Sam and Company

Now then, having straightened out the Mormon Church—rescind that excommunication, boys!—I can get right down to work on the Walton family.

Full disclosure: I worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and was treated well, even when they decided to cut me loose (they gave me a severance package that was not legally required). And though someone once described founder Sam Walton as “the world’s nicest guy until he gets down to putting you out of business”—well, why not? This is business, guys, not a Sunday school class: do you think Macy’s isn’t going after Bloomingdale’s?

There were things I liked about Sam. He squeezed that dollar till the eagle squawked, once picking up a muffler he found on the side of the road, since he was mufflerless himself at the time. Did the guys at the shop sigh heavily, throw the damn thing away, install a new one, and never tell Sam? Think that’s how that story went….

There were the reporters who asked why he was still riding around in the famous red truck, which sits squarely in the Walton museum, or visitors’ center, or whatever it is. “Get a decent car, for God’s sake, Sam!” His response? Something like where was he gonna put his four hunting dogs in a Rolls Royce?

Well, I was thinking about all this yesterday, when I read an article Susan had sent me about the Walton Family Foundation. True, it’s from a website called Liberal America, which tells you right off the bat what song this choir will be singing, but the question is: is it true? Because the headline reads:

New Report Suggests Walmart Heirs’ Foundation Is A Massive Tax Dodge

Ouch! And a further ouch when I read this:

An analysis of 23 years of foundation tax returns revealed that Sam Walton’s heirs only gave only 0.04 percent of their combined net worth to their own foundation–not even a fraction of what other wealthy Americans give to charity.

The article goes on to say that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett give over 36% and 27%, respectively, of their net worths to charity. And Rob Walton? You know, chairman of the board, Sam’s eldest son? He hasn’t given anything.

OK—let’s let Walmart speak:

Sam Walton believed in the power of opportunity to change individual lives and communities, and that anyone through hard work and determination can achieve the American dream, something he personally experienced. His wife, Helen, understood the importance of giving back. In fact, one of her favorite sayings was “It’s not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.” Their combined vision has led the Walton family to contribute more than $5 billion to charitable organizations and causes and continues today to drive the work of the Walton Family Foundation. 

In 2013, the foundation invested more than $325 million in K-12 education reform, freshwater and marine conservation and quality of life initiatives in our home region. Family members carried forward a philanthropic approach of sustained and focused giving, believing that it is the key to achieving lasting change, and they continue to challenge the foundation to find new, innovative solutions as well as measure impact from the individual grant level to the effectiveness of overall strategies.

Here’s a view from the middle, Forbes Magazine:

The Walton family is America’s richest, worth some $140 billion between them and longtime fixtures of the Forbes 400 list thanks to their approximate 50% ownership of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer.

Their Walton Family Foundation, established by the late Sam and Helen Walton in 1988, is considered a heavyweight in the world of nonprofits with just under $2 billion in assets.

Granted, the Forbes article was based, as was Liberal America’s, on a report by the Walmart 1%, which is a project of Making Change at Walmart, which doesn’t sound rabidly pro-Walmart. But it’s still Forbes, which presumably vets things….

All right, how does the Walmart Family Foundation match up with other foundations? According to Wikipedia, the world’s largest fund is something out of the Netherlands called the Stichting INGKA Foundation with a cool thirty-six billion. Next up are Bill and Melinda's, with 34.6 billion. And the Walton Family Fund?

Not on the list…

Yes, that list only covers the top 31 (no idea why they chose that number…) and number 31, with 3 billion—that’s a billion more than Walton—is the Kresge Foundation.

Kresge?

Could it be?

Run back to Wikipedia:

In 1924, with an initial gift of $1.6 million, Sebastian Kresge established The Kresge Foundation in Detroit. Twelve years earlier, he and partner John G. McCrory opened the first 5-and-10-cent store, and parlayed the concept and operations into a chain of stores that were incorporated as the S.S. Kresge Company. Many years later the enterprise became known as Kmart.

What would Sam think?

When the Jungle Gets Taken Away

OK, somebody figured it out just as I had. And did it better, went further, and is—according to him—getting great results.

Stephen Ilardi, a clinical psychologist at the University of Kansas, has a thesis: as a species, we’ve lived over 99% of our existence as hunter-gatherers, and our body is designed for that experience. But what’s happened? Well, several millennia ago, we started agriculture. And then eight generations ago, we all cooked up the Industrial Revolution—and that’s completely screwed us up. Why? Because our DNA, and thus our bodies, hasn’t had time to adapt to the change—we’re still in the jungle, ready to fight or flee at the sound of a twig snap. What do we get instead? The morning traffic jam, the eight hours of computer screen, and fast food on the way home from it all.

