting him to tell me which way he wanted me to go at the coming intersection. Instead he was focused on telling me how terrible a person I was and I had to interrupt him as we rolled up to the red light to ask if he wanted me to turn or go straight.

This startled him as he quickly looked around and noticed where we were and told me to turn right. I switched on the blinker at the stop light, sensing my car it turned green as I made my turn. He was back to yelling at me about my short comings which I found completely befuddling as how the heck could this guy think he knew me well enough to feel he knew this? I had to prompt him again at the next light to discover which way to go and I was told to turn right again. And he just stared at me the whole way as he continued to chew me out about my personal life which he clearly had no idea about and I again prompted him at the next light to find I was to turn right again. By the fourth light I pretty much guessed I was to turn right a final time which would bring us back to the license bureau.

He just continued on his tirade and I concluded on my own I should pull into the parking lot once we got there as he was reaching the point in his endless stream that: ''You're the type of person who should never have a driver's license and never will!!!'' Confused as to why, I asked him what I had done wrong, driving wise. He had been so intent on shouting at me that when he looked to his paperwork where he was to have been making notes, it was still blank as he had been so intent on shouting at me the whole ride that he hadn't thought to mark anything. He looked back up at me and yelled that I hadn't done enough things wrong, but I still wasn't the type of person who should have a driver's license.

So what did this mean? I wondered as we got out of the car and walked back into the office. Was he going to quickly mark all kinds of things wrong on the paperwork off the top of his head so I would have, in retrospect, failed the driving exam? I didn't wonder this for long as I was called to the desk and handed my renewed license.

Most often these incidents would happen when I was alone and people would burst into complete hatred upon seeing me. Sometimes I'd ask what it was I had done to offend them and they'd either storm off or look confused as if suddenly realizing they didn't know, themselves. Once in a great while I'd be with a friend when this happened and as we'd leave the store they'd ask how long had I know the clerk and what had I done to them to be hated so? I'd say I'd never met them before in my life and had no clue.

Yet, about equally often, a stranger would see me and feel like I was the one who would listen as they could finally unburden themselves about something they had been keeping secret all their years. Sometimes it would be people telling me of a dark moment in their life that they'd gotten through, one time it was someone who had been driving at night and glanced at his dashboard only to hear and feel a 'bump' and look up to see nothing, look behind to see nothing, and had been haunted these past many years by it wondering what, or who, he may of hit with his car. This was the first time he had ever told anybody and didn't know why he thought to tell me. Using the Golden Rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you, I would listen to them as they told me these stories without judgment.  They would seem comforted by telling me, and the moment would pass and we'd go on our separate ways.

Over the years, I'd tell my friends of these incidents and they wouldn't believe me, just assuming it was a story idea I was trying out before I wrote it down, but I'd assure them it really did happen. One of these doubting friends joined me as I went to get something I'd ordered at a store. When I gave my name, they went in back to search for it and we settled down on a bench to wait. A guy on another bench saw me and started talking about his childhood where his single mother had been a junkie and would routinely send him out to the streets to buy her next hit rather than worrying about him going to school. But after years of this, he had grown old enough to realize this wasn't how he had wanted to live his own life as an adult and made sure to attend school and graduate so he'd have the option of living a different life. Then he said, ''I don't know why I told you that,'' as the clerk arrived with my item and me & my friend left.

''Oh my God! It just happened, didn't it?'' she excitedly whispered in my ear on the way out, suddenly finding herself a believer.

I just gave her a look letting her know it had, with that touch of wonder and a touch of sadness, for I doubted I'd ever find my stranger to release me of the things that haunted me.

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Moments Of Interest

21

From the Spring to Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Five I took up a number of activities.

One of the things I did was learn a new computer language on my own. My friend and computer cohort Jeff had found that the 'C' Programming Language was being widely talked about in his circle of professional computer friends and recommended that I pick it up. Searching at various local book stores, I found the definitive book written by the language's creator and Jeff discovered a 'C' emulator for the TRS-80 which would allow me to play with the various examples in the book. While the emulator worked on the simple stuff, it really wasn't true to the full computer language and this placed me back in the role of writing code into notebooks and waiting for the chance to get to Jeff's house where I could type it in and compile it on his latest acquisition, an IBM PC. Though a cumbersome method to learn the code, I did get a pretty good handle on the language by the end of the year and I'd be ready to put that to good use once I got that professional computer programming job... cough.

While I couldn't afford to get to science fiction conventions as often as Jeff, he also visited science fiction clubs in town as well as in Denver. I rode along with him during some initial visits though, as Jeff liked to stay until the following morning when it came to the Denver club, I stuck to visiting the local club, while sometimes car pooling with someone else to join the annual Christmas party of the Denver club. I mostly kept to myself at the club meetings for fear of someone I met there would become someone to not have anything to do with me 'once they found out' about my 'situation'. Still I did find one husband & wife who were not only members of the Denver club but also made the trip to our town for the meetings of our club. Soon becoming familiar faces, I discovered that the husband had much the same musical leanings as I, though we had different artists in our collection which lead to a monthly album swap as we'd see each other at the meetings.

