Author: mshort64

Many years ago, I dated a guy who was taking salsa classes.   The group would occasionally visit a small local dance club to celebrate everyone’s progress. Lest anyone be left out, the class had agreed on a certain protocol, a line-up as it were.  You would dance with one partner, then move to the next in line at the music change.  When my friend would see that a particularly less than graceful partner was next in line, he would take himself out of the queue and get a drink or walk off towards the restrooms.   Why would you do that, I had asked, picturing the partnerless dancer standing awkwardly on the floor.  “I don’t dance with the tough ones” he replied.

That response pierced me, drew a little blood.  Indeed, we did not continue to date for much longer after that – not because of the remark exactly but certainly due to his acceptance that such is a good way to live.  Maybe it is.  It is for him.  I sense however that I am resolutely numbered among the Tough Ones.  Certainly I related much more with the hapless salsa ladies standing along the periphery awaiting his welcoming hand.  In his defense, he may have felt that his ability to lead such a dancer would be duly hampered to no one’s benefit or enjoyment.  Additionally, the rejected partner had ample opportunity to find another more aligned or even sashay off by herself, salsa convention be damned.  

Sometimes we can defy societal norms, face the cold wind of rejection with courage.   Even the tough ones however aren’t always so tough underneath. 

I see all around me many of these tough ones.  I work with the elderly, so many of whom are sick and struggling with few resources and even less support.  Their friends have died off and their families are busy or worse, have written them off.  Often there is evidence of the behaviors that may have led to the loss of familial affection.  Modern psychologists especially of the social media variety often commend adults for cutting off their toxic family members.  Protect your peace, they exhort. We are admonished to treat people in the manner that they treat us, give them their just desserts.  

How terrifying.  What is it that I deserve?  What do any of us deserve?  What if no one ever danced with the tough ones?

My first job after university was teaching at a tiny private Catholic school.  The students came from mostly middle and upper middle class families that were more involved than not.  Nevertheless there were always those students who struggled be it academically, socially, emotionally.  The principal of the upper school was an tall imposing former nun named Liz who despite running a school continued to teach one or two classes every year.  She always took the lower level history classes, never the honors or college placement levels that the other administrators taught.  In many ways, those are the easier classes, smaller and populated by motivated students.  When asked if she’d like to take on one of the honors courses, she always replied, “No thanks, I like the fringe elements ”  

Liz danced with the tough ones.  She moved with them, bent when it was necessary, employed fancy footwork to motivate and inspire.  It didn’t always work and plenty of toes were probably squashed, but she cared about every one of those kids and they loved and respected her in return. 

It’s easy to see children as deserving care even if they can be difficult.  How much harder is it to give to those who perhaps do not deserve your efforts.  Maybe it is less about what people deserve and more about what we want to give into the world.  The same guy who wouldn’t dance with the tough ones called me several months after we broke up.  We had ended on very reasonably amicable terms despite my feeling the sting of rejection.  He needed favor that would require me taking a little time off at work.  It wasn’t like there were no other options for him although they would have been far more burdensome.  I thought about refusing, knowing if I asked anyone, they would have immediately told me to do just that.  Don’t be ridiculous, they would say, he doesn’t deserve your help.

I did it anyway.  Not because I’m so special or because he was particularly deserving, although neither was he particularly undeserving.  But because that is who I want to show up as.  I want to be the person you can call on when there’s no one else left.  When you’re in a bad spot, when it’s going to be awkward.  Even when we aren’t all that deserving of someone’s care, because that’s what grace is.  Grace is when someone shows up when you’re not all that deserving, when you’re difficult or avoidant.  Grace is about dancing with the tough ones, because there are moments when we are all of us the tough ones.  

“You don’t understand, “ he said.  “It was my dream and it’s over.”

The drunk bespeckled college boy swayed at my doorway, a tiny Swiss army knife in his hand.  To what end, I thought hazily, having been awakened from a deep flannel-clad sleep.  I squinched my eyes against the bright hall lights at Jamie the now dreamless fellow student with whom I had gone to the campus movies several weeks prior.  We had watched The Right Stuff, a movie about the early space program.  At 18, I was purposefully disinterested in the space program and astronauts and frankly Jamie. 

