It was near the end of my day. A car pulled up to the doors to Entrance #2 amid a brief flurry of business and I went out to the driver's door with a valet ticket in my hand. "Do you want valet service today, sir?" He was an elderly man behind the wheel of the late model Honda.
"Yes," he replied. "You staying warm?"
"Yes, sir," I said. "This job keeps me moving; I stay pretty warm!"
"It's okay," he said as he gripped the interior handle of the open car door and slowly pulled himself to his feet, "you don't have to call me sir..."
"Oh, I call all men--"
"I was only a sergeant," he said, cutting me off; he hadn't heard my response. "I wasn't an officer." He offered up a handshake. I took his hand in mine.
"Thank you for your service, sir," I said. "Army?"
"Nineteen-forty-two to forty-five." He had read the next question in my mind.
"My dad was in from '42 to '46. Were you in the Pacific Theater or in the..."
"Europe!" His hearing was perfect, now. "I was with General Patton."
"Now, was he First Army or Third?" My father served in Europe during World War II, so I have the smidgen of European Theater of Operations knowledge I learned from him.
"First," he said.
"Ah," I smiled. "My father was in the Third Army." I couldn't think of the general's name who led my father's neck of the war. "Were you in the Battle of 'The Bulge?'" Another thing I had learned about my father's service. (Patton's First Army was in position to the north of the Belgian town of Bastogne, while General Omar Bradley's Third Army was about equally as far to the south of Bastogne. A thinly defended supply line was established between the two armies, and that supply line is where the German Army attacked in an effort to recapture the harbor of Antwerp, Belgium. The American forces along the line fell back westward in an effort to contain the German offensive, thus forming what the press of the time described as a "bulge" in the line.)
The gentleman smiled slightly and nodded.
I laughed. "You may have rubbed elbows with him!"
"How's your father?" he asked me.
I put my arm high up on his arm, near his shoulder, and said fairly matter-of-factly, "He passed away in 2008."
Then the man said, "I'm 91."
"NINETY-ONE?!" I blurted. The really quick part of my brain — the part that never shows itself for any practical purposes other than avoiding traffic collisions and recalling useless information — momentarily thought he was guessing my father's age, because, in that instant, without having to do any math, I knew 91 would have been my father's age this year. "You're doing good! You're doing GREAT!" I patted him on the arm in the same spot.
He hobbled past me toward the entry door to the medical building. "The good lord gave me a great life."
I walked ahead of him to open the door, and suddenly found myself struggling mightily to hold back tears. In that instant, I missed my dad terribly and I wanted desperately to sit down with this gentleman and ask him a million questions. What a tremendous obstacle placed before the men of his generation that they overcame! Most of them, anyway. And the sacrifice and the loss. The fear and the pain. What images must float up in his mind when he says things like, "I was only a sergeant, 1942 to '45!"
And now they're dying off to the tune of hundreds a day; maybe thousands.
I couldn't regain my composure quickly enough, and as he stepped through the doorway and away from me, my wish to him to "Have a good afternoon, now," came out as a wobbly, warbling croak, which I was grateful he couldn't hear.
Choking on the lump in my throat, I walked back through tear-blurred vision and quickly inspected his car for any prior damage, got in and headed to the valet stalls where I parked his car. And I let it happen. It was brief. I wiped my cheeks and my eyes with my hands, and I trotted back to Entrance #2, happy for the flurry of business that prevented me from dwelling on what had just transpired.
°
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Scenes From Entrance #2
I suppose I'm doing this backwards, chronologically speaking, but, with the way these entries post to Blogger, a random, casual reader will read them in some semblance of the right order. This is on my mind right now; I'll get to my "career" ethos in a later post.
With about a month at this new job under my belt, a few thoughts have settled in, and I feel a need to share them. Go get an alcoholic beverage; you may wish you didn't spend time in my brain. The break below this paragraph can last for decades.
I think it's official: I'm a people person. Fourteen years ago I can pretty confidently say I was not. When I took the job at Directions AV, Inc., I was pretty vexed at my agreeing to approach strangers with a video camera and encourage/cajole/plead for their participation in videos as a requirement of my job. But approach them I did and, if I have to say so myself, I became pretty damn good at putting together sight gags and short skits with no scripts and with randomly chosen non-actors. The unexpected by-product of that eight-years-and-change experience is that I can now approach and talk to just about everyone and be my wacky self as though I've known them for years.