I knew even at the time that the life I was living was unsustainable. In my brief sojourn into corporate America—hey, I’ll try anything once!—I could see what it was doing to me, and my coworkers. I would arrive at 6:30 in the morning, caffeinated but unfed. I would scrounge for food, and then go down to see my students, who would tell me they were “stressed.”

This struck me as curious, since all of the physical signs of stress—flushing, narrow eyes, hyperventilation, etc.—were absent. In fact, my students more closely resembled zombies that an animal about to fight.

But, in fact, the students were right—they were so stressed that they could no longer respond to the adrenalin that was coursing through them. Just getting the kids up, fed, washed and dressed, and dropping them off at school had been enough stress for the week. And so they had shut down.

I took fifteen minutes for lunch, which was often “food” from the vending machines. I worked until 4:30, when the decision had to be made: sneak out “early” or wait for 5PM? It wasn’t quite stated, but the official times for management were 7:30 to 5:30. I had done my nine hours plus given up my hour for lunch, virtually, but still it felt, somehow, like cheating.

That I was thinking this way—that working almost ten hours a day wasn’t enough—is to tell you how sick I had become. I discovered, after a year or two this, that I couldn’t see movies on Saturdays: I was still too wrought up from the week; I was emotionally a train wreck. I forced myself to get off the bus a mile before home, and walk by the side of the ocean. But many times I couldn’t—I was too tired.

And so, when the ax fell, I was already exhausted. But there was a twist—as toxic as the environment had been, there had been one huge benefit: I was deeply loved by many people. People who surrounded me, people I saw constantly. And then, the Monday after the lay off, I was alone in my apartment.

I knew what I was going to do, and I did it, hard as it felt.

I went to the beach. I listened to Bach on the way, Beethoven on the way home. I smiled and said hello to every stranger I met. I did it because I knew—if I sat down on the couch, I would never get up.

I had read—guys who lose their jobs gather in coffee shops, because they’ve gotta see somebody. My coffee shop is a block and a half away.

Without knowing that I was doing it, I essentially adopted Ilardi’s six-step treatment program:

1. Exercise
2. Sleep
3. Omega-3 rich diet
4. Social connections
5. Sunlight
6. Meaningful work

Yesterday, I had done two posts, I had fixed the leaky faucet, and I had played a Bach suite. Right—time to trot to the beach, which I did. And noted, as I was floating in the water, a group of people in bad new clothes who were clustering around a woman wearing Khaki pants and a navy blue polo. A photographer, obviously professional, was setting up his equipment.

It hit me—it was a group of Wal-Mart associates from the stores; Wal-Mart has the habit of picking associates to “model” their clothes for the shoppers. Ostensibly, it’s to give employees a boost in morale; cynics suggest that Sam Walton was too cheap to pay for models.

And so they had been corralled and taken to the beach, and were staring glumly out at me. I, of course, was considering the rich irony of it. They had jobs but couldn’t frolic in the water—no, their job was the beach, or at least to stand and look attractive by it. And I? No job, no problem.

I wrote recently that after two days of not taking a medicine for depression / anxiety, I was a quivering wreck. So why, since I am essentially following Ilard’s treatment plan, am I not “cured?”

Well, I read the answer to that several years ago. Chronic depression, or depression that has gone untreated too long, produces hippocampal volume loss—a fancy way to say that the brain has been permanently scarred.

Or has it? All of the work in neurology nowadays is suggesting that the brain is remarkably plastic—things that we thought were hardwired and unchangeable can be rewired and changed. So it may be that, after 30 years of healthy living have balanced 30 years of unhealthy living, I can cautiously attempt to get off antidepressants.

I was lucky—the medicines worked for me, and on the first try. And I have no deep-seated dislike of medicines, and no burning wish to get off the drugs. What I do have, fiercely, is one simple, overriding wish…

…never to be depressed again.

Wal-Mart Joins the Parade

OK—so they did it.

It’s a little late for me, since Wal-Mart laid me off over two years ago, but it will be great for the rest of the gay and lesbian associates who are still clinging to their job. Now, those associates can put their husbands, wives, domestic partners on the health plan.

What happened? Did a great liberal wave sweep through the corporate home offices in Bentonville, Arkansas?

Nah—it happened as Mr. Fernández said it would. It got too complicated, for one thing, to figure out what state allowed for domestic partners, what state allowed for marriage equality, when one state would institute marriage equality. Oh, and what to do about a married gay guy living across the river in Minnesota but working in a store in Wisconsin?