“I’m never going to be an astronaut!” He sobbed as he poured himself into my room.  “Did you really think that was an option?”  I was cranky at being disturbed, my brain awake enough to be logical but not yet capable of tact. “I mean, I can see a couple of obstacles right off the bat”  No no no, his sobbing morphing into moans as he slumped over on my bed.  “I need to prove to my dad I’m not a loser.”  Gentle snores rose up in the dark.  I tucked him in and laid myself carefully onto the covers of my absent roommate’s bed and tried to sleep.

Jamie woke up several hours later, disoriented and apologetic.  He scurried out the door and my life until a semester later, he happened upon me crying (soberly, I would like to state) over a romantic mess I had gotten myself into.  He brought me back to his room and gave me a soda – pop, he called it.  “Pop?”  I stared at him in distaste.  “This is New York, son.  Sugary, carbonated beverages are called soda.  You’re not in the Mid-West anymore.  “ “I’m from Buffalo” he reminded me.  Same thing, I had responded.  Heartbreak did not dampen my sarcasm by one drop.

Thus began one running gag among many for over 40 years of friendship.  That night, he put his arm around my shoulder, listened to my tale of woe, and made me listen to bad ‘80’s music.  He walked me to my bus and saw me safely home.

I had found myself a big brother.

In my many iterations of pretend families as a lonely only child, there was always an older brother.  My actual parents were  responsible adults – they had important things to do!- and no time for playing around.  Amuse yourself was the response to my queries about possible interaction.  So amuse myself I did with fake parents and siblings like so many characters in a play.  Among the siblings there was always the one close in age who tormented me while looking out for my in teasing, conspiratorial manner.  A partner in crime, unfailingly male.  A brother.  I wasn’t fond of girls my own age;  besides boys were supposed to protect you. 

This was a notion that caused me no small amount of pain in the future.  But never with Jamie.

Over the subsequent years we remained in close contact as friends. He married.  I married.  We both divorced, his more acrimonious than mine.  We raised our children, struggled through their teenaged heartbreaks, struggled through our own.  In later years, he remarried and found a measure of joy in his new family.  Through all that we grew as friends and as people.  He came for Thanksgiving to my home, I drove 7 hours each way to western New York when he was hospitalized with a rare spinal infection.  The man was a medical marvel, suffering multiple surgeries, bouts of pneumonia, bronchitis, varied infections.  If someone sneezed in Boston, we joked, he would catch a cold in Buffalo.

When therefore he left working at 60 on disability, it was no surprise.  His weight impacted his mobility;  his joints unable to bear the pressure began to crumble.  He was waiting on knee surgery when a routine colonoscopy revealed a mass in his lower intestine.  Doctors quickly scheduled surgery.

“I’m scared,” he confessed in a bourbon-laced late-night text.  “I have a bad feeling about all this.”  Stop being such an old woman, I chastised with my characteristic sarcasm masking my own concern.  You’re going to be fine and you won’t be alone. 

He wasn’t fine.  After the surgery,which showed that he didn’t have cancer, he developed an infection and died having never regained consciousness.  He also wasn’t alone; his wife and grown daughter stayed with him.  But he died before I could get there; he died before I could say good-bye.

I know there were 43 years of hellos and this one last good-bye was not going to define our relationship.  I had shown up for him at his loneliest moments when he needed someone.  I had shown up when he needed a little sympathy and a little tough love.  He showed up for me too.  He never criticized my choices even when he disagreed with them.  From him I got full-hearted love, never tough.  For four decades he was my most consistent cheerleader, not doubting for a moment that I would do something amazing with my life without caring whether I did or did not – because all my doings would never dampen his love for me.  Every call he ended with “Love ya, honey.”

In a world where we set conditions on human interaction, where friendship is commoditized and love needs to be Instagram-worthy, Jamie understood the unconditional nature of truel love.  He warmed those in his inner circle with his light and let us light his way in return during his darkest moments.  We don’t always acknowledge the gift of trust such vulnerability bestows but Jamie was as open with his pain as he was with his pleasure.  He showed me what real family meant so that I could grow as a friend and a person.  For what time remains to me without him, I hope I can honor his life by loving more unconditionally than I have and thereby keep him alive in some small way. 