Laid off in 2009, and feeling a little desperate after five idle months, I took what I now realize with clear 20/20-hindsight was an ill-advised taxi driving occupation. Despite the money-, time-, and mind-draining aspect of it, I also realize that it further developed my people-person skills. It is in the taxi that I actually realized that I can talk to just about anyone like an old buddy.
The taxi was killing me slowly, and I knew I had to get out, so I did that in July, accepting an offer at an imaging company as a school portraits photographer. There I realized that I can talk to almost anybody. Kids? Not so much. Honestly, it wasn't the talking that I had a problem with; it was the tolerating. Plus, all of the things I mentioned in the prior post.
In the preliminaries to being offered this job, the interviewer — who happens to be the owner of the company — seemed very pleased with my professed people-person skills that carried over from the taxi business. It may be the only reason they hired an old fart like me for a job where they expect their people to run to retrieve the parked cars.
But I digress. In the four and a half weeks that I have been functioning as a valet/parking attendant at this local hospital, I have greeted and welcomed already several hundreds of people. Some of them are repeat visitors, and others are one-timers. It is the repeat visitors who I think about the most. Some aren't visitors at all, but employees of the hospital. They're not our customers, but we are expected to treat them with the same respect and enthusiasm with which we treat the visitors, and enthusiasm is what I have felt since the start. Inside the building, beyond the doors where I am stationed, many of our repeat guests come in for surgery, and some come in daily for various and sundry cancer treatments. Some surgery patients are in and out in a couple of hours, while some go in and spend days in recovery. Cancer patients come in for chemotherapy, radiation, and even laser excision of cancerous skin cells. One gentleman, apparently in his fifties, arrives so precisely every morning that you could set your watch by him: 6:55. One woman was a regular visitor for my first three weeks, and she gleefully told me one Friday that it was her last day of treatment. Another lady — to whom I refer as "the lottery lady" — comes in every morning wearing her fleece skull cap (it's cold outside ...and she's bald!) announcing which day of her treatment today is, and how many days of treatment she has left. It's those numbers she plays in the Illinois Lottery Pick Three or Pick Four game and delivers the ticket she bought for me: day nine of treatment with 19 more to go, so she plays 919; day 12 of treatment? She plays 1216 and brings me a ticket. Today I was a winner, only not in the Lottery. She brought in for me and for my door coworker each a miniature holiday Bundt cake.
Some are very old, some are very young. Some have been preparing for surgery for weeks, while some were admitted under urgent circumstances. I see family members escaping from soulless waiting rooms to the cold freedom of fresh, outdoor air and a cigarette; some quietly shed tears of stress or worry while a loved one breathes upstairs with the aid of complicated electronics and machinery. I hand cancer patients their valet claim tickets and then enter their car and a cloud of lingering cigarette smoke, able when I park their car in the lot to escape the prison of their addiction that they cannot.
It dawned on me a few days ago, a sad realization, that probably half of these cancer patients will not survive that for which they are receiving treatment. The lady earlier mentioned who was so gleeful that she was finished with treatment told me practically in the same breath that, if the treatment doesn't prove successful, she could be looking at hospice in a matter of a few weeks; this was her last hurrah, her Hail Mary pass for big yards. Lottery Lady is happy to mention her forward progress, but she never volunteers how she's doing.
So much hope. So much fear. So much defiant dignity in the face of unpredictable odds, all in brief pauses between the entry vestibule doors.
°
With about a month at this new job under my belt, a few thoughts have settled in, and I feel a need to share them. Go get an alcoholic beverage; you may wish you didn't spend time in my brain. The break below this paragraph can last for decades.
I think it's official: I'm a people person. Fourteen years ago I can pretty confidently say I was not. When I took the job at Directions AV, Inc., I was pretty vexed at my agreeing to approach strangers with a video camera and encourage/cajole/plead for their participation in videos as a requirement of my job. But approach them I did and, if I have to say so myself, I became pretty damn good at putting together sight gags and short skits with no scripts and with randomly chosen non-actors. The unexpected by-product of that eight-years-and-change experience is that I can now approach and talk to just about everyone and be my wacky self as though I've known them for years.