That was one thing. The other thing? Talent—and how to attract it. OK, retail is not like academia, which arguably has a higher percent of gays and lesbians than retail. But you’d be surprised—I was—by the number of LGBT folk in high positions in Wal-Mart. And how do you attract a key person away from Costco when Sam’s won’t put her or his partner on the health plan?

That—if memory serves—was also the gist of a letter sent to the Wisconsin legislature by the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. Yes, the UW’s History Department has traditionally been very strong. But several high-powered historians had turned down the UW to go teach at Harvard, since Massachusetts was the first state to allow gay marriage, and remains in the vanguard.

Or what do you do when you’re transferring an employee from Massachusetts to Mississippi? His compensation package is going to change, if he can no longer put his husband on the health plan.

Lastly, and Wal-Mart admits it—they held out until the very end. Of the 30 top retailers, only two (Publix and a chain I’ve never heard of) are not offering benefits to same-sex couples.

I wish there were any pleasure in this for me, since I battled for several years to put Raf on the health plan. Instead, he paid several thousand dollars more to be covered under Cobra, when his old job folded. And he is now paying several thousand more from his old job to cover me, since my job folded, and Raf’s current employer—like Wal-Mart—doesn’t allow him to put me on the health plan.

But it’s hardly the money issue that makes me so sour on hearing this news.

I defended the company when I worked for it, for nearly 10 years. Does it pay its workers badly? Yes—and with the exception of Costco—so do all the other retailers. Does it have a disproportionate number of part-time workers? Again, no more so than the rest. Does it fight tooth and nail against unions? Absolutely.

We would have, in fact, seminars on what legally we could say to employees on the topic of unions. No, we couldn’t threaten to fire either individuals or close the store if an employee advocated for unions, or if the store joined one. But we could explain the company policy, which went something like, “Wal-Mart has the open door policy, which is a way to assure that management and workers communicate and come to an agreement.”

Well, I used that policy to press Wal-Mart to put Raf on the health plan. And, be fair, I was listened to, treated respectfully, and told “no.” Be more fair—the policy only promises that you’ll be heard, not that you’ll get what you want.

The problem I have is the strong-armed tactics. Ten current and former employees were arrested in front of the Washington DC offices of Wal-Mart, recently. And even worse, some 60 or 70 associates have been fired or disciplined for traveling to Bentonville during the annual meeting to protest conditions in the stores.

And Sam Walton would be reeling in his grave at the thought of employees risking their jobs to bus into Arkansas to raise grievances, while the top management was having what is essentially a huge party. Why? Because the Walton family owns about 60% of the stock. So yeah, they have to have an annual meeting—big deal.

Oh, and that 60% of the stock? That’s equivalent to the amount of money owned by the bottom 40% of the American people.

So would Sam Walton be at the party, or would he be outside, listening.

No question in my mind….      

Phooey on Culture

Yes, I said that.

I thought, having spent most of a lifetime trying to learn the cello, that I knew what culture was. It was no big mystery, in the fifties and sixties.

Culture was sitting behind Mrs. Steenbock’s beehive hairdo on Saturday nights as the Madison Symphony, unseen but at least heard, played Beethoven. Or going to the Elvehjem and seeing oil paintings.

Well, Wal-Mart taught me many things, including what culture is.

They were, in fact not so much big as incessant on it. The company cheer was everywhere—I once organized a little spontaneous cheer at the coffee machine in the lobby. There were five of us waiting to stick in the fifty cents that the machine turned into coffee, and nobody was much doing anything. “The cheer,” I exclaimed, “we can do the cheer!” So we did.

In addition, we routinely provided the formulaic answer to the question, “¿Cómo se siente?” or “how are you feeling?” (The answer, by the way, was “Super Bien, u, ah, ayi, YES!”)

And there were people who got it, dug it, loved it. My boss told me the story of how stunned she was, two weeks into her life at Wal-Mart, to be at an outdoor restaurant with a group from Sam’s Club. The manager of the restaurant mentioned that he shopped at Sam’s, and said, “hey, what is that thing you guys do every morning with the shouting and the clapping?” And yes, the group stood up and did all THREE cheers for the patrons in the restaurant.

And Sam—that would be Mr. Walton—was big on culture. If we can keep our culture, he said, then the business will take care of itself.

In the end, it got ridiculous. Culture, I used to tell them, is not a cheer or a recited mantra produced on cue. It’s more about the actual rules that govern the company and the way people interact. And it doesn’t matter how many talks you give about the ten-foot rule, if the president doesn’t say hello to the rest of us (and he didn’t)—that’s the culture.

So now—trawling for anything to write about today—I read the interesting fact that the president of Zappos is ardent about the company culture that he will FIRE anyone who doesn’t fit.

