Miss Suzy

I am four years old and we live in a tiny house in San Jose, California. The name of the street is Singleton, and my best mate Dax is also my cousin and we often pretend to shoot the airplanes flying by with our finger guns. I envy his big house and his many shiny new Star Wars toys. I have Luke Skywalker with the blue lightsaber coming out of his arm. He has the Death Star.

Today my mother and I just dropped off my father in the early hours of the morning when the sun is long in the East and everything we see is gold. I’m tired this morning but my mother is beautiful and she makes me crispy cinnamon tortillas again and I listen to her fat tummy and she tells me my brother’s name will be David Nicolas. She then says she likes David the King but not David the Name so we will just call him Nick.

My father comes home bringing Orange and Grape Crush again, but I don’t drink too much because the carbonation is cruel in my mouth but I want to because the orange flavor is ridiculously sweet and terribly artificial and I am rarely allowed to drink this much soda at one time. He takes me outside where he is working on the little yellow Toyota Corona, Betsy was her name, and I step on the gas because I thought that would help him but he yells at me and I don’t know why. I think I frightened him.

My mom reads Miss Suzy to me for the dozenth time and I recite parts of the book to her. Miss Suzy is kind yet timid but she has help from the brave soldiers and everything works out for her.

Soon I will begin walking to Hillsdale School. It’s right down the street and I’m not scared but I always have nightmares about getting lost on the way home so maybe I am scared. I’m the smartest kindergartener in the class, smarter than most of the older kids, so the teacher is always proud to call on me even though I rarely raise my hand. We are learning Spanish together but I will forget most of it before the first grade.

I love my parents.

Descriptive Practice - Not a True Story

My mother’s flower garden sat at the top of her ranch in upper Santa Monica. The air was always clean and crisp there, possibly because of the ocean breeze wafting in every evening. My mother passed away in 1975, and we sold her home to some investors, but the memories are as clear as they ever were.

She had about a dozen orchids that would bloom beautifully late spring for about a week then mock us the rest of the year with their ugly brownish bulbs. I had always fantasized about tearing them out and replacing them with something simple and dependable like lilies. Mother didn’t care when they bloomed, as she would always say, “it’s not the length of time that we see them, but that we see them at all.” Mother was about as present as the orchids in our young lives.

When she did make time for her four children, we would spend most of it in and around this garden of hers. We called it a flower garden, but it was just our enormous backyard. We had the bright green spring grass that was barely high enough to cover the ants, but it felt nice on our feet. She called it her garden because she always imagined herself a Victorian dilettante, entertaining society while grazing on fresh fruit and old cheese. While she was alive we complained about her frequent visits to this boyfriend or that suitor or this function or that commitment, but after she passed we only remembered our times in the flower garden.

Vulnerability

Last Friday, my boss invited us all to work and offered us food and talked to us regarding vulnerability. He's new here after our last boss left abruptly a couple of weeks ago. I guess his schtick is vulnerability, because vulnerability is the path to creativity, innovation, and something else that I can't remember at the moment.

I'm a math teacher, but I do know a bit about vulnerability, so maybe I know about creativity.

The ironic thing is, he didn't demonstrate to us anything even remotely resembling vulnerability. "If you want to innovate, you must be vulnerable," he said and I agree with this. Trying new things is risky. Did he try anything new? Not really. He had us get into groups and write things on paper about what we wanted to see (at work, of course) and what we didn't want to see. Then he burned the things we didn't want to see. I've written on paper before and I've burned things before. I thought he was going to read those and I wrote on one, "Organizational vulnerability starts at the top." Oh well.

Did he say anything personal about himself, as in something that would make him vulnerable? Definitely not. Now this is something I can say "I know about that!", having been a member of the Mortifyingly Embarassing and Uncommonly Shameful Addictions Club for the past 19 years (actually longer, since I was literally a member before I knew I was a member).

If I were an alcoholic or a drug addict I don't think it would be as difficult as admitting to what I am actually addicted to, but admitting to these would definitely make me vulnerable. Admitting to a nervous breakdown, or to not having finished college in a room filled with college graduates would make me vulnerable. Maybe he overslept one time? Nope. There was nothing like that on Friday. Not even any allusion to any hint of a reference to any kind of weakness was mentioned. At all.

All of which left me kind of sad. I've been vulnerable before. It does take courage, or stupidity. I'm still not sure which. I wanted to be in a room with vulnerable people. I wanted to know that I wasn't alone. I know I'm not, in other venues, but at work, I am.

I have failed as no one I know ever has. I am a teacher in a room of other teachers, only I am older and have more years in the business, with far less to show for it. No one ever wonders why. I don't want them to wonder why, but I do want them to.

I don't want them to wonder, "Hey Mr Cortez has been teaching for 15 years, so why is he working part-time here? What has he been doing all this time? What happened to him?" Actually I do want them to wonder, but only if they are going to ask me directly. Otherwise I will be even more alone than I am now.

What have I been doing all this time? Trying hard to not be vulnerable. I tried to steel myself against failure. I didn't think I was capable of the kind of failure I have failed at, even though I failed at many things before I failed the really, really, really fantastic failure. I failed at sports mainly, and trying to be cool.

Not believing I would ever fail didn't work so well, so now I'm doing the opposite. I'm basically embracing failure. Every week I meet with other guys who have failed and we talk about our failures during the week. Sometimes we succeed and we talk about that. Once in a while we notice some guy hasn't been to our weekly meeting in a while and we hopefully conclude he just doesn't fail anymore. (Sometimes I secretly think the reason is exactly the opposite). Our group is all about vulnerability. It's the only place I can be myself, at least for now. I have trust issues. For me to be vulnerable is the most difficult thing possible, but I have to do it. I have to learn to trust not just other people, but myself.

After you've failed as much as I have, you don't believe success is even possible. I don't believe in any kind of personal success. I don't trust myself and I don't trust God and I categorically, emphatically, do not trust other people. At this point, where I am at my lowest, I have to risk the remnants of my sanity and self-worth and take the bravest step possible: I have to expose my failures to other men and be vulnerable.

I have to do this every week. More than once my lack of trust has been justified, but recently I've been able to address this directly. Most of the time I am able to breathe deeply and sink back down in my chair in relief. This week, these guys aren't berating me for being a schmuck. Thank God for them. Maybe I can trust them after all. Maybe I can trust God. Maybe I can trust myself.

No, Mr Boss didn't show any kind of vulnerability, and I don't think he's really going to get the kind of innovation and creativity he wants, but this isn't Apple and I only make $20 an hour so what does he expect anyway?