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?

Attention, Wal-Mart!

Let me tell you a story, a very familiar story. You are awakened at 3 in the morning by your three-year old, who announces, as best he can, that he has diarrhea. You sigh, get up, go to the bathroom, and yes—there it is. You wash the child, put him to bed, and wait for the inevitable. Sure enough, two days later, again at 3 AM, you’re at your local hospital. You wonder how much, if any, sleep you can get before you drag off to work….

Let me tell you a story, a very familiar story. You are awakened at 3 in the morning by your three-year old, who announces, as best he can, that he has diarrhea. You sigh, get up, go to the bathroom, and yes—there it is. You wash the child, put him to bed, and wait for the inevitable. Sure enough, two days later, again at 3 AM, you’re at your local clinic in a small town in rural Zambia, where there are no medicines. Your gut wrenches: your child may very well die. You trudge home, passing as you go small shops, all of which have Coca-Cola for sale.

There are people who have the word “why” wrapped tightly around every strand of their DNA, and my guess is that Simon and Jane Berry—two retired people who had a little to go off and save humanity—are two such people. And their question, as you can guess, is “why can a town have Coca-Cola but not have medicines? If the Coca-Cola can get there, why can’t a simple, cheap diarrhea kit that could save a kid’s life get there? Why do one in five kids in parts of Africa die of diarrhea before they reach the age of five?”

The nice thing about the why people is that they keep on asking questions, frequently driving everybody else who is just trying through the day, dammit, nuts. So Mr. and Mrs. Berry—they’re British, so no “Simon” or “Jane” here—asked, “why don’t we use the extra space in the crates of Coke to get the diarrhea kits up to the stores that sell the Coca-Cola? 

Presto, mágico! (And I’m sure it wasn’t that easy….)

Tremendous idea, right? The Berrys had designed the kit to fit between the bottles of Coca-Cola. And the kit—which contains basic salts, soap, and a towel—is relatively cheap; as I recall, it costs about a dollar to produce the kit, and it’s a nice little moneymaker for the shopkeeper, with a good margin.

Unbelievably, the Berrys succeeded in getting the attention of Coca-Cola, and they met with them and learned about their distribution chain. That frequently looks like this:

Well, the whole thing seemed like a great idea, when I was pondering the problem of what to write about last July, and also wondering what to do about my brother John and his wife Jeanne, who have:

1.     everything

2.     birthdays in early July

So it seemed like a good idea—why not donate 10 dollars every month? What’s ten bucks to me? So I called John and Jeanne up on vacation and told them about it, and then I forgot that I / they were making the donation. (Just as an aside, isn’t it criminal that we are living in a world where ten dollars is nothing for some, and everything for others?)

Well, among the people for whom the ten dollars is nothing are Bill and Melinda Gates—I’m presuming no introductions needed—who, so says the email the Berrys sent me, agreed to screen a documentary of the project in Seattle last month. Nice!

In fact, I also have a fair amount of “why” bred in the marrow of my bones, and I spent seven years at a company even bigger than Coca-Cola making everybody completely crazy. And when Wal-Mart could bear it no more, they showed me the door; there are, however no hard feelings.

So here are my questions, presented in good business English as a bulleted list:

·     Why doesn’t Wal-Mart partner with ColaLife (the Berrys’ organization)?

·     Why not sell the kit in Wal-Mart (the cost of Pedialyte at Walgreens—sorry, but it’s closer—is six bucks, so what a Volume Producing Item! Wow—better than those Moon Pies!)?

·     Why not donate one dollar for every kit sold to Colalife, thus letting the developed world help the undeveloped world?

There’s something about the Internet that makes people go nuts, and a good example I draw from the comments section of the “About ColaLife” page:

The third world government should tax coca cola and other multi nation corporations at proper rates according to their level of profits. This tax then should be use to supply medicine and infrastructure for the maufacture and distribution of medicines,

These half ass aid program does very little to truly alleviate underdevelopment or promote progress. These programs only continue the dependency and underdevelopment of Africa.

Tax coca cola and other multinational like they do in the west and use the money for medicines and infrastructure.

Ouch—as much for the grammatical errors and typos, as for the content. Fortunately, Mr. Berry is a more temperate soul, and does a neat job of first agreeing with him, and then—gently—demolishing him.

In fact, I think the Berrys’ ideas are a breakthrough on several levels—not the least of which is to combine the private sector with public health.

Now then, Wal-Mart, you guys in?

Ode to Wal-Mart

It’s a curious matter—for the last two days, I have had waking dreams in which I was back working at Wal-Mart. OK—that’s explicable: after you have spent seven years of immersion therapy, you don’t come out of it unchanged.

