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Left to Read

        What kind of person reads this Blog?  Research tells us that they are sophisticated, worldly, serious, but not without a hint of whimsy.   

         They are people on the go, young and old alike, some with hidden agendas, others with agendas folded and sticking slightly out of their pocket.  These are people thirsty for knowledge, but not useful knowledge.  

          The readers of this Blog know the value of a $3.00 dustpan, but some other things, not so much.  Like for instance - the value of a two-bit haircut.

          Studies indicate that some readers quickly skim, searching, hoping to stumble across some bit of wisdom, some nugget of truth that will mentally free them, if only momentarily, from that high-pitched noise coming from the television or the refrigerator, they’re not sure which but its driving them buggy.

          Others read slowly, moving their lips as they do.   They hope to glean a modicum of sanity from an otherwise sanity-less kind of thing.  These are the same people who, when ordering a crab sandwich, seem surprised it doesn’t come with cheese.  Had they bothered to read the fine print at the bottom of the menu they would have seen that cheese was listed as an option and costs about as much as a quarter of a dustpan.

          The rest of you, and you know who you are, enjoy coming to this Blog but you never read it.  You file it away in some electronic folder that you plan to get to “Some day”.

    You still haven’t organized your closet and the backseat of your car is a mess.  Oh sure, you casually mention Zobostic to impress your friends but secretly hope there isn’t going to be a test.

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H.R.S.H.

Home of Retired Super Heroes

Small Listening

          I have never been good at small talk.  I am, however, excellent at small listening.  It is as if the entire world is a sweater, and I am a hangnail.  I catch key words, the odd phrase, or facial expression and snag them into my mental web of comprehension.

          Conversations, for me anyway, lay captured as a fly tangled up in the spider’s web, waiting for me to return - to dissect sentences, drain verbs of their action and leave passing clichés as empty, broken fragments, drying in the Sun, eventually blowing away with the slightest punctuation.  

          I surround myself with words.  I’m soaking in them right now.  They are my fishing trip, minus the flies and mosquitoes.  They are my golf game that I hope nobody ever captures on film.  My adventures span the distance from exclamation point to page down, and they are all adventures that remain relegated to this keyboard. 

          For the past several years, I have checked books out of the library, only to read two or three sentences and return them.  Captured by a cleaver title, like a raven to a shiny object, I pluck them from the shelf and cart them home.  Almost instantly, upon reading, I’m bored.  I’ve neither been hooked nor drawn into the story or character and so I close it and pick up the next in the pile.    This is not something I would recommend.  I am sure that I have missed some good stories by not hanging in long enough and I could not really tell you what I am hoping to one day discover by engaging in this behavior.

          My latest discovery is a small book entitled Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, by: Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein.   This book immediately captured my attention when I read the dedication page.  

        It contains a quote from Groucho Marx.  “These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.”  Any book that can make me laugh aloud in the library gets checked out and carried home.

          The problem, as you know, with armchair adventure, is its limitations with respect to life.  Life should be experienced outside, with wind, noise, and blinding Sunlight.  It needs to be breathed in and it should make us sweat, and shiver.  Even if we have to grab the big hand and let it drag us around the face of the clock, scraping our knees across the five, and snagging our shoelaces on the eight, we should never let go.  It is a journey taking us nowhere, while simultaneously pulling us through time.

          It is the small listening that causes me to pay close attention to the dedication page of a book.  It is there that the author steps out of their author persona, and stands facing the reading public, and speaks from the heart, not from the dust jacket smoking a pipe and attempting to look regal.  The dedication page is the tree that we ran to as children.  As long as you are touching the tree, you can’t be tagged.  Someone else remains it.

         

           

            

The Projects

         I was walking through the projects the other day when I noticed that a lot of them had been abandoned.  It was like walking around the inside an old cardboard box that was someone’s lost and found department. 

            I ran across a little courage.  It appeared to be lacking muster. I know, because I myself have had to muster up a little courage before and this one truly needed a little more mustering.   (Mustering being more of an art than a science).

            It wasn’t far from there that I noticed a head of steam. Obviously someone had tried to build it up and failed.  I didn’t know why and then it dawned on me.  I hadn’t seen any encouragement.  Where was all the encouragement?  Whoever had started this project apparently had some but woefully lacked the ability to solicit more.

            Seeing all of this was becoming depressing.  I wanted to leave the projects and get on to other things but just then I stumbled across something.  I bent down and brushed away the dust and dirt and that’s when I saw it.  At first all I could see was a corner of it but it was enough for me to recognize what it was.   It was momentum.  Someone had lost it. 

            I began to understand why they were called The Projects.  They were feeble attempts; fragmented beginnings build on schemes and lacked the stable foundations and supports pitched at the right attitude.

            As I walked away I noticed a few pros hanging around the corner of the Writer’s Block.   It was a good time to be getting out of there.

                 Now I shall go and attend to this day and will be thankful that I am not in Cleveland.

 ZC

Old World Craftsmanship

            There are things they don’t want you to put on your resume or wipe onto the sofa.  After a lifetime of jobs and an even longer string of interviews, I find I have gathered a jar full of truths.  They are small nuggets of reality, not taught in school, never shown on an overhead or reflected in a Power Point presentation.  They can only be collected by traversing humanity, one job at a time, playing by the rules and being observant.

            I should mention here that time travel can not free you from these truths, as documented events will show: from the era of hunting and gathering, through the age of industrialization and deep into the information age this planet has been infested with people and aye – there’s the rub.

            To the best of my calculations there are only 26 pure and decent business owners on the planet.  The rest have suffered and given in to the pangs of greed, paranoia, and rabies.  Do not scoff my friend; I have seen many a rabid business owner or manager struggle hard to avoid yanking off their necktie and biting you on the ankle.