Love ya, honey.  

Back in March of 2020, as the pandemic emergency took hold, life began to shut down.  Workers were sent home, stores were shuttered.  I was living alone then, a typical Empty-Nester.  My sons had set out on their own and although they lived close by, fear prevented much interaction.  

Fear prevents much in general. 

I was working as a human resource consultant from my dining room table.  My primary source of exercise was pacing  through the connected rooms of my antique house: dining room to living room to front room to kitchen.  The loop totaled 75 steps and during the course of a typical phone call I would make a good 10-15 loops, as I counseled business owners on how to stay solvent and keep employees safe while their businesses tanked financially.   

There were some calls that didn’t permit such pacing, like the calls with employees trying to understand how to pay for insurance costs with no income or how to estimate what their husband’s hospital costs might be now that he’s been intubated.  Or the update calls from managers on how many of their people had gotten sick and far too often which of them had died.   

I was safe, utterly unexposed, gainfully employed, with no young children or elderly parents to have to tend to.  Nevertheless this was grueling work that allowed for no easy boundary since I was always home, within easy view of my computer.  I would sit down thinking, oh I’ll just finish up this email or notice, only to find myself hours later elbow deep in some report or other.  

Days would go by with no face-to-face personal interaction.  I would hear occasionally from friends but they had their own families to contend with.  My company began to host weekly “Happy Hours” that were discomforting glimpses into the personal dysfunctions of coworkers.  The leadership was determined to accentuate the positive, a laudable effort, but one that left many of the staff adrift.  We tried to take some care of one another, but obligations of work and family meant that coworkers came a distant third.  I myself was guilty of that.  Virtual gatherings lost their novelty quickly and with it any sense of intimate interaction.  Like so many, I retreated.  

Toward the late spring, outside life began to open up tentatively despite many who preferred to remain sheltered in place.  Into these contents under pressure, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protest marches exploded.  Neighborhoods began to bloom with Black Lives Matter posters in windows, quotations from Martin Luther King dotting lawns, often against displays of  American flags with the white stripe steeped in blue and placards supporting the police.  

The summer came thick with humidity and tension.  I like so many others felt overwhelmed by anxiety.  Becoming so abruptly aware of my own blindness, I with my lofty principles and Quaker platitudes, faced the suffering of my fellow humans feeling helpless to do much of anything worthwhile.   I’m a fixer, so fix is what I tried to do from my dining room loop, what I tried to do by attending marches and listening to others experiences and learning. 

I was not alone in feeling overpowered by events going on around me, but I did feel very much alone in dealing with my own impotency, the smallness of everything I tried to do.  What good was any of it?  I value my existence by its usefulness.  I felt empty.  

One Sunday in an effort to cheer myself, I went to Home Depot to purchase some plants.  As a homeowner and American Suburban Dad-wannabe, I take no small pride in my grass and garden.  I kibbutz with the other neighborhood lawn experts: what are you using for crabgrass? What’s your secret of that blue in your hydrangeas?  That day was gray and humid, promising rain and the store was busy.  Because of its warehouse size, people felt more comfortable to wander masked through the aisles and ponder the purchase of new faucets for the bath or maybe a vanity.  I gathered my plants and a can of window cleaner and got into the line by the lumber supplies.  Behind me were several men, in jean shorts with their masks worn under the nose in protest, purchasing racks of plywood.  “There’s supposed to be another ‘march’ tonight so I gotta get the store windows boarded”  “Oh yeah, ‘march’ they call it.  More like a riot.’  They groused intermittantly.

I stood with my plant and my silence, lost in darkening thoughts.  

The cashier was a young guy, tall, broad.  He was also Black.  He greeted me, scanned my items, took my payment politely.  In my brooding, I walked off leaving the small bag with my window cleaner behind.  

“Miss!” he called out (and not Ma’am, bless him) “Miss!”  He came after me. “You forgot this.”  

“Thank you, thank you, I’m so sorry,” I gushed, embarrassed by my spaciness.  He smiled down at me behind the mask.  “No worries,” he said. ” I got you.”  He nodded and returned to the counter.

