Rest Day

Usually I have a book review or something about art in this space on Fridays. But I'm taking a rest today. It's been an intense week for work, and today is likely to be the most intense day of the intense week. I'd appreciate your prayers.

What I do have today is a photograph of my grandson. My caption would be "future blogger," but I'd be interested to see what you might say.

Photograph: Cameron Young by his mom Stephanie Young. Used with permission.

Finding "The One"

I first met the young woman who would become my wife on paper. Actually, on two pieces of paper.

During the Christmas break of my senior year in college, I spent the holidays with my family and then went back to school two weeks early. I was the new managing editor for the college newspaper, and I had a ton of work facing me – assigning reporters to beats, organizing editors, laying our plans for a new arts and entertainment section, figuring out photographer assignments – all the usual stuff.

A professor whose insight I valued had given me a list of five people whom he thought were the top reporters/writers in the class: Tom, Mary, Jeff, John and Janet. I had never met any of them. I had to assign the five and some 50 others to beats. Each soon-to-be reporter had submitted desired areas to cover for the paper.

Fifty-five people said they wanted to cover student government. Well, sure. I needed two. I had covered student government as a reporter, and it was the plum assignment, because it was almost a full-time job for two people (who also happened to have classes to attend).

So I looked at the five to determine which two would get the student government beat.

Janet’s requested beats caught my attention. She had asked for student government. And she asked for the religion beat. She was the only person who asked for the religion beat. No one in their mind asked for that. It might result in one story a semester. It never had news.

But if she wanted it, it was going to be hers. I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to browbeat some unwilling reporter into accepting it. (Why she wanted it is another story.)

And I gave her one of the two positions for student government.

Shortly before classes began, the new reporters started drifting into the editorial office, introducing themselves, finding out their beats, asking if I had anything for them to do. And I did, since the paper resumed publication before classes started.

Her first words to me were this: “Hi. I’m Janet Lowrey. Do you have anything for me to do?”

And my first words to her were: “Yes. I need a story on the new chemistry building.”

She went out and did the story.

The student government beat included covering meetings of the student assembly on Wednesday nights. She and the other student government reporter alternated each week. The meetings would be over by 9 or 9:30 p.m. Then the reporter would return to the editorial office to write the story.

Janet wasn’t a slow writer. But she was a painstaking, perfectionist writer. It became something of a ritual. At 11:45 p.m., I would walk into the typing lab and ask her for whatever she had. “I’m almost finished.” I’d nod. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” I’d say. “It won’t be,” she’d reply. After getting her story, I’d edit it, write the headline and fit it all into the layout, and then deliver all of the copy, headlines and photographs to the back shop for typesetting. I’d get to bed about 1:30 or 2.

In theory, the managing editor usually went home about 7 p.m., and the copy editors managed the editing, design and layout of the paper. But that semester was the semester of the great flu, and all the copy editors got it – and for weeks. Three of us escaped the illness – the editor, who focused on his editorial page and left the rest of the paper to me; the sport editor; and me. So I’d work to 1 or 1:30 in the morning, and then get up at 4:30 to get to the back shop to do the paper’s “paste-up.” It was a long semester. I was paid the princely sum of $10 an issue, which worked out to about 75 cents an hour.

But somewhere in there something happened. Three weeks after our initial conversation about the chemistry building, we were dating, and dating seriously. In fact, it was so serious that we were already talking about getting married. Yes, that was three weeks after we had met. It seemed way too fast, but it didn’t. It was as we both knew, if not from the first meeting, then not too long after that.

We met in Janaury and were married in August. That was 38 years ago.

And she’s still “the one.”

She’s also still a perfectionist.


This post is part of the blog carnival on “finding the one,” hosted by Bonnie Gray. To see more posts on the subject, please visit Faith Barista.

Top photograph: The One. Bottom photograph: The One with the grandson.

The Four Cardinals

No, it’s not about my hometown’s baseball team or officials in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. It’s about the four cardinal virtues. And as C.S. Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, that’s “cardinal” as in “pivotal.”

Prudence. Temperance. Justice. Fortitude.

They’re in short supply these days. They even sound so old-fashioned and dated. Two have taken on somewhat different meanings – Temperance became anti-alcohol back in the late 19th century and Justice these days is usually translated somewhere in the vicinity of “my rights.”

But they’re important, these four. They’re even more important than when C.S. Lewis first wrote about them.

In the 1940s, most people could still recognize and define them.

Today we think to have Prudence must mean you’re a prude.

And yet.

As a society, we are not so far gone that we can’t recognize the virtues. We instinctively know what Justice is – fairness, which, as Lewis says, includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness and keeping promises, among other things. Prudence – thinking out what you’re doing or planning to do and understanding what will result from it. Temperance is doing things in a measured, balanced way.

I like how Lewis describes Fortitude: “…Fortitude includes both kinds of courage – the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that ‘sticks it’ under pain. ‘Guts’ is perhaps the nearest modern English. You will notice, of course, that you cannot practice any of the other virtues very long without bringing this one into play.”

I also like that he capitalizes them. They are something beyond common nouns.