To Puerto Rican eyes, this seems crazy. Perhaps because in Puerto Rico, you can only be fired for cause—because you did something wrong—and not at will. But there’s something else as well.

We are—sorry—much more cynical than the average gringo. You guys up there are horrified when a politician gets caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Down here?

Most of us don’t even lift an eyebrow.

So somehow it’s a little easier to imagine people buying in to a corporate culture in Iowa, say.

And Zappos does take it seriously. 480 pages seriously, in fact. That’s the size of the annual company Culture Book, an unedited affair derived from the employees themselves. Everybody hired has to spend a month in the customer loyalty program, which included two weeks of talking to customers in the call center. And of course, there’s the 2,000$ offer to quit that’s made in the first week after the training.

OK, now we come to core values. Zappos, like Wal-Mart has ‘em. And here they are:

Deliver WOW Through Service

Embrace and Drive Change

Create Fun and A Little Weirdness

Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded

Pursue Growth and Learning

Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication

Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

Do More With Less

Be Passionate and Determined

Be Humble

Hey, pass me the Pepto-Bismol, would you?

Nor am I the only person to say this. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book about it—Smile or Die—and the billion-dollar motivation industry that caters to corporations with glum employees.

Everybody’s gotta be happy—or in Zappos’ terms, fun and a little weird. But she points out that a culture that enforces one mood only may have a problem when the mood doesn’t fit the situation.

Remember the banking crisis four years ago? Ehrenreich argues that everybody jumped on the bandwagon, everybody was a team player, everybody was thinking positively. What was needed, of course, was a Cassandra—somebody screaming that the situation was crazy.

As well, constantly forcing yourself into a positive mood erodes your ability to detect your real mood. A deadening of the affect takes place.

I saw it all the time on the faces of the Wal-Mart people. I’ll do a lot to keep this job—sit in a cold, arid environment, cope with demanding bosses, make impossible budgets.

Just don’t ask me to smile! 

Individual and Mass Madness

We heard it with annoying regularity, the bromide about “thinking outside the box,” so we did what any sensible person would do.

The Puerto Rican “no.”

“Well, I’ve lived in England, Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, so I know at least four ‘noes.’ But the Puerto Rican ‘no’ is the only one I can’t do anything about.” Words a friend said to me, years ago.

And that would be?

“You ask for something, and it’s instantly agreed to. Absolutely! No problem! And then nothing happens. You protest, and the process repeats. You beg, you cajole, you cry, you scream, you threaten. All to no effect. Nothing happens…. And you can’t have a rational discussion because they keep agreeing!”

An exaggeration, of course, but there is some truth to it.

Maybe it was that just some Puerto Ricans practiced the “no”—others didn’t.

But those who did, did it almost reflexively.

The multitudes of you who check your computers scores of times daily—awaiting a new post!—will know about the ten-foot rule, so beloved of Sam Walton. You had to smile, greet, and offer help (if in the stores) to EVERY customer within ten feet.

All part of that Wal-Mart culture!

Well, it was also part of the culture—the real one, that is—to pay lip-service and leave.

Well, the lips were pretty convincing, that 10-minute-really-half-hour weekly meeting of Human Resources. How that lady talked! The service those lips provided! She virtually role-played Sam W. challenging us to do the ten-foot rule!

She left to go visit the stores. I trailed behind her. I smiled and greeted.

Bet you know who didn’t!  

So I took it all seriously, sort of. And by chance or design, I thought outside the box in at least two ways.  First physically, when I could bear no more and had to leave the madness behind and look at iguanas. And second, creatively, when I had my spate of ten brilliant ideas daily and had to go tell someone about it.

I realize now what that slight but perceptible rise in shoulder level meant….

Well, I suppose if there is a Puerto Rican no, there may be a Wal-Mart no, as well. If so, it was generally postceded (well, look, what about preceded?) by the proper noun “Marc.”

Though some of my ideas were really very good.

Did you know that you should keep fruits strictly segregated from meats?

Logical, really—how many times have you picked up a package of meat, and gotten a sticky, bloody hand for the effort?

Right—and where is the produce department in most stores? Right by the entrance.

Which means that almost inevitably you’ll have to put the leaking meat packages over or near the fruits. (By the way, you probably should use the little baby seat for fruits and vegetables….)

Well, that came out at one of the monthly meetings, during which we were routinely peppered with the question ¿cómo se siente?—how you feeling!—to which we would mechanically roar “¡Super bien!, oooh, ahhh, ay, YES!”

That’s culture, you see!

(Get why I was out behind the building?)

Well, I got to work on that problem! Hey, don’t we have a responsibility to our customers? Aren’t we an industry leader? As Wal-Mart moves, so moves the country!

