A Day of Shining Eyes

Well, he was a gentleman who came into my life at a time when—as he would put it—my eyes were not shining. How could they? I was waking at five every morning, serving the Gods of corporate America, and straggling home at six or seven, to eat dinner, wash dishes, and put myself to bed. So after five days of that, how was I doing on Saturdays?

Wait—according to policy, I had to work every other Saturday morning, since I was “management,” which meant that I had an entirely different view about the time clock. Why? Because if you were paid by the hour, you had to punch in. Right—but you also got to punch out! To be management meant that you had to arrive earlier than your boss, and stay later. So in fact, you never punched out.

Saturdays? Well, I son learned that I couldn’t go to the movies, since I had no emotional reserves left. And that meant that a sad movie would plunge into an abyss of despair, and anything remotely funny would shoot me into a stratosphere of hilarity.

Do I have to tell you about Sundays?

So I had happened, in my Walmart years, on Ben Zander giving a TED talk about shining eyes, and I had been impressed, so much so that I sent a link to the director of Human Resources, my big boss. Characteristically, this was ignored, and I went on my way: willingly putting myself on the treadmill, until it was decreed that I got off. The severance pay was good; the freedom was better.

Confession—I was both in and out of corporate America, since my job was to hide myself in a room upstairs—away from almost everybody—and convince little groups of people that they could speak English. This, of course, was a joke—since I had no formal training as a teacher, only ten or fifteen years of teaching, during which I had convinced everybody that I was an excellent teacher. Oh, everybody but me.

I had, you see, disproved Barnum and Bailey, or whoever it was: I had fooled everybody all of the time! Wow! So what to do, that first Monday morning, when I woke up jobless? Lie on the couch? Watch some TV? I opted for the beach.

Well, that meant a walk, and that meant seeing people, and that meant saying hello to people—people whom I would see every day, so they became, well, not friends, but friendly faces. If you smile and say buenos dias about thirty times in the morning, eventually your day becomes a buen dia.

So the exercise stimulated the brain, and I would be writing as I trotted home (I didn’t really swim, I plunged into the ocean and paddled about for five minutes—just enough time to become part of the blue sky, the green water, the golden sand….) So I would write and go off to a teaching gig I had picked up.

Two things happened: I encountered the most difficult student of my twenty-year career. The student ended up teaching me more than I did her, since she put me to the test at every turn: did I really believe that I don’t teach, but instead create a space where learning can occur? Every other student had met me, if not halfway, at least part of the way. This student—though perfectly nice and quite motivated—could be derailed but the slightest mote of dust that I blew in her path. Nor could I lift her back onto the track—that she had to do herself.

In the end, she ended up speaking quite well: another person who had proved me wrong that I was a failure as a teacher.

Well, there was work to do: I had put in my 10,000 hours of practice at the cello, so in theory I should have been quite proficient. Was I? Yes, at home, alone. But with other people around? I travelled through performance anxiety and was firmly entrenched in performance panic.

I’m lucky—however much I piss and moan about the things I have had to do in life—who else do you know who has delivered death to his mother?—I have a lot of energy. After a week of intense struggle, I came out the other side. I was and wasn’t a musician; rather, I leant my body and my fingers to the cello, and something or somebody played. And the less I got in the way, the better it would all be. I had gotten to that Zen state: the playing is good today, GREAT! The playing is bad today, GREAT!

I was treating myself—and gee, it only took five decades!—as well as I had treated my students. And with much the same results: when I play Bach suites in the café in  the afternoon, it always comes out OK. Some days it takes a bit longer, but it always comes. And if people drift in and listen? Perfect!

Well, I spent the morning getting pre-admitted for a cataract surgery next week. Right, it took four hours, during which—typical gringo—I had completely streamlined the process in my head so that I, and everybody else, could have sailed in and out in an hour. Then I began chatting with a woman, and telling her the story of my father: he had had to have the same operation, and had a particular terror of anybody doing anything to his eyes. He was, in fact, panicking, when he called the nurse to confess and plead for more time. Fortunately, the nurse knew just what to say…

“…Jack, we’re gonna give you so much Valium, you won’t give a shit!”

So we laughed about that, and then I spoke to the anesthesiologist. He asked: what did I do?

So I told him: I’m a writer, I wrote a memoir of my mother, and how she died. Actually, I just told him: she was old and feeble and losing her mind, so she stopped eating and drinking, and died a wonderful death at home, with the cat on her bed. So the doctor’s eyes shot up, and he wanted to read the book. Hey, good deal!

Then I went to the café, where I told Amir what Jorge, the manager, had said about him: he’s an excellent worker, he wants to learn everything, he really helps a lot. So Amir was so pleased he sold me coffee to go, but then realized his mistake. I told him: I’ve had a lot worse things happen to me.

Then I watched Ben Zander and realized: it’s been a day of shining eyes!

Mine included….