With the burst of cash from my new grocery store job, I suggested to Jeff that we should go to the largest record store in town and each buy a hundred dollars worth of albums. He actually took me up on this leading to an over two hour browse & pull session through the store as we compared our findings, made sure we didn't get duplicates, and even pick-out a fanciful experimental choice or two. Despite reaching closing time at the store, given the pile of records we were collecting at the register they were happy to stay several minutes longer until we made our final choices to each reach the hundred dollar mark. This lead to a solid month or two of good listening at home and at Jeff's house.

So, too, did the friendship of Pat and I blossom. He was the military computer programmer that the local start-up software company had picked-up to replace me after I left the previous year. He was also a budding writer with similar science fiction and music tastes and we'd get together and chat from time to time, trading recent short stories to read and make suggestions. By Nineteen Eighty-Five he was out of the military and soon working for another small software firm in town after the initial one we met at went out of business. Oddly enough, despite having that defunct start-up computer business in common, we never talked about it; my guess is our individual experiences there were mutually sour enough that neither of us wanted to be reminded of them.

As I had lost a few pounds the previous year, I found I was continuing to lose weight this year as well. This came as a surprise to me as, given my tenuous income the previous year I could see losing weight from gaps in my eating, but this year with the grocery and computer room monitoring jobs I was easily able to afford food and was eating like a horse, as the saying goes. But as losing weight is never deemed a bad thing in social circles I never brought this up to the specialist I was still seeing about the knuckle and knee pain I was still suffering from. Nor did I bring up my Sun intolerance to him as I felt that was just a silly thing to be having and didn't want to get laughed out of his office.

While direct exposure to sunlight had made me want to pass-out within moments the previous year, I had begun to build up a tolerance to it spending more and more time in the Sun before rushing to the shade or back inside a building when I started to feel wobbly, typically after about five minutes. A vast improvement over the previous year's roughly one minute time frame, this still lead me to wait until sunset before spending much time outside and going for walks. As there was a 7-Eleven about a quarter of a mile away from my mother's mobile home park, I would take up walking there a couple nights a week from Spring through Fall ostensibly to pick up a Big Gulp while I was working on code or listening to music at home, it was actually just an excuse to get a walk in. After decades of walking across the hayfield by my childhood home to get to the grocery store or to other parts of my childhood town, I found myself feeling restless without a significant bit of walking in my life. The walks also gave me time to consider and plot-out a story idea or two.

By the end of Summer, with many short stories under my belt, I was inspired by my first book sized idea. Called ''The Ultimate Tool'', it was about a future where we all had wireless personal information devices that could link us with vast databases which helped us stay in touch with others, be aware of emerging news stories, and pull-up precise facts about things as we needed them in our daily lives. It would make us feel smart and connected all the time and my story would explore the impact of a device such as this on our lives and even feature a subplot about a young man who lost his device and was subsequently lost in the world he was familiar with, but without it he felt helpless and clueless as the world continued on around him. Worn as a headband rather than as a smart phone in our pocket, I see we're likely just a few years shy of being there today.

My book would climax with the second guy in charge of the company that made the devices using them to swallow the whole of the populace of the world into a virtual reality of 'the normal world' while their bodies were actually repurposed into slave labor in the physical world at the whims of the tool making company. This hegemony would be over thrown by the guy who had lost his device, thus seeing the world transformed for what it was, the original inventor of the device, dead but still existing in the network as a simulated presence, and his niece, whom he had been shepherding through life via the network and allowed her to see past the simulated world they were unwittingly thrust into.

I wrote the segment where the dying founder introduces his niece to the virtual reality world concept as a short story and was very happy with it. While I had been writing all of my previous short stories from the beginning to the end as they occurred to me, in the case of this book premise, I decided I needed to actually outline it before I continued with it. Fleshing out the outline with the subplots, main characters, key moments and the climax & resolution, I discovered I had made a terrible mistake. When I would come up with an idea, my motivating factor to write a story was to discover how it unfolded and ended. Like watching a movie except with the screen being the computer screen as my fingers typed in what happened next in real time. An immersive and exciting way to write a story as it was revealed to you by your own fingers, I would then sometimes have to go back and polish-up a few problems with the final text. In the case of the book, by figuring it all out as an outline, I lost all interest in actually writing it up as prose; after all, I already experienced the story so what was the point of writing it up? It would just be a chore. But I couldn't very well pass around my outline to my friends saying 'read this' and gain their interest in what I'd come up with.

I felt I had thrown away my first big book idea and pledged to never make that same mistake again.

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