Dear Blog Reader.
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine.
Fortunately, the January thaw is upon us. My good winter coat was in desperate need
of cleaning. I had mentioned two weeks ago that I am the Sharritt version of
Pigpen; the lovable dust cloud of a little boy in Peanuts. In this case, my
dust cloud generator is an outdoor wood burning stove. Every morning as the car
is warming up, I throw a few logs on the fire. You open the door to the furnace
and the smoldering fire releases a waft of smoke. Over half of a winter, it
adds up and my coat loses that vibrant red look that ironically, makes me so
smoking hot.
My coat isn’t the only thing that makes me hot. I have to
confess that I have a character defect. I have been working on it for 50 years.
Who knows when or how it developed? Maybe someone dropped me on my head when I
was one, or the cat swatted me upside of the head and took my Cheerios away
from me. It is really a two headed hydra. I really hate it when someone treats
me like an idiot, and I really really hate it when a person acts in an unfair
manner. Not to toot my own horn, but I do think that over the years the
maturation process has soften my reaction to incidents that push the
aforementioned buttons on my lizard reactive brain. I will let you be the judge
of that with the two memories that I am about to share.
Once a long time ago in a life time far far away, I was a
residence hall manager at Purdue. I managed Cary Quadrangle a 1,500 men’s hall.
When giving tours, we would say that it was the second largest all male
dormitory in the country behind West Point. We had no idea. That was one of the
lines passed on to me by the previous manager and since no one seemed keen to
fact check, we passed it along as the gospel. As you can imagine, 1500 young
men or old teens, depending on your perspective, can get into a fair amount of
trouble if left unsupervised. We had 42 resident assistants to do the supervision.
These were slightly older young men who had distinguished themselves by not
getting caught breaking the rules that they were to enforce on their slightly
younger charges.
As you can imagine, it took intensive training to convince
them that the institution knew what it was talking about and that the rules
were really in place to help with our charges orderly transition to young
adulthood. Part of what we did each year was to foster a spirit of teamwork and
belonging within the staff. We would participate in a series of team building
exercises. One year we decided to challenge the staffs from two other dorms to
a rousing contest of tug of war. We would have been doing this for a long time
but no one could find a big enough rope to harness the energy of 84
testosterone charged young men in a battle for honor and glory. That summer one
was found. An alumni who became a Navy officer sent us one of those massive
ropes used to tie a ship to the pier with a note stating that tug of war would
be the perfect team building exercise for the staff and this was the perfect
rope for it.
It was big. Tug of war is a really good team building
exercise. Your team faces your enemy in a show down of strength and strategy.
If your team works together and develops a good pulling rhythm, you can use the
victory as a metaphor for working together during tough times during the school
year. So we met upon the green in front of Wiley Hall. Cary Quad’s 43 (of
course I was going to participate) against Wiley and Tarkington’s 40 some. As
you may have guessed, I live quite comfortably in the land of hyperbole. I
easily turn molehills into mountains. I can easily turn tug of war into a
battle for America and Apple pie. That is what I did. My guys were stoked. They
were mean and lean and ready to pull.
My competitive juices were flowing. Since the tug of war
challenge was issued and accepted early in the spring before the resident
assistant selection process had started, I may have selected my staff based on
certain physical characteristics. Yes, we were big. There may have been one or
two or five high school heavy weight wrestlers on my staff that year. The facts
are a bit hazy. But we were ready. The challenge was supposed to be the best of
three. We had picked up our rope. We had slide easily into the tension. We had
laced up our hiking boots. When the whistle blew, we strained. The rope groaned
with the initial stretch. The contest was in stasis for a few seconds and we
slowly walked our opponents the 20 feet to their defeat. We were exuberant in
our celebration. It had not been that close. We knew that after 30 more seconds
of exercise we would have bragging rights for the next year.
The rope was moved back to center. Both teams shouldered their
harness once again. The flag was brought to a rest over the center line. We
held. The whistle blew. We strained. The rope groaned with the initial stretch
and the sissies on the other side let go. All 43 of us went sprawling to the
ground. Trying to be a good leader and setting a good example, I was wearing my
shirt, tie, and dress pants. I untangled
myself from the lump of humanity. I jumped up with my grass stained knees and
went looking for retribution. I heard that I put on quite a show. I questioned
their manhood, their sense of fair play, and their right to be called citizens
of the world.
Six months later, I was speaking with one of my staff
members who had just finished an interview for a real job after graduation.
Coincidently, the interviewer was none other than my sister. In a misguided
effort to establish some rapport with his potential future employer, he brought
up this incident. My sister listened thoughtfully and responded, “That sounds
like the kind of thing that would set him off. We Sharritts are big on fair
play.” Big on fair play. Even when you know that you are about to lose, you
take it. You try your best and you never let go of the rope.
So last week, I was pleased that I did not jump up with my
bruised dignity and start ranting and raving like a maniac while I was out to
eat with the lovely Miss Beverly. We were with friends and eating at a lovely
new upscale restaurant in Pendleton, Indiana. Approximately a year and a half
ago, I gave up drinking caffeinated diet soda. Like many things in my life, I
was doing too much of a good thing. It got so bad that I could drink a 32 ounce
of pop on the way home from work and the caffeine would not affect my sleep
patterns. However, my blood pressure was not responding positively to the
stimulation. So I bit the bullet and suffered through the monster headache and
went cold turkey. However, I do love the burn of the bubbles going down.
Thankfully, the soda makers have responded to the aging population and have
started offering caffeine free diet at many find dining establishments.
This being a fine dining establishment, I decided to ask. “Do
you have any caffeine free diet?” Our waiter responded, “This must be your
first time here. We stock a full bar and have a fine wine list. However, the
only pop we serve is Coke and Sprite in a bottle. “The old Roger would have
responded. “Fine, bring one of those bottles out here and I will stick it where
the sun don’t shine.” How was I to know
that this fine dining establishment didn’t cater to the soda drinking crowd? I
figured that a fine dining establishment would want you to be inquisitive about
their beverage selection. I know. I should have been more in tuned with our
waiter’s feelings. This was probably a big step up from his last fine dining
gig. It would take a while getting used to serving Chicken Foofoo without pop
when you were used to slinging Big Macs and a supersized diet Coke with that.
Where did he think he was working New York? “Oh, I will
insult these people and be indignant with my 10% tip.” But wait there is more.
Our friends ordered the side salad with ranch dressing on the side; which we
promptly found out was “Hoosier gravy.” Everyone knows that is just plain
silly. Ranch dressing isn’t gravy until you mix some sausage fat with it.
However, I maintained. I breathed deep. I joked about it,
and managed to be gracious with the tip. It is nice to be able to fight the old
ways; to have mellowed just a little; to be able to almost understand that the
young man was trying to find his way in a competitive service industry.
For me, there are miles to go though. I know this because I
am looking forward to the day when my grandchildren ask me if I want to go to
the restaurant which shall not be named for a fine meal for my eightieth birthday
and I tell them, “No the last I heard they don’t serve fountain drinks there.”
Take care
Roger
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