And it was gonna start right here, in Puerto Rico! Yeah, we were gonna be the pioneers in an adventure that would save millions of lives, and it was starting here, right here, not just in Puerto Rico, or in Caguas, but in the creatively explosive atmosphere of Marc Newhouse’s classroom!

Gentlemen—we gotta redesign the shopping cart!

“Look,” I was exclaiming to the head of Loss Prevention, “this is what we can do. Put a little basket with a picture of a banana—here, I drew it—on the right side of the cart. Now, we got another little basket—got a burger on that one—on the left side of the cart! See! Look, this is the redesigned shopping cart, called a SaftiCart, which is a very good name, if I do say so. Just look!”

He barely glanced.

Well, at least he didn’t tell me to throw the plans in the wastebasket as I left….

Still think it was a good idea, though.

It was the world of the corporate no. And to be fair, not all of my ideas were quite so good.

“Listen, I got this plan to absolutely ensure that we get the bonus EVERY year.”

Well, the bonus was quite a juicy plum, especially for the already well compensated. So it did get the CEO of Wal-Mart Puerto Rico, Inc.’s attention.

I had just finished telling him that I was legally married to a guy and Wal-Mart needed to put Raf on the medical plan.

Thought to lighten the air in the room….

“We build an extra Sam’s Club and an extra SuperCenter somewhere, but we don’t tell Bentonville! That way it’s pure gravy! They can’t expect us to make any money off a store they don’t know exists, can they? So all the profit goes straight to the bank! And bang into your pocket, at the end of the fiscal year!”

He was puzzled, but painfully earnest.

I kept trying.

“Well, the gringos are hardly gonna run around the island, actually counting the stores, are they? Come on!”

He was a very powerful, probably very rich guy.

From Colombia.

And so had no use for the Puerto Rican “no” (if it exists…).

No, Marc!

Gotta be photoshopped, but fun to think about, anyway….

Wonderful wonderful people

Confession—I spent seven years hectoring my students on rule number one of writing….

Consider the reader.

What does he know? What does he need or want to know? It’s not about you, the writer. It’s all about the reader.

Yup, banged that drum for seven years as loudly as I could!

And then?

Was completely deaf to it.

I wrote a book, you see, all about life and death and iguanas and some other stuff. Then, I concluded it with my getting laid off at Wal-Mart. I mentioned throwing pencils at the students, about not going back to say farewell to my room, about not getting to say farewell to my students.

Well, I sent off drafts to people, and people mostly liked it. Not surprising; is a friend gonna write and say, “Jeez Marc, you’ve written a dog! Couldn’t get past the first chapter!”?

OK—the book is coming out on Saturday. We set up—my partner in literature and I—a little page on Facebook. There was a sample chapter. And then I realized. I talked about the building. I talked about the iguanas behind the building. I certainly mentioned that Wal-Mart cheer!

What didn’t I do?

Mention what in the world I was doing at Wal-Mart in the first place….

Marc? Duh…..

Didn’t bother my friendly readers—they know the story. But wouldn’t a stranger be a little confused?

So here’s what I should have written.

Nothing was more improbable in my life as the fact that, every day between 6:30 and 7AM, I walked up concrete steps, ducked the dive-bombing grackles, passed the alarming cars, and entered the Wal-Mart Home Office.

I knew how it had happened, of course. Ofelia, my old boss and a cherished friend, had sent me off to teach in a trailer in a parking lot in Bayamón.

“No, Ofelia, this is too crazy. I mean, I’ve done the rum factory. That was fun. I’ve done the executives and their wives of the third largest bank on the island. And what is Wal-Mart, anyway….”

She sighed and explained.

Well, needed the dough, and a gig is a gig.

“So how did it go,” she asked, after that first day.

“Ummm, I think I blew it.”

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“Look, you know I’ve been teaching ESL for ten plus years, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, what you don’t know is that I become a completely different person when I’m in a classroom….”

“Of course, it’s called the teacher’s persona…  So what happened?”

“Well, I get there and introduce myself to this lady, Elizabeth, and she’s completely unimpressed. I go into this little trailer straight from Arkansas, and begin the class. And then, I hear this clapping from next door and someone shouts ‘Gimme a W!’”

“Oh, the company cheer,” she said brightly.

“Well, I was dumbfounded,” I said. “Didn’t know what to do. So then I said ‘What the hell was that?’ And they said what you said. So then I lost it and said, ‘well, do we have an English class cheer?’”

“Oh no,” breathed Ofelia. “Marc, you didn’t. Marc, tell me you didn’t….”