I returned to my car and sobbed.  Ugly crying, tears running, nose running.  All because some kid said “I got you”   How could he have known what that meant to me at that moment.  He did nothing extraordinary or courageous.  He didn’t even chase me down into the parking lot.  He took a couple of extra steps and was kind.  He made the effort, despite whatever  the difficulties of his own situation, being surrounded by strangers during a health emergency, to connect with someone that he didn’t know, just another customer,  some old white woman whose stance could easily have been that of the plywood men surrounding her.  That did not prevent him from performing a kindness, from treating me with respect, from being the person he wants to show himself to be in this world.  

That small act altered the trajectory of my day and remains with me to this one, years later.  It is always not the grand gesture or all-encompassing mission that makes the difference.  A simple act of generosity can be everything to someone in that moment.  Those efforts are never worthless, but elevate the giver as much as the receiver, because in those moments we are all recipients of grace.  So thank you, Home Depot lumber area employee from 2020.  From your one small act came years of gratitude and awareness of the impact we can all so easily have upon one another.  

At Chatterton Elementary in 1969, I was that girl. The one who laughed at the teacher’s jokes.   Seated in the front of the class, pencil at the ready, eagerly awaiting the inspiring flow of knowledge that I would record in my marbled composition notebook.  It was the first grade after all and I had much to learn.  Who better to teach me than Miss Ashley, young and pretty with blonde hair and delicate features.  Previous teachers in my NY public school had been boisterously autocratic;  Miss Ashley ruled her classroom with soft-spoken authority.   

We were practicing spelling and penmanship, so each morning after securing your coat and lunch in your cubby, you took a ditto from the pile on the teacher’s desk and sat down to work. I would pick a paper careful not to smear the freshly mimeographed ink and, with sharpened pencil, painstakingly write out the letter and word of the day.  

On this day, it was G.  I grabbed my paper, smiled at Miss Ashley and got to work.  Today’s letter: G.  GGG.  G is for goat.  Goat goat goat.  Hmm.  No, I thought.  Not good enough.  I erased the goats and tried again.  Goat. Goat.  Ugh.  Why are G’s so hard?  I erased the goats again, but this time, the eraser smudged and tore the paper.  Frustrated, I crumpled it up, threw it in the bin, and went to take another ditto.

“What are you doing?”  I heard from the desk.  Miss Ashley peered up at  me from over her grading.  I made a mistake, I explained, and need a new paper.  “Let me see it.”  she responded.  What? You want me to into the trash for my paper?  I wasn’t squeamish, but I didn’t want to have to show such terrible work to my Miss Ashley. I was not however so bold as to disobey an order. 

“It’s dirty,” I complained. “Let me see it”  she responded.  I had no choice.  I reached in and plucked the regrettably clean but crumpled worksheet from the trash.  “Smooth it out and complete the work.  On that ditto.”  She made sharp eye contact with me, then returned to her own work.  

I walked back to my seat convinced the entire class had witnessed my humiliation.  Hot little tears fell to the page as I wrote my jagged g’s and slid the finished paper under the others.  When the project was ended with the Z is for zebra page,  we were each presented with our ABC booklet.  I tore mine up on the way home, stuffing the remnants into trash cans as I walked.  The intervening weeks had not doused the fury ignited by my public frustration.  

Worst of all was the idea that I was forever tarnished in Miss Ashely’s eyes, an imperfect and worse pettish child.  I had shown my true colors and we could never return to her prior affection for me.  All that was left was to wait out the term and start fresh with a new teacher.  

So I bided my time, doing the best work I could, knowing it would never balance out my mistakes.  In fact, no matter how hard I tried, I could never manage to avoid mistakes.  A few years later, my fifth grade teacher, who was no Miss Ashley, handed back a math paper with a cutting “always a 99 and never a 100, eh Margaret.”  

She knew.  They all knew.  I was irredeemably imperfect.   Well, I knew my course.

Thus began an obsession with perfectionism that persists to this day.  More to the point however, is the obsession with the flaw.  Of all those letters, all 26 of them, 25 were perfectly good.  Only one was flawed.  Only the G, but over five decades later, it is the only one I remember in absolute detail.