            However, that isn’t what I’m here to discuss.  Today we are going to talk about the sofa.  Some of you I’m sure refer to it as a couch.  Either is fine.  Don’t worry about it.  Know however that we are not talking about the chair, or the coffee table, only the sofa.

            As a small child, Migaleito Nunzeio grew an odd, almost unhealthy affection for the family couch.  It was where his family members sat and talked over the day’s events.  It was where they all sat to watch television and laugh together, and it was sometimes where his father slept.  He wasn’t sure why.

            Upon graduating from high school, Meggaleito designed and built his first sofa.  It had taken him some time with several false starts but the final product was a masterpiece.   As sofas went it was a beauty.  Meggaleito took several pictures of the sofa, arranging the various pillows here and there for each picture.  He then set out to show off his masterpiece and to take orders.  Yes, Meggaleito Nunzeio was soon knee-deep in the sofa business.

            It wasn’t long before The Nunz, as his friends called him, needed help.  He couldn’t keep up, not with doing all of the work himself.  He soon had to raise his prices so he could add employees.  Over time, there were frame builders, people to purchase the materials, truck drivers to deliver the finished product and seamstresses galore.

            Nunz soon had a design department, an accountant, and one person just in charge of safety.  As his business grew, so did the expenses.  After several complaints, Nunzeio found he had to add a quality department just to make sure that things were being done right and the amount of hours he was putting in caused him to hire people to supervise every department.  Meggaleito soon had Mangers, Directors and he had hired an advertising agency.

            One of the problems, as it turned out, was that none of these employees felt the same way about sofas that he did.  Nunz had a passion for sofas.  Sofas were his life. His employees, on the other hand, were consumed with… well, all things employee.  They wanted more pay for what they were doing.  They wanted overtime, they wanted weekends off, they wanted more vacation time, and none of them really wanted to work for a living.

            Sitting at the dinner table one Saturday evening Meggaleito Nunzeio examined his life.  He took a long, hard look at the product that was coming out of the factory and an even harder examination of what it was costing him.  He wasn’t proud of the sofas that were being delivered to his Customers, and he didn’t much care for the materials being used, or the level of craftsmanship.  The Nunz wasn’t happy with much of anything.

            That Sunday afternoon Nunzeio sat and wrote out his resume.  He listed his high school education and then began to write about his passion for sofas.  He wrote about building a sturdy frame, using only the finest hard wood, top quality glue and dowel rod construction.  He spoke of double stitching every seam with high-grade thread and he had always included free Scotch Guard and one yard of additional material should the Customer desire extra pillows.

            When Mr. Nunzeio had ended his resume he discovered it to be nine pages in length.  He was absolutely delighted.  Although no one would ever see his resume, in writing it, he had reawakened his dream.  On Monday, he would be making some changes.  He would hold a company-wide meeting.  He would voice his concerns for the current sofas being produced, for their inferior materials, poor designs, and expensive price tags. 

            Mr. Nunzeio would inform his employees that there are certain things you should never put onto a sofa, like poor quality, inferior materials, and high price tags.  Overcome with emotion and in his broken, immigrant English he held up one finger and said to his assembled workers; 

“I want us to get back to the truth.  I want to feel good when our product is delivered to the Customer.  I want us to be proud of the work we are doing, and every single one of you is going to help us to get there.   For the next three days, I am stopping production.  You will all report to work, but instead of going to your assigned jobs, you will come in here to the lunchroom.  We are all going to give our ideas on how to work together to put our hearts and love into our work.  We are going to reduce the cost of manufacturer, while at the same time increase the quality.  If, at the end of three days we do not have a solid, workable plan, I will close the factory for good, and we will all be out of a job.”

            Looking into this jar of truths that I have collected over the years I can see that even though I never bothered to poke small air holes into the lid - these truths live.  They have a life all their own, requiring nothing but for us to stand in line, behaving as humans.

            We line up to register for classes, that throughout the years others have lined up for.  We follow the business model shown, we learn the examples given, and we display behaviors deemed acceptable to produce raises and promotions.  We all stand in long lines muttering, “Think outside the box, think outside the box.” when in fact we love the interior of the box. 

            The box is us; it is our exploration of space, just as it is our inhumanity to others.  It is our ability to love nature, and our arrogance in how we treat our future.  We are frightened of change even though it is what we seek.  We push our limitations while holding tight to securities.

            On August 3^rd. 1956, Meggaleito Nunzeio closed his factory doors for the last time.  Some of his employees went and stood in the unemployment line.  Others set out for new adventures and a few headed into a panic and seriously wrong directions.

            The Nunz sold the building, the sewing machines, the time clock and the lunchroom chairs and tables.  He closed up his house and climbed aboard a luxury cruise ship and headed for a tropical vacation. 

            On January 12^th, as Mr. Nunzeio sat along the rail of the upper deck looking out over the vast ocean he contemplated the work of a cobbler.  Here, he thought, was a person who had dedicated their life to the repair and refurbishment of shoes.  Although an honorable and worthy trade the cobbler had fallen to a rapidly changing market.  In the blink of an eye it became cheaper for people to buy new shoes than it was for them to repair their old ones.  New, synthetic materials, formed instantly in stamping machines, run by minimum wage employees took the place of handcrafted, quality footwear.

            Then, as he thought back on his very first sofa and of how proud he was to have made it himself, as would a cobbler might have, taking pride in its quality, a lady close to his own age walked up and asked if she could join him there on the bench.

            As they sat looking out at the ocean, she said:

 “Are you here alone?”

            Noticing her hand-made leather shoes he thought to himself, I like this one, and he smiled for the first time in a long time.

ZC

           

           

           

           

A Place for Everything

and everything in it's place.

But where has all the time gone?