“Yeah, I got ‘em all on their feet and clapping, and I shouted ‘GIMME AN E, GIMME AN N. GIMME A G’ all the way through the word English, and then I shouted ‘WHAT DOES IT SPELL’ and then ‘I CAN’T HEAR YOU’ and then ‘WHAT DO WE SPEAK!’ and then….”

Here I noted that Ofelia had her head in her hands.  

Curious that the company hadn’t called, demanding a change of teacher, I went off to do more damage the next day. And met the president of the company, coming out the trailer door.

“Great cheer,” he said, introducing himself. “Loved it! You’re really part of the Wal-Mart family now!”

Completely sincere!

Well, the disasters multiplied. Tired of teaching, I turned to presentations. Get the kids to talk! (All students of any age are my kids…)

Great—first presentation was about the Florida Keys. I noted confused faces. And did something that I should never do.

Try to be a teacher….

So I jumped up, grabbed the magic marker, went to the flip chart, and started to draw.

I drew Florida, I drew the keys, I created what looked for all the world like an obscene graffitum on a men’s room wall.

Worse, I saw myself do it!

It was like a train wreck—I saw it coming on, I saw my hands creating it.

Couldn’t stop!

Never confessed that to Ofelia.

Well, I started off my Wal-Mart days as a contractor—Ofelia is the head of a very good little language school.

Then Elizabeth, apparently more impressed, phoned me, offered me a job. They had created a position for me, and wanted me to be the fulltime English teacher.

“Great,” I told her.

“Wonderful,” I said to her.

“SHIT!” I said, after hanging up the phone.

Didn’t want it, but knew I had to take it. The benefits? Great!! Salary? Excellent!

Marc in the corporate world?

Nahhhhh!   

For two years, it drove me nuts. Then, I relaxed. I began roaming the halls with my ruler, pretending to be a traditional teacher. I put a ridiculous yellow duck on the door of my room, and called it my VPI—the volume producing item so beloved of Sam Walton. I instituted the ‘cultura de la clase de inglés’ one tired day after hearing the “Wal-Mart Culture” invoked for the umpteenth time.

Among other items, students had to breathe audibly in and gaze upwards when I pronounced the name of Sam Walton.

Someone wasn’t taking it seriously.

Oh, except for one thing.

The students. Those wonderful, resilient, amazing people who told me their stories, shared the joy and pain in their lives, showed me the pictures of their kids or pets. The kids who put up with my nonsense and dodged the pencils I threw at them, and said “333 jewelry thieves” and hid under their desks when they heard me approach, smartly tapping the ruler against my thigh.

Wonderful, wonderful people!

All Wrong, As Usual!

OK, look—if this post is more all-over-the-map than usual, there’s a reason.

The damn iPod is all twitty again.

Or rather, it’s following its own internal logic.

Here is—I think—the explanation. 

I had a hankering to hear the opus 40 cello sonata of Shostakovich. So I went into iTunes and looked it up. And there was the big boy himself—Rostropovich, for whom the sonata was written. 

Well, that’s like hearing King James read the Bible. Nobody has ever said Rostropovich couldn’t find his way around a cello.

Eleven bucks—I nabbed it. 

Plus I got a zillion other pieces—this must have been a box set with five or six discs.

And each disc starts with the number one.

Get where I’m going? 

Right, came to the end of the 1^st movement, and then got a tango by Astor Whatever-his-name-is (Pizzarella? Doesn’t seem right…).

Fine, listened to that. Then got a bit of Prokofiev. Then the second movement of the Schumann cello concerto. Then the second movement of the Shostakovich.

Well, I either pressed the damn shuffle key again (possible) or the iPod is playing EVERY track 1 before it progresses to track 2 (likely).

Well, I’m nothing if not resilient these days—thanks, Wal-Mart!—and the purpose of the daily trot is just the trot. And saying, of course, buen día to everyone I meet.

Especially strangers.

It was a thing of Sam Walton’s—the ten foot rule. You gotta say hello, smile, and offer help to anyone within ten feet. That’s if you’re in a store. Otherwise, just smile and say hello.

Well, I did it, of course. Franny must have had some effect on me. Remember that “regular morning hour” her report card adjured on her (not sure that’s correct) when she was a kid? 

Well, when Sam speaks, you listen!

It’s part of making the day. If you’ve been laid off, you don’t get up and lie on the sofa. You grab your shoes and iPad and get moving.

And saying hello to people makes friends, connections. Which is why I was talking to Elvin, the 64 year old Nuyorican who’s working on the building next door.

Fascinating guy. Lives in La Perla, one of the most storied communities of Puerto Rico. Quite literally, the social anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote extensively about it in 1967 his book La Vida.

