We make the road by walking

It happened again, even with that job, the one I loved so much, the last one.  Kathy and I were driving from our room at Manresa to the campus for an annual dinner, one of these traditions that will likely bring us back down to Detroit from our new home 250 miles north.  As I drove the route down Woodward that I had taken every day for the last ten years at the university, I was surprised to feel it: revulsion.

My first job was washing dishes at the Crestwood Snack Shop, a typical strip mall mom and pop restaurant that was a three mile bike ride from my parents' house in Des Plaines, a suburb of Chicago.  I was 15, but fibbed about my age so I could start working.  For that summer halfway through High School I washed dishes the old fashioned way, in a huge stainless steel double-tub sink, with dish soap that was so caustic that

by the end of the summer, I could read on my arms and hands a map of every scar I had ever earned in fifteen years of bangs and scrapes as a boy living on a road paved with stones, where a spill on a bike meant scrapes and minor cuts.  Now the road was smooth black asphalt, with fresh white concrete curbs, and not a stone in sight.  When I turned 16 the following December and could get a job legally, I quit the Crestwood and got two jobs at the Flying Carpet Motor Inn, one as a busboy on Sundays and another the next summer as a maintenance worker on the grounds.

I remember the first time I rode my bike past the Crestwood after leaving the job.   I felt a kind of revulsion, recalling the sting of the dish soap, the negative comments of the boss, and the slow times between the lunch rush and dinner.  I was so glad that I had my new job, so glad that I wasn't back there.  Two years later I found myself experiencing those same feelings of revulsion and relief after moving on from the busboy job, simply looking into the dining room from my job on the grounds, which I kept through most of college.  When my career took me from Des Plaines to Detroit permanently, My visits to my parents' home took us right past the Flying Carpet, and again I felt relieved not to be working there, raking the sand traps with those three-foot wide aluminum rakes in the hot sun and pulling endless weeds.

At the university, I was able to remain for a lifetime, almost 41 years, until I retired.  I was proud of that, and grateful that the diversity of needs there allowed me to change jobs several times but still belong.  As much as I enjoyed my work as an academic advisor and then a career counselor and then a director of our cooperative education program and then director of Student Life, when I passed my old offices where I had done those jobs, I felt a tinge of the Crestwood revulsion.  It surprised me, and bothered me a bit because they were jobs that I had enjoyed and found fulfilling and noble.  But every one of them was surpassed by subsequent set of responsibilities and challenges and rewards that was a better fit, a job that allowed me to be more myself, and it was this awareness that helped my understand and accept these negative feelings about past jobs at the university.

My last job was the best.  Working in partnerships with non-profit agencies that serve the poor engaged the best parts of me, giving me a kind face and a passionate lifestyle, allowing me to be of encouragement and affirmation on and off campus.  The work I was given allowed me to see and affirm the best in everyone, students, colleagues, and people in the community.  It was a dream job that even allowed me to take summers off and find some balance in my life.  So there was a bit of shock when last week I felt this same revulsion for my last, great job.  But I know what it was about, and I accept it.  

Paolo Friere and Miles Horton look down at me from the spine of an orange book that is in the center of the bookshelf directly over the desk in my study.  Its title makes more sense than ever, and is the key to this feeling looking back.  Truth is, I don't know how I did any of these jobs when I first look back.  I don't, at first, know how I put up with the sting of the dish soap, or the grouchy diners at the Flying Carpet, or the blazing sun in the grounds, or the pressure of placing every co-op student, or the long planning for events that drew small turnouts.  And for a moment, I did not know how I could drive down into that city whose hunger and homelessness were so pervasive, so far beyond even the generosity and tenacity of the heroes with whom I worked every day.

I have come to know that Friere and Horton have the answer.  The title of their book is the answer to this feeling that I could not go back to any of these jobs, because I could not do them.  The truth is written on the spine of that book: We Make the Road by Walking.  I realize that along the drive down Woodward when I had this last, dream job, I knew that I could not do it.  What made it possible was that I would get out of my car and start seeing people.  On early mornings it would be Gloria or the other custodians, alone in the quiet, dark building getting ready for the faculty and students to arrive.  On normal mornings, I'd meet faculty and students coming out of the parking lot, and exchange hellos in the stairwell and along the hallway.  My e-mail would display names that gladdened my heart and gave me courage.  They were names of faculty who were committed to teaching, community partners who were committed to serving he needs of the poor and otherwise forgotten.  They were the students who got it, who were on the road with them, making the road where there was none, not in laws or programs or policies.  

I forget that the only way I did those jobs was by stepping into them, and by making them work by what was available, by finding the resources along the way, and especially the people.  In the church, we call it “actual grace”.  This awareness equips me for this non-job called retirement.  More about that tomorrow,