9/18- My Work Week

Monday morning was a big to do as Scott and Gail, Daniel's friends we'd had coffee with the day before, came over for breakfast before they headed back east past the Sound and Cascades to eastern Washington. Wendie and Daniel were now hosting quite a crew as Matt and I were still staying there, Scott and Gail were coming in for breakfast, and then, of course, the two of them tucked around a table in their little apartment. As we sat around eating and visiting it reminded me of meals in the little cottage my family used to rent when I was a kid back at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. It was one of those island bound cabins with no amenities, and just a front porch and a fireplace to crowd in on as the family gathered.

After breakfast, with a quick tour of the garden outside, Scott and Gail were off, then Matt as well, and finally Wendie and I were bound for work. As mentioned in the previous post, Wendie works for a non-profit called Third Ear Project which has been having severe financial difficulties this year. So much so that Wendie only works 10 hours a week despite a mother load of work that needs to be done. Being that I am in town with little to do other than visit with my sister I figured I'd volunteer my assistance. It would surprisingly turn out to be quite profitable for me in the end.

Now, I've skipped over a few important events that happened over the weekend because it seemed more fitting to talk about them now. The first was that Wendie's boss, Alex, who is the only other person in the office had a horrible accident Friday night, a day after I'd met him in town. He was out riding his bike and ran into an unseen ditch that flipped him over the handlebars landing him on his head and right arm. It knocked him out so bad that when he came to he had no idea where he was and barely had the senses about him to call his girlfriend to come find him. In the end, he had a concussion, his face got all messed up, his right arm was broken, and possibly has some broken ribs. All of these are bad things beyond the obvious because he's the only one who worked full time in the office, and is the one who goes out to pitch the organization to places like the Rotary Club who are unaccustomed to seeing scabbed faces and casts before them. Not the best for fund raising at a time when business is suffering.

From all this, my help was quite welcome so I spent the day working a bit of computer stuff like data entry and organizing things. For me the day was great, I felt useful and was just puttering along at my own pace enjoying feeling the facade of settlement again. Meanwhile my sister was not having a very good day. There were obvious stresses in the office over what to do now and how to get things done. The organization teaches classes, and they were starting that week, but had only one student for it. So by the time we were driving home again she was beating herself up for a whole myriad of reasons.

The other event I'd skipped was a call I'd gotten from Todd over the weekend. We'd talked on Saturday as usual, though only sporadically because he had been taken in by a billionaire down in Portland and was between soirees with the Prince of Ghana and the President of Wells Fargo Bank. Yeah, that's billionaire, with a "B". From what I could gather he was quite possibly either heading to Canada, or getting dropped off here. All of this was very tricky timing with the elements here on the home front.

I found myself in Todd's position just a week earlier, though different. Where I was coming into Boise in the dead of night with no official nod to stay at his newly found sisters house, now Todd was possibly dropping in to a recently crowded home from the weekend while tensions were growing at work and personal space was a definite need. As Todd had felt, I likewise didn't want to leave him hanging saying, no, don't come, the timing is bad. The happy medium was to have him camp out with me should he be popping in.

The next day was much better. Wendie felt more productive, Alex had given a great Rotary Club presentation despite being banged up, and due to my updates of the website pushing the class two weeks back we'd gotten several students signed up. By now I had also gotten a pretty good idea that Todd was planning on stopping in as well. On our way home from work, as Wendie was asking me if Todd was coming in that night or the next, he called saying he was on the ferry approaching town. Wendie stopped in for groceries and I walked down to meet him.

It was an understated self consciousness with both Wendie and I that it wasn't the most hospitable welcome for him of "welcome to our home, here's the woods", but the nice thing about Todd is that all he wants is honesty and he's happy regardless of the situation when he gets the straight answer. I had warned him when he was still in Portland of the situation here, but on the same tune, I was camping out as well and he would simply be joining me. Either way, it was a good reunion as we met up just passed the ferry dock and I was able to catch up some on what had been happening in Portland as we walked back to meet my sister.

That night we all had dinner together and the mood was much lighter than it had been the night before. We all retired somewhat early and the next day I had volunteered to do some errands for Third Ear. With Todd in town now I figured it was the perfect sort of work. At the end of the previous day we'd printed up a bunch of revised fliers to replace around town and it seemed fitting to wander around and show Todd the town. Daniel works from home, so it also helped to vacate the house for the day to let him concentrate.

Port Townsend is one of those quaint little Victorian sea towns that are just adorable to wander through, and we took our time doing it. It also provided us the time to really beat around the ideas behind the weekend Todd had just had. It had been such a flurry outside of a normal days events that it seemed it helped Todd to have someone to voice them too.

I would highly recommend checking out his write up on it all, but the long and the short of it seemed to boil down to the struggles of escaping identity. The billionaire, Andre, had been bitten by a brown recluse spider some years ago and was now clearly dying of it. He had all the money in the world, and as Todd found out, apparently quite a good insight into spirituality as well and the two aspects were in deep conflict. Along with Todd Andre had taken in another hitcher from Canada, and with both he was treating them to a lifestyle neither had likely ever tasted. From what I gathered he believed seemingly random encounters all reasons behind them, much like Todd and I do, and that helping others along was a key aspect to living a good life.