OK—for people who don’t know Puerto Rico. Viejo San Juan is the oldest city on the island, and was walled / fortified by the Spaniards. It’s charming—got blue cobblestones that are iridescent when wet, wonderful colonial architecture, vibrant Caribbean colors.

La Perla is its shadow.

Almost literally.  Because the walls are still intact, and the community is wedged between the walls of the Old City and the sea. Take a look!

 Charming, right?

Yes and no. La Perla sprung up quite spontaneously about a century ago. All the cooks and servants for the rich people of Old San Juan, needed a place to sleep, right? And nobody had much money (‘cept for those rich people, who even so may not have had much…). So they went through the gates of the walls, past the cemetery, and found a little land. Built a little house with whatever they could find. And that’s where they lived. 

Everything was fine, and, in a sense, still is. Everybody knows Elvin, the guy I was chatting with yesterday. Everyone likes him. His shop is right in front of the beach, and he sleeps with his window open—no bars, unlike the rest of us. Nothing but salt air between him and the sea.

Sleeps well, too.

Unlike the rest of us, who are living in fear, in gated communities behind barred windows and doors. Oh—and the latest trend? Putting GPS sensors in your kid’s backpacks, so you can track ‘em if anything happens to them….

But if you’re safe in La Perla, you’re safer than anywhere in the world.

Why?

“Anyone messes with my stuff, I spread the word. They find out who did it, tie him up, and throw him in the ocean.”

Remember—there are sharks off the coast of Puerto Rico.

And the “they?”

Well, Spanish is less fussy about specifying the subject—less fussy than English. You can say lo encuentran—literally, they encounter him—and everyone gets it.

But the they may well be somewhat different than the good, hardworking types of a century ago. And La Perla is perhaps not quite so poor. The wood shacks have become concrete houses, over the years. And one of them—you can see from the safety of the walls—has a swimming pool on the roof.

Overlooking the ocean.

Nice!

So it’s not quite the community that Elvin remembers as a kid. His aunt raised him in La Perla. When she left the house, she told her neighbor. Neighbor looked after the house. Aunt came home, cooked, and gave the first plate—arroz conhabichuelas, no doubt, and hmmmm….I can taste ‘em!—to the neighbor.

Actually, the whole neighborhood ate together. People brought what they had, passed it around, sat, talked, laughed, told stories.

Oh, and watch out—‘cause ANY adult could smack a kid who needed it….

Well, those days are gone. Elvin worries, thinks Puerto Rico is going to hell in a hand basket. 

“I hope it doesn’t go the way of France,” he said.

“Two hundred years ago?” I said, startled.

Remember when kids knew about the French Revolution?

“Yup,” he replied.

Well, he’s a good man, my new friend Elvin. Just one little thing.

He’s technically a squatter. 

And that’s where Harry comes into the picture.

“Did you once tell me that reality is different in Puerto Rico? Years ago, in Chicago?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Look, there was land that nobody wanted and there was wood that nobody wanted and Elvin’s aunt’s father or grandfather needed a place to sleep, so what’s the deal?

Turns out that somebody wants it, now.

“Sometime between 2005 and 2007 Donald Trump was fascinated with La Perla as it would be a great place to make a resort. He was looking at it from above and wanted to walk down and see it closer but his bodyguards wouldn’t let him. La Perla residents saw this, heard him [sic.] we know what’s going on. Also some Spanish developers apparently have their eye on the area as well,” Gómez told reporters.

Go ahead, google “La Perla Puerto Rico Donald Trump” and you’ll get the prdailysun.com article from which I stole the above.

Well, I started this post by typing out the title—All Wrong, As Usual. That’s because I had read an article about how to create a great blog. Gotta have keywords right near the top (“keywords?” ummmmm???…). Gotta put in links. And tags.

I was going to tell you that I’m doing this blog all wrong.

But then Elvin jumped into the post, and then La Perla, and now we’re forced into the question of whether we’d prefer to have Trump / Spanish developers and a resort or…

…drug dealers reclining in their infinity pools after a hard night’s work in the puntos de drogas or…

…the remnants of the descendents of Elvin’s aunt, who still remember a place that was and that now isn’t and that still is.

And I’m doing it wrong?

Three Failures and a Chair in a Tree

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I was saying on my morning walk, as I peered at the ocean roiling below El Morro. But I could equally have said…

“…what is the correct understanding?”

For I had completely bombed in my classes yesterday, after an interesting day of failure on Sunday.

OK, I now drop the ironic tone of previous posts. Anything—until further notice—comes from the gut, not the mind.

I have never wanted to be a teacher—I’ve told you that, right?—and I have never taken it much seriously. I do show up on time. I am as groomed as I get. But beyond that, I don’t do much. I observe the students, just as I observe the iguanas.