Immersion because, physically, the building swallowed you up. True, it was capable of holding 600 workers, or so, plus providing a cafeteria and a huge auditorium, but it only had five or six windows, all of which were in the cafeteria. But so photophobic were we—note that pronoun there—that we kept them covered with translucent hurricane shutters, no matter what time of the year, or what chance there could be of a hurricane.

It was more than that. There was never a meeting in which the corporate “culture” wasn’t trotted out, but it was a culture honored in word only. Don’t think, however, that there wasn’t a true culture operating—one very much against the official, expressed culture. It wasn’t about doing your work or producing something, it was about going along with the herd, sending defensive emails, printing them, and then producing them, if anyone attacking the herd happened to single you out for the kill.

You ran, ideally, as much inside the herd as possible, since obviously the people on the outside, or—God forbid—the stragglers behind, were the logical victims to be picked off. And it was also true—you didn’t want to be out front. So that meant never, ever thinking outside the box, no matter how often it was urged on you.

This was a lesson lost on me. At one point in some meeting, the quality assurance lady gave a talk in which she stressed that fruits and vegetables must be rigorously kept away from meats, with their potentially leaking cellophane packages. All of that dripping blood, you see, is a perfect medium….

‘So why do we have the shopping carts that we do?’ I was thinking.

“You see, we have the basket on the right side of the cart in red, with pictures of meat cuts and chicken and so on—so that we don’t have to translate into Chinese or Korean or whatever for our foreign markets. And on the left side, we have a green basket, with pictures of bananas and apples and oranges. See? We’ll be an industry leader! We’ll save countless lives! We’ll reduce the number of food poisoning incidents by 333%!”

“We’ll see, Marc….”

That was five years ago, and if you go, as I did last week, into Wal-Mart today? The same stupid carts from the 1950’s, in which fruit and vegetables and meats can fornicate as much as we people ever did in the sixties.

Even after two-and-a-half years away from it, I still think of it, occasionally, and that makes sense to me. But here’s my question—why was it that yesterday, I dreamed of being chased down, and told that there was an important meeting, an urgent meeting, a mandatory meeting, at which everybody but guess-who was? And when I got to the meeting? The topic was poetry.

Yes, poetry. And the good Human Resources ladies (my apologies to the other three men in department) had done their best, which…

…wasn’t very good.

One speaker was awful, in fact. She was cowering behind a PowerPoint presentation with mutilated, hideous slides that were unreadable and anyway swung about unpredictably. Oh, and the speaker was mumbling into the microphone and painfully nervous.

This morning’s dream?

Elizabeth, the woman who first hired me, has told me to go to Sam’s Club, where I am to teach math. OK—do that, leave for lunch, get back, start to grade the tests that I have given. Except that—being math—I have no idea what answer is right. Elizabeth reappears and tells me that she’s sure I’ll have some pertinent remarks about poetry.

I protest—I know nothing about poetry. “Certainly, you do,” she returns. At this point I wake up.

I wake up wondering—has Wal-Mart decided to do to poetry what they did to the grocery business, which was to trample it? Or am I to write poems about Wal-Mart?

Confession: I have just made the attempt, and there isn’t much there.

It was a time in my life when the poetic impulse, or any creative impulse, was thoroughly squelched. Except that, in a curious way, it wasn’t. I am perhaps the only person you’ll ever meet who designed and created an office-wide ESL website in PowerPoint, complete with narrated lessons, quizzes, games. I devised a word-of-the-day scheme that I remember, even now, as being quite beautiful. And then, of course, there were all those batty but good ideas—like the new and improved shopping cart—that somehow never got anywhere.

I am the person least suited to corporate America, and after I got used to that realization, I then realized: the ax would fall when it would fall, so really, there wasn’t much sense worrying about it. I could have tried harder, I suppose: tried to fit in more, gone to more meetings, learned to love the box. But why bother?

Fear and lethargy

Walked hand in hand down

The grey-clad aisle,

Past the cubicles where

Bamboo shoots pointed up

To the florescent lights,

Where workers slouched

Eyes glazed, minds numbed

Their hands caressing the mouse…

And Crest snuggled, in

Three thousand stores,

Six inches to the left of

The Colgate, though in fact

The two had hated each other for years,

Despite their wives having gone to

School together….

And their kids?

After never having spoken,

They developed a strange

Taste for dope,

Which could be satisfied,

After hours

Underneath the gondola,

That metal rack that sails

Down the aisles of

Big box stores,

Propelled by mustachioed black-haired

Blue and white striped burly

Consumers, ardent, burning           

Maddened to sample the new

16-ounce Crest—24 hour cavity protection!

