This week I called Steve Bork a quitter. To his face. In front of customers. Steve and I have worked together a long time. We had enjoyed Indian food just the night before, discussing old times and having a great time, but that doesn’t make Steve any less of a quitter. Steve, of course, has a different narrative regarding the incident; a set of “alternative facts”, as it were. But I think I am getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.
My last blog post was in February, so I have some catching up to do. In February I got a new company car and right now it is nearing 8000 miles. That is a lot of catching up so I will just hit the high spots before getting back to telling you about my friend, the quitter, and the incident Friday morning.
We have all been quite busy. My Mother-in-law has now transitioned to skilled nursing care and the family has been sorting all of her things in preparation for selling the house. Suffice it to say that this involves a tremendous amount of time and energy, and it is an emotionally draining process for everyone. The house and the things are loaded with memories, and the realization that the house you grew up in is being sold is a sobering one for my wife and her sister.
I have been very busy at work with training and new product trials and customer issues, which is where the 8000 miles came from. And we have had the usual personnel shifts that occur from time to time to deal with. In addition, it is public knowledge that Valspar is being acquired by Sherwin Williams, and although everyone is very professional the longer it drags out the more nerve-wracking it becomes. It is human nature to want things finalized so we can all get on with whatever changes are coming.
A couple of weeks back I woke up one Friday and my elbow felt numb, but I figured I slept on it wrong and I went on about my business, which included driving home from Kansas. When I got home my wife and daughter looked at my elbow and seemed a bit alarmed. It was pretty big, and looked strange. I went into the ER and told them my arm didn’t hurt but I was tight across the chest...
Yep. I got hooked up to probes and monitors and they did a chest x-ray and everyone acted very concerned about me. After a couple of hours they decided there was nothing wrong with my heart (something I told them before they started) and they pulled some fluid out of my elbow and sent me on my way, urging me to follow up with specialists who would charge me the rest of the money.
The next day I had a couple of teeth pulled. They are the first I have ever lost, but I certainly do feel like an old man, with a couple of teeth missing and a bum elbow (bursitis). Afterwards I filled my prescription and quickly drove to Kansas before my lips returned to normal size, and then I enjoyed the lovely opioids that made the pain in my mouth go away.
On St. Patrick’s Day I visited a customer in mid Missouri and one of the engineers came in wearing a green sweatshirt from Rolla. We talked about his shirt and here was a little friendly Columbia-Rolla engineering rivalry that ensued with the other engineers. One of the engineers had an old sweatshirt from ‘86, which someone reminded him was before he was born.
I left my customer and drove to Rolla, Missouri and after crossing through a couple layers of campus police security was able to obtain a University poured pitcher of green beer. I walked over to the other end of the roped-off and designated area and sat down at a University picnic table across from Herbert Lynn Hasty.
Herbert is a little older than I am. He was a student in the mid-70’s, and I was in Rolla in the early 80’s. We have become friends over the years and we resumed our friendship without hesitation over a couple of green beers. Old stories came flowing out like beer at Septemberfest as we were joined by all of our friends.
Most of us had nicknames back in the day, often awarded on an Animal House basis from friends or upper classmen. They would shorten your name or rhyme it with something, or pick a trait or phrase to associate with you. Often we could not have told you someone’s real name. Herbert Hasty told us that the male to female ratio was 13 to 1 during his time in Rolla, so several of the guys would organize trips to Columbia or Springfield, where the girls were. These “nefarious”activities earned him the unfortunate nickname Herbert the Pervert. As I look around the table I see Vice Presidents and professors and managers. I see community leaders and family men who have been married 30 and 40 years with grandchildren, all telling tall tales and sharing limericks.
My friend John is the father of Eagle Scouts, and he knows Herbert from their time in Scouting. Herbert has been training Scoutmasters for many years. The stories continued as we all moved over to Alex’s for Pizza and gyros. The TKE house will be coming down and the old Delta Sig house has been torn down to make room for the new TKE house and we all shared old stories about all of them.
On Saturday we all met at the Alumni Center where they served us food and Bloody Mary’s before the Parade. The University is going to be getting a new Chancellor, and the Board is getting a new advisor, but the streets were still green and the parade still went on and the traditions still continue. I saw my old friend Peyton, who is now Father Peyton.
I caught up with everyone, including some new friends and some faces that I had to dust off the edges of my memory to remember. The stories that we tell do not match the reality of today. The traditions continue, but they are not the same experiences that we had. Somehow, ours seemed more intense. And I think in many ways they were. It is true that we are all older but it is also true that society has changed. Our reality was different than what they face today.
Nerd and I were watching the Parade when I got a cryptic text about my dog. Apparently he had not reacted well to getting his shots at the vet. Harvey hates the vet and he hates shots so that was not surprising.
I left shortly after that and on the way home I stopped to see Mom. Mom had been sick the previous week with the flu but she was feeling better, the staff girl informed me. Mom was glad to see me and she was happy to learn that I was married and that I have three kids, and she thought it worked out well that we had two boys and then a girl. She was once again thrilled to learn about my grandson and that she was a great grandmother. Mom seems happy, but I know she knows she doesn’t think clearly.