Laid off in 2009, and feeling a little desperate after five idle months, I took what I now realize with clear 20/20-hindsight was an ill-advised taxi driving occupation. Despite the money-, time-, and mind-draining aspect of it, I also realize that it further developed my people-person skills. It is in the taxi that I actually realized that I can talk to just about anyone like an old buddy.
The taxi was killing me slowly, and I knew I had to get out, so I did that in July, accepting an offer at an imaging company as a school portraits photographer. There I realized that I can talk to almost anybody. Kids? Not so much. Honestly, it wasn't the talking that I had a problem with; it was the tolerating. Plus, all of the things I mentioned in the prior post.
In the preliminaries to being offered this job, the interviewer — who happens to be the owner of the company — seemed very pleased with my professed people-person skills that carried over from the taxi business. It may be the only reason they hired an old fart like me for a job where they expect their people to run to retrieve the parked cars.
But I digress. In the four and a half weeks that I have been functioning as a valet/parking attendant at this local hospital, I have greeted and welcomed already several hundreds of people. Some of them are repeat visitors, and others are one-timers. It is the repeat visitors who I think about the most. Some aren't visitors at all, but employees of the hospital. They're not our customers, but we are expected to treat them with the same respect and enthusiasm with which we treat the visitors, and enthusiasm is what I have felt since the start. Inside the building, beyond the doors where I am stationed, many of our repeat guests come in for surgery, and some come in daily for various and sundry cancer treatments. Some surgery patients are in and out in a couple of hours, while some go in and spend days in recovery. Cancer patients come in for chemotherapy, radiation, and even laser excision of cancerous skin cells. One gentleman, apparently in his fifties, arrives so precisely every morning that you could set your watch by him: 6:55. One woman was a regular visitor for my first three weeks, and she gleefully told me one Friday that it was her last day of treatment. Another lady — to whom I refer as "the lottery lady" — comes in every morning wearing her fleece skull cap (it's cold outside ...and she's bald!) announcing which day of her treatment today is, and how many days of treatment she has left. It's those numbers she plays in the Illinois Lottery Pick Three or Pick Four game and delivers the ticket she bought for me: day nine of treatment with 19 more to go, so she plays 919; day 12 of treatment? She plays 1216 and brings me a ticket. Today I was a winner, only not in the Lottery. She brought in for me and for my door coworker each a miniature holiday Bundt cake.
Some are very old, some are very young. Some have been preparing for surgery for weeks, while some were admitted under urgent circumstances. I see family members escaping from soulless waiting rooms to the cold freedom of fresh, outdoor air and a cigarette; some quietly shed tears of stress or worry while a loved one breathes upstairs with the aid of complicated electronics and machinery. I hand cancer patients their valet claim tickets and then enter their car and a cloud of lingering cigarette smoke, able when I park their car in the lot to escape the prison of their addiction that they cannot.
It dawned on me a few days ago, a sad realization, that probably half of these cancer patients will not survive that for which they are receiving treatment. The lady earlier mentioned who was so gleeful that she was finished with treatment told me practically in the same breath that, if the treatment doesn't prove successful, she could be looking at hospice in a matter of a few weeks; this was her last hurrah, her Hail Mary pass for big yards. Lottery Lady is happy to mention her forward progress, but she never volunteers how she's doing.
So much hope. So much fear. So much defiant dignity in the face of unpredictable odds, all in brief pauses between the entry vestibule doors.
°
Monday, December 15, 2014
Arc
For years, now, I have lamented about how my occupation(s) has cramped my writing time, and how I need to find a way to put more time back into my life to give to writing. I finally got out of the taxi in July of this year, walking away from it ...and right into a sporadic, stressful schedule of school portrait photography. At the beginning of the school year I was busy, and the hours were all over the map ...er, clock ...with some days requiring me to leave my apartment at 4:30 am, and other days to leave at 9:00. As the fall semester wore on, the schedule lightened up, and the "part time" nature of the job that had me working sometimes 50 hours a week at the start made itself more evident.
Waning hours — and pay — aside, I remembered soon after I began the job that the part I had really hated about the video job I'd had from 2001 to 2009 was the lugging-around-the-heavy-cases-and-setting-up-so-much-crap-all-the-time part, which was exactly what I was doing again with the photography job. I was promised with the photography that, as the portrait photography aspect slowed down, the sporting event and candid photography aspect would pick up, and I would continue to have somewhat steady work. However, since the other thing I wanted to get back into my life after leaving the taxi behind was acting, I didn't want the sporting event and candid photography to take up my evenings, which is when theatre commitments occur.