O Sole Mio, sing the packages,

And the waves recede,

All passion spent.

Right! Did it!

Christmas Lethargy

Full disclosure—at this time of year, I completely don’t want to do anything.

It could be a leftover all of those years in school—why don’t adults get the breaks that kids do? Aren’t we supposed to be in charge? What kind of saps are we to be out working when our kids are vegging at home with their video games? Shouldn’t we reinvent child labor?

Right—so now you know my state of mind. What you may not know is that I’ve spent four hopeless hours looking for anything to write about. And what have I found?

Problems, dear Readers, with the Olympic torch, which according to The New York Times has gone out four dozen times and once had to relighted with a plastic disposable lighter, instead of the “official backup flame.” The story went on to say…

But perhaps the low point in what has seemed less like an Olympic torch relay than an exercise in ineptitude and misfortune came earlier this week when one of the runners carrying the torch to the Sochi Games had a fatal heart attack while attempting to walk his allotted distance, about 218 yards.

Right—that would be unfortunate, but given that fourteen thousand people are participating as torch bearers, little problems are bound to crop up.  Oh, and the torches…well, here more of The Times:

Russia’s torches were manufactured in Siberia at a reported cost of $6.4 million by KrasMash, which usually makes submarine-launched ballistic missiles. It is not everyone’s favorite just now, but it cannot be sent to Siberia, because it is already in Siberia.

“Any normal person will have at least a few questions,” Mikhail Starshinov, a member of Russia’s parliament, was quoted saying in October by The Moscow Times, in an article titled “Veteran Bobsledder Set Alight by Faulty Olympic Torch.” “Why were 16,000 produced? How much does each torch cost, and is this price appropriate? And finally, why don’t they work?”

Reasonable questions that anyone might have—but can I make a post of it? Combine it with some other story about the Olympics? I drift over to the New Day, which has an interesting story coming—as they so often do—right out of a Walmart Supercenter. Because it turns out that somewhere in Broward County, Florida, a Walmart employee shot up a coworker’s car. Why? Because she got awarded Associate of the Month, and not he. Here’s the info:

"Definitivamente parece inusual que alguien pueda estar furioso hasta el punto que puede dispararle al vehículo de alguien solo porque esa persona recibió un premio", dijo Keyla Concepción vocera del alguacil. "Obviamente sintió que era injusto que ella recibiera este premio", agregó.

(“Definitely it appears unusual that somebody could be furious to the point that he could fire at the vehicle of that person just because she had received an award,” said Keyla Concepción, spokesperson of the marshal. “Obviously he felt that it was unjust that she received the award,” she added.)

Well, something to know. News flash—the guy, Willie Mitchell, is available to any of you employers out there!

(One wants to know—does he still have his gun? And was he packing in the store?)

Right—and from there I read that Ricky Martin has no plans to marry, but if he did, he’d do it in Spain. Well, that seemed like something I should know about and who, by the way, gets to be Ricky’s boyfriend? Is there an interview, a competency exam, a competition? If so, I’m screwed because beyond being married myself (and famously faithful to Mr. Fernández), here’s Rick and Carlos together:

Wow! And what this proves, Dear Reader, is that seriously rich and beautiful people very easily hang out with…

Not worth finishing that sentence!

Right, so what about Yahoo? Anything there?

Well, I can tell you that the archbishop of Minneapolis, John Nienstedt, announced that he won’t be ministering publically until he’s cleared of charges of putting his hand on a boy’s bottom during a photo shoot after a confirmation four years ago. But Nienstedt  says he always puts his hands in specific places. So who knows?

Right, then it was time to take the religion quiz, since I had to prove that I, an atheist, was more knowledgeable about religion. And guess what? I got a 92—which I’m calling an A—and the average is 85.

OK—it’s clear. It’s now 2 PM, I’ve wasted four hours and produced nothing, which is not good because what am I gonna tell my shrink tomorrow, when he asks—as he always does—how much time I’ve spent vegetating? It’s one of the signs of depression.

Right—fallback. Check out the stuff I’ve sent myself during my middle of the night munchies run. And there I came upon Noah, who I remembered dimly from 3:52 AM (when I sent it to myself).

OK—829 words! I’m outta here!

98 Bucks, Five Hours Waiting, One Broken Nose

Right—it was a standing joke, in those days when I dedicated myself to pounding on tables and throwing pencils at the students (ostensibly, I was teaching English at Wal-Mart).

Supercilious Student: “Are you working Black Friday this year, Marc?”

Marc (too serious): “I most certainly am!”

SS (leaning in and peering into Marc’s face): “Really, Marc!”

