There's a shift happening at work. I went in last night to put in my 3 hours and walked through an empty section of the store. The last day I worked (5 days ago?), there were kayaks and canoes and life jackets and car racks crammed into the corner of the store where my department (optics) lives. Last night, nothing, just open space where a lone janitor shampooed the carpet.
The seasons are changing. As the leaves turn orange and yellow, the summer sports of camping and hiking and paddling condense to make room for snow sports. During this transition, the pace of work has slowed considerably. Last night, a total of perhaps 10 customers visited the counter. I helped a man purchase a watch for his wife, a woman purchase an altimeter for her husband's birthday, a mother pick up a cadence monitor for her marathon-running son, and a bubbly woman from Colorado purchase a pair of $120 Oakley sunglasses.
In between helping customers, I cleaned the glass display cases, straightened up the maps placing them back into their cubbies, and rearranging the cheap sunglasses on their awkward display stand.
When I was first hired, Steve, the man I shadowed for a day, told me the sunglasses display was the bane of his existence. They looked pretty inconsequential to me, but after a month of work, I get it. The display stand is tall and thin. The sunglasses sit on wire holders shaped in a way that holds the nose piece and the arms of the glasses much like a nose and ears might hold them in place on a person. There are about 50 glasses lined up in a long row and four rows in one display. When there isn't much to do, straightening up the display becomes my meditation.
Move one set of glasses and the ones above and below teeter off their precarious positions. Get one row straight, spin the display, and four or five pairs slide off their holders. If there are no customers for me to help, the rearranging of the sunglasses display stand can take a good half hour of patience.
And there are two display stands.
As a former teacher, I find the simplicity of this task refreshing. I was reminded of how complex teaching can be when this morning, Ann, ran around the house, the phone tucked under her ear, trying to arrange a bus for her class field trip, find her house keys, and make a lunch. When she got off the phone we had a curt exchange.
"When will you be home tonight?" I asked
"I don't know," she responded a bit frustrated.
"Why? Do you have a meeting?" I was curious.
"No! I have too much to do!" she snapped.
"Jeez, I get it. I just wanted to know if I was going to see you before I went to work." Now I was frustrated.
I do get it, of course. She's at the point in September when a thousand of pieces of the puzzle are laid out before her waiting for her to join them together into something cohesive. The kids don't get the rhythm of the classroom yet, parents are concerned for one reason or the other, and there are so many details to plan -- the ecosystem science kits and their live terrestrial crickets, field trips to the Cedar River Watershed to see a "real life" ecosystem, and planning for next week's Curriculum Night when parents will bombard her with questions about math and writing, all of them trying to get a one-on-one conference with her so they can explain how special their child is.
I get it. I'm rearranging sunglasses, dusting counter tops, and placing maps into their holders doing those normal things humans do -- breathing, laughing, checking the clock to see when my shift ends -- and Ann's juggling balls underwater.
The other day I said to Ann, "You know what the biggest difference is between teaching and working in retail?"
"The pay?" she smirked.
"Well, that's different in one regard, but actually it's that when I'm not at work, no one really notices, no one really cares. Work continues without me. No one is there thinking, 'Where IS she and why isn't she helping?' With teaching, everything depends on you. You're like the center of a wheel and all the spokes depend on your being there, solid and in one place, functioning smoothly. In retail, I have become the spoke and someone else is the hub."
There is Zen in all of this. When I find myself feeling slightly bored, I pull out the towel and window cleaner and methodically clean smudges off glass cases. Inevitably, someone needs my help or has a question, but while I'm waiting, I can get into a rhythm of polishing the glass in circular motions. I can gather up the map sheets and find their place in the storage case. I can lift up one pair of sunglasses back into their holder and watch three more slip out of place. And when the glass is clean, the maps put away, and the sunglasses straightened, I can let it all go when a customer approaches to pull out five pairs of sunglasses or four different maps, smudging the display case in the process.
There was no letting go while teaching. Not for me, any way. I held it all and the weight of it was exhausting. I see the exhaustion in Ann already. She's much more relaxed than I ever was, though like today, she has her moments. It's a time of transition for her as well, from the slow days of summer to the insanely chaotic days of September.
I get it.
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