What the conflict seemed to be was his identity as a man made of money. I'll let
Todd give all the details, as its his story, but essentially he seemed only to be able to offer gifts that enhanced vanity and prestige rather than genuine service to another. This was a gold mine for Todd and I to explore that day and it retouched into our differences over the benevolently mis-channeled suburban kid archetype, like those on charity vacations as Todd calls them. In short, that debate of ours is a reexamination of the old adage "its easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven". My question has always been, what does a rich man do then? I suppose, to answer my own question quickly and to keep in the Biblical references doing so, I guess you just treat money in the same way as manna in that it should be a non-hoardable resource.

This segues quite nicely into how the rest of the day progressed. Early in our fliering route we stopped in at a coffee shop that was hiring. I asked, clumsily, it they would consider hiring me for a week or so until they got a permanent fixture in. Of course they refused, and I really hadn't expected them to say yes anyway which was why I sort of bumbled through the procedure. Todd saw it and offered a way to rephrase and see if I could fill the gap while in town with my 9 years of experience behind me. Later in the day we hit another shop that was hiring. I tried this new approach, was handed an application, and told the best time to talk to the owner would be between 6am and 7am. The next day I rose at 5:30am, had breakfast with Wend on her way to her other job at the Challenge Course in Port Angeles, then meandered down to the Tyler St. Cafe to meet Teresa, the owner.

Teresa didn't even really look at the application. I pitched her the idea and she told me to come in the next day at 5:30am to open and see how much training I would need. It turned out one of her two baristas was taking a week off the first week of October and the Port Townsend Film Festival was also coming to town the following weekend and both baristas were anxious to get time off and join in.

Now to go back to that idea of money as manna. Before all the defensive hate mail starts pouring in about it being great that I can profess wandering around penniless while others have responsibilities to take care of I understand all that. I am, by no means, suggesting that everyone should just trust to faith that money will appear whenever its needed. All I would like to do is write about the incidents in which it does happen to me, or anyone else I hear about to hopefully reduce the stress of those who are bending over backwards to make ends meet in order to take care of themselves and their family. I still have quite a difficult time trusting in that idea, but being in the fortunate position I'm in I've decided it be a wasted chance not to test it out.

I'm not sure if I've told this story before on here about my Nana back when she was raising my Dad, but its such a good story I'm going to tell it again if I did. When they first moved to the town a grew up in in the '50s they were having a lot of bad financial trouble. Nana was a very religious woman of Christian Science and there are hundreds if not thousands who would attest to her kindness, but one day she found herself with no money in the bank and no food to feed her family with in the cupboards. She went grocery shopping anyway, rationalizing that her family was more important than a bit of business to the grocery store and had resolved to write a bad check and make good on it later. In the meantime her kids would be fed.

When she got in line to the register she couldn't do it. She put everything back up on the shelves without saying a word and went home deciding that somehow something would work out. When she got back to the house her back steps were covered in grocery bags filled with groceries. It turned out her neighbors were going on vacation for a week and decided to give all their perishable food to them so as not to waste it.

Its my belief that things like this do happen, the trick seems not to rely on them happening. What then of my good fortune? I've often asked myself if I'm relying on this good luck that I have, and Todd has told me he worries that I am attempting to manipulate fate in this way. The only thing I can offer up is that I always am plotting some sort of plan as to what to do when I do get down to nothing. I got to zero in Denver, but I still did have my locked up savings which made that zero a false zero. Money came to me anyway though and let me unlock that savings and dole it out in different ways. I also left Denver low on cash figuring I could stop and work on the way, and by Boise it had tripled. The big one has been that I've been planning for a while to go to England in November, but had no idea how that would be funded. I worked out the hours I'll get from this job and the cost of a ticket there and back and it came out just a little over what I need. Spending money, I think.

Anyway, so that was the magic of the week. After getting the job that Thursday morning Todd and I went out to finish fliering the town. Todd's heel had started nagging him, though, so I dropped him off by the bay to write until I was done. On the way there I bought myself a congratulatory hat for the new job to replace the one I lost in Denver. I spent the rest of the day roaming outer Port Townsend and picked Todd up in the evening to head home again.

By now he was trying to figure out where to go. Originally the idea was out to Cape Alava to finally hit the Pacific this year, but with his heel going that didn't seem like such a good idea. Nothing else was really calling to him though, in fact, even that wasn't calling to him, it just seemed more like the thing to do. The other nagging thing was that on Saturday would be his birthday, and its always nice to do something fun for your birthday, regardless of how much you don't like celebrating them.

Friday morning I rose at 4:45am for my first day at work. It cracked me up that the girls there were on their best behavior for "the new guy". When they finally told me that I asked them to please stop since I do really badly with well behaved people and would much rather everyone just be themselves. At that they began petting me. One girl, Mary, had wanted to touch my hair and finally did when I told her to be herself, then her sister, Teresa, the owner, started stroking my arm hair. It cracked me up, and from then on I've been comfortable working there. I also got along quite well with the girl training me, Kelly, who was quite specific on getting my shots to pull perfectly... which is probably good for me in the end.

After work Todd and I hatched a plan to give Wendie and Daniel the house to themselves for the evening for the first time in a week. Todd had finally decided it seemed best to just head back home and recoup his heel issues. Talking to Shalain, his girlfriend, it turned out there was a paying house sitting gig waiting for him there. Another "it just shows up" example. We were all planning a trip to Seattle the next day anyway, and although a birthday Greyhound trip is a horrible sounding idea, the whole plan fit well together other than that. That night we borrowed Wendie's car and went to the drive through for an explosive evening of Inglorious Basterds and District 9. As Todd noted, we started the trek west with a drive-in and we're going to end it with one.