Marc: “Not only will I be there, but I will be opening the door!”

SS: “Are you sure?”

Marc: “Nor is that all. I intend to address the crowd. I will emphasize that we Puerto Ricans are a gentle, peaceable, and tranquil people. Therefore, I will ask for a minute of silence, as we ponder the true meaning of Christmas: the amazing and miraculous gift of a son, our savior who is Christ our Lord, sent to mankind….”

SS: “Marc? Marc?”

Marc: “Then I’ll announce the rules. People will enter our stores in groups of five, at two-minute intervals. No running, no pushing, no fighting. Ladies and the elderly first, as well as the handicapped.”

And so it would go—the students would ask what store I’d be at, and routinely I’d say either Bayamón or Carolina: it was a toss-up which store was the worst. But I would hear the stories—the fights in the store over televisions, people jumping over the góndolas (the retail term for the set of shelves that the merchandise is placed on), front doors being broken, people falling in the rush to get in, and having other people jump over them. In short, it was madness.

Nor is it unique to Puerto Rico—I spent yesterday reading reports of the same madness in New Jersey and Florida. And in fact it was in New York, several years ago, that a security guard actually lost his life during the melee in the store.

Well, of course I never went to the store—either to work or to shop. In fact, I used to point out to detractors of Wal-Mart that they should actually be glad I was working there; I was taking their money but not spending it in their stores. And so my students would drag themselves in, exhausted still from Black Friday, and I would have had a restful four days. Time for Act II:

SS: “Did we see you there in Bayamón on Friday morning, Marc?”

Marc (pounding table and pointing his index finger upward, like a medieval saint): I WAS THERE! I personally took charge of the crowd, addressing the shoppers variously in English, Spanish and French. I thanked them for honoring us with their presence and patronage, and that it was a privilege to serve them in any way. It was a most orderly morning, and the shoppers unanimously thanked me at the end for a truly enjoyable shopping experience. Several of them have written me little notes of gratitude….

Well, the trick was to claim to have gone to the furthest Wal-Mart on the island—the Wal-Mart that absolutely nobody from the metro area would go to. So I claimed, for many years, that I had gone to Wal-Mart Mayagüez, and that the shoppers of that western city were by now well accustomed to well-bred, genteel shopping. I went so far as to say that people were saying things like: “Well, yes, I had thought about buying a television, but if you’d like it—please, be my guest.” Accompanied, of course, by a grave little nod of the head and a quiet bow. Oh, and that they were stopping at the entrance of the store and insisting that others enter first.

That said, I’m sorry to say that things have deteriorated a great deal since my years there—and you can see it yourself in the video below. And this was hardly an isolated case: Huffington Post’s headline says it all:

Walmart's Black Friday Going About As Badly As You'd Expect

Well, this year’s revolú was all about a 32-inch television going for just 98 bucks at Wal-Mart, as The New Day explains below:

Adames, [sic.] aseguró que próximamente evaluará la disposición que regula las llamadas "ventas excepcionales", al hacer referencia a que la mayoría de las quejas que recibió y las de incidentes de violentos fueron de situaciones ligadas a consumidores que buscaban un televisor de 32 pulgadas que Walmart vendía en precio regular de $98.

Al ser un artículo vendido a precio "regular", los consumidores no podían pedir un vale ("rain check") o un artículo sustituto. El titular de DACO dijo que buscará la manera de que los comercios expongan la diferencia de forma más clara para evitar problemas.

What was the problem? Well, Wal-Mart was saying that the TV was being sold at the “regular” price of 98 bucks. And given that, the customers had no right to get a rain check when the merchandise ran out.

Yeah? I have just gone on to Google, and yes, the 98-dollar TV at Wal-Mart is all over the Internet. But if you go to Wal-Mart.com? Click on the 30-39 inch size, and you’ll see that prices start at $179. So what gives?

At any rate, our department of consumer affairs issued 49 citations to Kmart, Wal-Mart, CVS and assorted others. Oh, and 50 social workers inspected the lines, and told parents to take their kids home, or find someone to come get them. Most people complied, except for two—curiously, from Mayagüez.

I’m lucky—I don’t have a job, but I don’t have kids. And so I can choose—do I want to celebrate Christmas? If so, do I want to spend money or not? The answer is usually “not,” but that’s not an option for a lot of people.

Personal responsibility—say some people. “If you decided to have children, then you should have figured out how you were going to pay for them….”

Guess so. But I wonder—one of the women in Mayagüez got into a fight with a guy, who slugged her and broke her nose. And she had been waiting for six or seven hours for that 98-dollar TV.