But on Sunday—that would be the day before yesterday—I had written a post about failure. And had had a successful day studying it. Then, it was time to work.

OK—the worst task first. I attacked the kitty litter boxes, and thought while doing so that the wash was next. But there’s a rule —self-imposed, but still a rule—in the house that one cannot proceed from one room to another without carrying something (generally, dirty ashtrays or coffee cups). It’s a big house; it’s the only way….

In this case, it was not a dirty ashtray but a dirty sex toy. NO, not my sex toy but the cat’s. Yes I provide them, although I do not GIVE them. I quite properly deposit my dirty underpants in the laundry basket. Smith, the cat, retrieves them (it?) and moves to the most public area of the house, always on a rug. There he proceeds to….

….I’ll not say. But I can only say that he makes a quite distinctive sound as he goes about it, and that, of course, prompts me to shout…

“FOR GOD’S SAKES! YOU ARE SICK AND DISGUSTING! PUT THAT FILTHY SEX TOY AWAY, OR AT LEAST DO IT IN PRIVATE!”

Words, I realized a week ago, that my new neighbor must have heard, as she was smoking a cigarette on her balcony. (It’s Old San Juan, remember? All the doors are open here….) She gave me, well, a special look hours later on the street….

Still thinking somewhat about the wash, I then went to address a few words (why bother? guess it’s just habit) to the cat.

Right. He was in the bedroom where, well, the bed was unmade.

OK, did that, and then saw—you’re not forgetting the wash, are you?—a book on the floor. Well, that’s not right, I thought, as I frequently do. I picked it up and headed to…

You get my drift?

I did eventually do the laundry, some hours later. But observing as I was the trifling failures in my most proximate agenda, I had quite a successful day. Things got done—they often don’t.

Buoyed by all this, I got right down to work, the next day, writing an assignment for the students. It’s something I never do. Worse, is was on conditionals, something I like, and which can be fun. And should be—I generally sing “Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner!” Unbelievably, everybody in Puerto Rico knows it, though of course in Spanish. So we sing it (in both languages) and go on from there….

In this I am bested by former co-worker, a Spanish teacher who taught the gringos to sing ojalá que llueva café, café AND made them dance to it. Alas, it was in the days before YouTube—she’d be famous, or at least viral, by now.

But no—I had to prepare. All for my students….

The look on their faces still pains me. They didn’t understand.

What were they doing wrong? How could they fail me, their teacher?

I did the only thing possible.

“Would you please,” I said in my most teacherly tone (and yes, computer, teacherly is a word—stop with that damn squiggle) “do exactly what I do?” I then held the accursed assignment high in the air, turned it face down…

…and slammed it on the table.

“I think I’ll not charge for this class,” I said, “although in fact there is something to be learned here….”

We went on to discuss failure—how it teaches you so much more than success, and how prevalent and necessary it is in nature.

They thought I was nuts, of course….

Well they’re probably right.

And it reminded me of my two other failures, as a teacher. The first, years ago, in my earliest attempt at teaching. Three teenage boys, three books on the table. A nervous and novice teacher.

Fatally, the books were…

… Jane Eyre

For boys? For Puerto Rican boys? Look, it was a setup, I now see, but I only made it worse. Now, I might possibly be able to do something with it. (“OK, it’s crap—we all know that….”)

Second failure—in my first week teaching at Wal-Mart. I was hardly inexperienced, and they certainly knew me, and how I taught. Was it the life size portraits there in the building of Sam Walton, staring down—looking so much like Jack, on his most dispirited day?

And now a third failure.

OK, so now we’re at today. I get up, I take my walk, I touch the portal of El Morro (and no, I don’t know why, I just have to), I turn back and see…

…a white plastic chair stuck firmly in an almond tree. (Yes, we have almond trees in Puerto Rico—they’re just not the same. Get it?)

The image stays with me for the rest of the walk—two Beethoven quartets long (my current metric, as we said in Wal-Mart). It’s with me now. Nor do I know why….

Perhaps because it was an amazement, an undoubted success. No one, I hope, had a work order to put a white resin chair in an almond tree (which, speaking of colors, turn an amazing russet at this time of year). Nor—no offense intended, my Puerto Rican audience—would it ever have been executed . Or so well, at least.

And no, no one had cared—not the tree, not the chair. Certainly not the municipal government. Perhaps it was the wind that blew the chair into the tree. More likely, it was the students from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas nearby who had, on a whim, placed it there. Maybe—ah, that’s it!—it was art. But nobody had cared.

Or they had, in a careless way. And so….

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I think. And then wonder…

…Is that the correct understanding?