We live in a coarse culture, in a coarse time. Our elected officials embarrass us but we’ll keep reelecting them. (The problems with Congress are not new; it was Mark Twain who said that Judas Iscariot was nothing more than a premature congressman.) Our celebrities are, well, just that, celebrities, who behave as if popularity connotes wisdom and intelligence.

The differences between Christians and culture should be sharpening, but I see little of that. It’s more like we’re becoming more like the culture, not less. Making our music sound just like the music of popular culture isn’t going to make us relevant, but something else just might.

Something like living the cardinal virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude.


Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter have been hosting our discussion of Mere Christianity. To see more posts on this week’s chapter, “The ‘Cardinal Virtues,’” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Harlequin

He travels well in Italy,
Commedia Dell’Arte,
seeking never securing
his Columbine, flowered
name, flowered love, but
that’s what makes a love
story, a romance, that
always yearning never
achieving essence of the
emotional
physical
spiritual.

He slips into France and
then England, creating
the pantomine, bursting
upon footlights and fame,
popularity forcing his way
from the streets
to the playhouses and
that changes him, naturally
and unnaturally so that
his DNA is transmitted
by Barrie and Sennett and
Disney to Peter Pan and
Snow White and Cinderella
and even those slapstuck
Keystone Cops and
Keaton and Chaplin.
Chaplin, yes, of course,
especially Chaplin.

Yet I see you
Cezanne Harlequin
and I wonder
at the sadness
of Harlequin, or
the sadness
of Cezanne.

My wife and I spent a long Memorial Day weekend in Chicago. In the Impressionists’ section, the Art Institute was featuring a very small exhibit of Harlequin (1888-1890) by Paul Cezanne, loaned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. If you’re interested in a little of the history of the character of Harlequin, you can read about it at Wikipedia and The History of Pantomine.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see other poems submitted, please visit the site. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time today.

How I Spent

Stream-side cabins
twenty-five dollars a night
but then:

Smoke in the mountains
road signs resembling snakes
(curves ahead) (only curves ahead)
my father shifts to low.
Cool blanket evenings
in July, August, hiking
up trails designed for tourists
not hikers (but I could pretend),
to ascend, to see, finally
the valley below,
the land below.
I always feel closer to God
here, my mother says.
I like the black salamanders
in the streams.

This poem is submitted to the Warrior Poet Society, hosted by Jason Stasyszen, where the current prompt is “vacation.” To see more poems based on the prompt, please visit Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: Stream in the Smoky Mountains by Neal Floyd via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Machinist

Eyes focused,
intense, intent,
he works, his coordination
of eye, mind and hand
a delicate thing,
a learned thing,
a known without knowing
thing, a rhythm of the job,
of the work, the task.
He is content, he is satisfied,
even if he knows his name
will be printed
in the newspaper
only once.


This poem is submitted for One Shot Sunday hosted by One Stop Poetry. To read an interview with photographer Rob Hanson and to see other poems submitted, please visit the site.

Photograph: Machinist by Rob Hanson for One Stop Poetry. Used with permission.

The Best Boss I've Ever Had

Actually, I’ve had two best bosses. Except one wasn’t a boss.

I had just graduated from college and joined the staff of the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise as a copy editor. My “welcome to your new job” consisted of “here’s your chair and typewriter, and here are three pages for layout; don’t forget the headlines.” Today it would be called total immersion.

The staff seemed nice enough but was too busy to worry the new kid. When I had my pages done and headlines written, I rather tentatively asked where I should take them. “To the back shop,” was the reply. I did find the back shop, and then returned to my desk to find more pages waiting.

When it was dinnertime (which we called lunch, because our day began at 3 p.m. for the morning paper), one of the copy desk members – the guy designated as No. 2 – walked to where I was sitting and asked me to come to lunch with him.

His name was Richard, and he was about 12 years older than I was. He wasn’t my boss, but he did what a boss should – helped me learn the ropes. At dinner, and we had lots of dinners together, he told me about the paper, what to do and what to avoid, what reporters were totally reliable and what reporters weren’t, what to expect from my fellow copy desk editors, sources I could use to verify information.

I knew him for six weeks. One day he told me he was giving notice and going to one of the newspapers in Dallas. But the time he spent investing in me for those six weeks helped me – and the newspaper – enormously. Because six weeks after that, because of staff turnover, the new kid had become the new No. 2, and effectively No. 1 because No. 1 had a drinking problem.

Fast forward 10 years. I was working in St. Louis, and had just been promoted to a new position in a business division. My boss, a guy named Tom, was totally straightforward: “You should know what you’re doing. If you don’t, ask. If I’m not around, do what you think is best. If you make a mistake, I’ll tell them I authorized it.”

Then he threw me into the pool. And I figured out how to swim. He was always around with a life preserver if I needed it.

He was much like Richard at the Enterprise. Tom had been a reporter for years before becoming a PR guy, and he and Richard shared that no-nonsense, damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead attitude. I worked for Tom for a year until they transferred him into the corporate division.

Both Tom and Richard knew how to enchant employees. They certainly enchanted me, and made an enormous impact on my professional life.


Over at The High Calling, we’re reading Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. This week’s discussion is on “How to Use Pull Technology” and “How to Enchant Your Employees.” To see more posts on the book, please visit The High Calling.