Have we all gone crazy?

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….      

On Becoming a Footnote

OK—it’s 11:22 in the morning and what have I done?

Well, it must have been the fatigue following the exertion of becoming, with Mr. Fernández, a footnote in the legal history of Puerto Rico—that must be what’s operating, here.

It was in 2008 that, on a cold December morning, Rafael and I walked into the Cambridge City Hall to get married. Had we made an appointment? Of course not. So the secretary sighed, and called the justice of the peace, Margaret Drury, down to marry us.

Every trip to the altar—even when there’s no altar—is a long one. In our case, it was physically a long trip; I had spent the early part of the week in Wisconsin with my mother, who was recovering from open-heart surgery. I had flown out of a huge snowstorm, missed a flight in Miami, gotten back home, confirmed our flights to Boston—and discovered that Expedia had botched one leg of the journey. We eventually flew to New York, and took the bus to Boston. And then the snow began—the storm I had flown out of from Wisconsin I had bussed in into Boston.

I was still on edge on the day of my marriage—it had seemed unreal, somehow. But I had told my boss, the director of Human Resources, that I was getting married—and to whom. She asked how long we had been together, and I told her: twenty five years. “It’s high time,” she said. Later, meeting her in the crowded lunchroom, she kissed me, wished me a good trip, and bustled off to wash her hands. Glancing over her shoulder, she called out, “and congratulations on…the other thing!”

And so we referred to our wedding as “the other thing,’ throughout the trip.

I had told her, because I knew perfectly well what I was going to do: ask the company to put Raf on the health plan. He was between jobs—and his Cobra payment was a couple hundred dollars easily over what I would pay to put him on my company’s health plan.

So I found myself, after we returned, with my boss and the president of the largest company on the island—Wal-Mart Puerto Rico—arguing that if we had a statement in the Employee Handbook stating that we didn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, shouldn’t gay spouses be included in the benefits? “I think you should,” said the president.

It was the first time anybody had raised the issue to him.

Was it easy to do that? No—my hands were wet, my mouth was dry, I was in the classic fight or flight response.

I also knew that I would do it, that I was right, and that if I didn’t do it, I was letting the next generation down. Drag queens fought in Stonewall for me, and if they can fight cops with Billy clubs, I could talk to a Colombian man in a small office in Puerto Rico.

My request was denied, of course, on the grounds that my marriage was not legal in Puerto Rico. OK—so I wrote requesting reconsideration from Bentonville. Oh, and I wrote a letter to the executive vice president for Human Resources for the entire company.

This is called rattling the cage, and somebody has to do it.

Bentonville never replied, so I sent a certified letter. That got a response.

So it became a tradition, in those last years of my time there—I would formally petition to put Raf on the health plan, and present my marriage certificate.

“What do you want me to do with this?” my buddy Karen would ask.

“Oh, just send me the same letter you sent last year,” I’d say.

“Ay, Marc….”

If the Internet were working, I could tell you who said, “courage is a muscle that becomes stronger with exercise.” Recently, I came out to a room full of strangers, blurting out, “Sweetheart, I’m your husband, not your friend,” after Raf, about to read a poem of my mother’s, referred to me as a friend. The whole room laughed—look, how threatening is a roomful of poets?

So it was natural to me, to protest when a notary public, in preparing a deed for an apartment I bought, referred to me as soltero, or bachelor.

“No, I’m married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” I said.

We went around about it; he explained that legally, I was a bachelor. We signed; I went home and had a drink. The lawyer went home and lost sleep.

In Puerto Rico, property sales are handled by a notary public, who must be as well a lawyer. So the notary public got it into his head—he knew he had to do something. The next day, he called the professional association that rules over the notaries, and asked them the question: what to do about a marriage legal in one state but not in Puerto Rico?

“It was great—they all took the question very seriously, and very respectfully,” said Tony, to give the notary his name.

Even the head of the association, with whom Tony finally ended up….

“Your job as a notary is to record the facts, not judge on the legality,” the director said. “You have to amend that deed, and state that Marc and Raf were married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And they both have to sign it….” The director went on to speculate—what happens if Puerto Rico is obliged to recognize all marriages from other states, including same-sex marriages?

So we did, but not before asking Tony if they the notary association had ever had the question put to them.

“No,” he said, “they had been waiting for it, but it had never come up. They’re actually thinking of writing a memo to all the notaries on the island, directing them to do what we’re doing. So yours will be the first gay marriage recorded on a legal document in Puerto Rico.”

“You really should spread the word around,” said Johnny, when I called to tell him the news. “There could be other gay people who need to be aware that their marriages need to be recorded….”

So I have!