I had to find something else.
One evening of feverish and reckless Craigslist searching netted me an interview with HealthPark Hospitality/Advantage Valet, a company headquartered in Barrington, Illinois, a mere hop and a skip from where I live. I never knew I wanted to be a valet; fact of the matter is, I never did want to be a valet, but, in the dark hours of that evening it seemed like a swell thing to look into.
They touted full-time work, steady, regular hours and choice of schedule. The bonus is that the property where the position was open is a hospital a mere ten-minute drive from my apartment. BONUS! But I think I already wrote that.... I started with HealthPark Hospitality on November 10, and — despite how primitive-brain valet work may appear to a reader, I'm having a blast with a job I get home from at the same time every day, that I don't have to bring home with me, that I don't stress over the night before, that I don't have to carry anything to or from, and that there is no expensive equipment for which I am responsible on a daily basis ...if you don't count the occasional $150,000-ish Mercedes Benz I have to back into a parking stall between two other cars.
And now the cows have come home to roost to put the money in the proof pudding where my mouth is. Or something like that. Translation: time is what I wanted; time is what I did this for. It's time to start getting my brain focused again on writing. I was doing so well — at least exercise-wise — prior to the taxi and Facebook. Fucking Facebook. But now, with what little writing discipline I had when fate dumped me into a taxi all but lost, I find myself struggling to get it all back in gear, to observe life and formulate a topic, to concentrate on that topic and to whip words into a coherent pattern to make that topic interesting to a reader, even if it's something about a long-neglected avocation. And then there are the writing projects I long to get back to which have sat on the proverbial shelf for way too long, regardless of how much or how little writing I have done since 2009.
Since 2009. Jeesh. Five years. What the actual fuck?!
°
Waning hours — and pay — aside, I remembered soon after I began the job that the part I had really hated about the video job I'd had from 2001 to 2009 was the lugging-around-the-heavy-cases-and-setting-up-so-much-crap-all-the-time part, which was exactly what I was doing again with the photography job. I was promised with the photography that, as the portrait photography aspect slowed down, the sporting event and candid photography aspect would pick up, and I would continue to have somewhat steady work. However, since the other thing I wanted to get back into my life after leaving the taxi behind was acting, I didn't want the sporting event and candid photography to take up my evenings, which is when theatre commitments occur.
I had to find something else.
One evening of feverish and reckless Craigslist searching netted me an interview with HealthPark Hospitality/Advantage Valet, a company headquartered in Barrington, Illinois, a mere hop and a skip from where I live. I never knew I wanted to be a valet; fact of the matter is, I never did want to be a valet, but, in the dark hours of that evening it seemed like a swell thing to look into.
They touted full-time work, steady, regular hours and choice of schedule. The bonus is that the property where the position was open is a hospital a mere ten-minute drive from my apartment. BONUS! But I think I already wrote that.... I started with HealthPark Hospitality on November 10, and — despite how primitive-brain valet work may appear to a reader, I'm having a blast with a job I get home from at the same time every day, that I don't have to bring home with me, that I don't stress over the night before, that I don't have to carry anything to or from, and that there is no expensive equipment for which I am responsible on a daily basis ...if you don't count the occasional $150,000-ish Mercedes Benz I have to back into a parking stall between two other cars.
And now the cows have come home to roost to put the money in the proof pudding where my mouth is. Or something like that. Translation: time is what I wanted; time is what I did this for. It's time to start getting my brain focused again on writing. I was doing so well — at least exercise-wise — prior to the taxi and Facebook. Fucking Facebook. But now, with what little writing discipline I had when fate dumped me into a taxi all but lost, I find myself struggling to get it all back in gear, to observe life and formulate a topic, to concentrate on that topic and to whip words into a coherent pattern to make that topic interesting to a reader, even if it's something about a long-neglected avocation. And then there are the writing projects I long to get back to which have sat on the proverbial shelf for way too long, regardless of how much or how little writing I have done since 2009.
Since 2009. Jeesh. Five years. What the actual fuck?!
°
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