At home it turns out the thing with Harvey was worse than we thought. The short version is that
Harvey has a significantly enlarged heart because of a bad valve and it has to work really hard and it is also rubbing against his trachea, making him cough. There is not a lot they can do to make his heart smaller. He has some medicine but he will be turning 10 in April and the vet said he would not likely make it a year. There were a lot of tears.
That same Saturday we learned of the death of Chuck Berry. Chuck was a great musician and a native of my area. He lived a full life and left an amazing legacy. Some chose to ignore all of those things and point to his failings as a human. Let me say that I have a lot of those human failings, and I see no reason to color someone’s life and accomplishments because they were real and imperfect human beings.
This past week I listened to some of the words of the Supreme Court nominee as he spoke about precedent and the weight that it should carry in judicial decisions. Judge Gorsuch assigned a great deal of deference to precedent based on how long it had been in place and how much of an effect it has on people’s lives. As he spoke I found myself thinking of precedent as being the same as tradition in our personal lives.
We follow traditions and give them respect long after we are sure why we do so. A group of drunken college students a century and a decade ago rode into town on a manure spreader and declared a holiday because they had spring fever and we continue arriving on a manure spreader long after any of these students have any idea why or what a manure spreader is.
“We’re so Great, We’re so Fine, We’re the Class of ‘79!!!”
-Lafayette High School Class of 1979
We also attend homecoming and class reunions and get together with our buddies from the service. We go to our Elks Club and Jaycees and Church groups, because we want to belong to something meaningful. Going through high school or college or boot camp together is a bonding experience. The shared experiences, especially in stressful situations, bring a certain closeness that lasts beyond the experience itself. And we want to recreate that feeling.
Steve Bork and I both started working for Valspar twenty years ago. This week we visited two of his accounts to transfer them over to me. One of the accounts is in Iowa and Steve and I have both called on them over the years. My two main contacts at this account were Nelda, who operated the system, and Dick, who was the engineer. Over the years we attacked a lot of problems together and played some golf and I became a fan of the local delicacy“chicken lips”, (which are just boneless Buffalo wings with Bleu Cheese) but for a while it was a bad habit and like Herbert I got stuck with the label “the guy who likes the chicken lips”.
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Nelda is retiring next week, but she was on vacation the day Steve and I visited. Dick retired several years ago, and just recently lost his wife. Steve and I had dinner together the night before our visit, and we talked about the last 20 years. We spoke of Ray Parenti and Mike Bourdeau, and of Marcia and Carla and Jerry and the 12 new tanks in a single year. Those were different times. Things have changed a lot over the years.
As we left dinner we ran straight into Dick and Nelda. They were together and I am happy to announce they are dating. After Dick’s wife died they started spending time together and they have always enjoyed each other’s company. We spoke for a while. There were hugs all around and promises to get together for golf.
The next morning I went to put my business card on the wall but I noticed my old card from years ago was still there, with the old logo and my “voice mail number”(how long ago was that?) I left the old card. We drove across Illinois that afternoon and had Indian food in Bloomington Normal before visiting another familiar old customer where everything has changed.
And that is when I called Steve a quitter. Certainly, Steve prefers to call it “retiring”, but he has already admitted he is going to work a few days a week in a local wine shop. Apparently he is going to spend more time volunteering at church. He says he has enough money and doesn’t need to do it anymore. He acts as though it is his life and he wants to live it on his terms. He is moving on.
We all have our own “bubbles”. It may be the bubble of our high school or college or work life that has structured the way you see the world. Maybe it is a group of political friends or neighbors or friends that share a hobby. Not all of those folks are going to share our views but they will have shared experiences.
Sometimes we cling to the past, and yearn to recreate situations that no longer exist, and sometimes we create new situations and memories. Sometimes we avoid the reunions, and sometimes we won’t miss them. Sometimes a long lost friend shows up and we learn 30 years of history in one afternoon.
We cannot recreate the past, but we can remember it. We can honor traditions but sometimes, like bad precedent, bad traditions need to change. Sometimes we find ourselves going through the motions, checking off the boxes without understanding why. Our traditions need to have meaning or they need to be changed.
Sometimes the comfort of tradition and routine is all we have left. A familiar voice, a smile, or a hug can mean the world to someone who is losing their memory, or to a dog with a heart that is too big. Sometimes it is important for you to be there for other people. Sometimes they need the comfort of your presence.
You can’t go back. The road is forward, and there is no reverse, but the path is up to you. The journey is not about piling up a bunch of things for people to go through someday. The journey is about the people you encounter and the experiences you share. It is not about your title or the value of your car or house. Those things will fade. It is the people in your life who will matter in the end. It is the lives you have influenced and the experiences you have shared that make you who you are.
We are not the first people to face losing a dog, or selling a house. Steve is not the first person ever to retire. We face common experiences as we go through life, but we also experience the change that occurs in the world; so that someone who is going to the same thing we did 30 years ago will not experience it quite the same way.
We cannot see the larger patterns of life until we are looking back on them from the end, where we can see the whole picture. And that is why we need to pay attention to the experiences of our fellow travelers on this journey. Change is a constant, and so we need the stability of long term relationships to get us through.
This morning my little bacon muncher is lying here next to me, warming my leg until the sound of breakfast gets him to get up and come downstairs. He doesn’t understand but somehow I think he knows. I know the reality but for now I will choose to ignore it. There is a lot of change and work and pain coming but we will get through it and it will make us stronger.
After all, I am no quitter.
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