Lessons Learned in Retail Part 2.

It was a slow day at the store today and I got to talking to another vendor, a woman who sells handbags at a kiosk outside my store. I had spoken to this woman, let's call her Kathy, before but never much more than a polite, "Hello, how are you today?"

Kathy came into my store eating an ice cream sundae and complaining about how slow business was. "Yea, really slow," I said shuffling some papers and pretending to be too busy to talk. But Kathy was insistent on having a conversation, and she asked where I had worked before, then she told me she is a nurse. She works full-time in the Labor and Delivery wing of a hospital. She said it was always her dream to be a mid-wife, to help deliver babies, and she gets to live her dream every day. She only sells handbags to make a little extra money on the side.

She told be about delivering a nonliving fetus on her first day in the Labor wing, and how she waited 50 minutes to listen for a heartbeat before she had the nerve to pronounce it dead.

This conversation got me to thinking, what if I had met Kathy as a nurse? What if I knew her not as the sundae-eating, talkative handbag lady, but as a medical professional? What if I was someone else, and it was my wife's baby Kathy helped deliver? I would be surprised, then, to see her selling handbags at the mall. But until today, I would have been shocked to see her in scrubs at a hospital. What does she know about delivering babies? I would have thought, she sells handbags for a living.

And really, it is all just a big accident that I know Kathy as the handbag lady and that she knows me as the calendar-and-game-store guy. We have not always been the people we are today, and we will not be the same people when our respective stints in retail are through. But still, I will always think Kathy as the handbag lady, I can't help it.

We all are passengers on a great ride through time and space. We collide with other passengers on a daily basis--some we love, some we hate, most we forget. Some of us are lucky enough to find another passenger we'd like to spend the rest of the ride with, grab onto them, and find out they are interested in riding with us too. Some of us ride utterly alone. Most of us are simply left to deal with an unpredictable onslaught of fellow passengers who we must engage with to keep moving forward.

It is important to remember two things about other people.

First, other people are not pawns, tools or obstacles whose purpose is only to aid or impede our own success. People are people, real, full of feelings, bent as much on success and faced with as much adversity as we are.

Second, the juncture at which you meet another person in your life is a matter of utter chance. You can never assume or judge a thing about the person's life as a whole when you only know them in a certain, narrow moments of their existence. It was totally unfair for me to think of Kathy merely as the handbag lady. It is totally unfair to think of anyone as merely the person they are at the moment they collide with us. After all, if we really are just hurtling through life on a wild cosmic ride, isn't it all just one big roll of the dice? As Kurt Vonnegut writes, our lives happen as "the accident will."

To Kathy, I apologize for my own human folly in assuming her life was primarily about handbag retail. And to most others I have bumped elbows with in my life, I apologize for judging the importance of your own life solely by the bruises or kisses you have imparted on my own.

Life Lessons Learned in Retail: Part 1

I can't describe fully the sense of urgency and restlessness that comes over me when I read the subtitle of this blog: "I'll make mine a story worth telling." Most days, I feel as if I have fallen away from the adventure, discomfort and journeying that make any story worth telling. It is worrisome to think I am letting some of my best days get away from me. Maybe I should be pursuing some grand adventure now, trusting that my reason (and possibly my checkbook) will guide me to a straighter course later on. So I often wonder, what am I doing working at this job at the mall? Why should I, with a head and heart for much greater things, allow myself to settle like this?

And then I have an experience like the conversation I had with an elderly gentleman the other night. He was an Army veteran who had served a number of years before he became a school teacher. He had voted for Kennedy (he reminded me several times) and even worked on Kennedy's campaign, but he was an old-school red-blooded American and is now entirely outraged by the new politics of the Democratic party.

He unabashedly proclaimed his political beliefs to me as I was closing up my store the othe night, and it slowly became clear that he was at least as misinformed as he was opinionated. He believed we have all been tricked into believing in Obama, when the real truth is that Obama has falsified his birth certificates. He is a smooth talker and has conspired with the FBI to keep them covered up. Obama is in bed with China, who is obviously our communist mortal enemy, and he is building a secret civilian task force that will have the same invasive powers as Hitler's SS or Mao Zedong's Red Army. Finally, he warned me about the dangers of all these new windmills that are being built. Had I even thought about the danger they pose to commercial aircraft coming in for low landings on a foggy day?

Threatening Windmills

No, I hadn't. And yes, I have stupidly trusted that someone along the line has checked that Barack Obama is indeed a U.S. citizen. But despite myself, this man's rage and passion left me unnerved. How could someone have so much hate for a country he claimed to love so much? I remembered something one of my professor's taught me: we cannot experience great disappointment without great love.

This man dearly loved the America he remembered--the country he knew when he was my age. It was a great nation back then in the 1950's and 1960's, and he was proud of it. Our country today is vastly changed. New technology, new business, a global economy, nuclear threats, and a war few of us really understand. And what the hell is Twitter anyway? It's no wonder this man was upset. He probably feels lost in his own land most days.

Grant Park, Chicago. November 4, 2008. Photograph by Molly Ryan

So, all this has come to my next movement of this blog and an answer to my question--why am I doing what I'm doing right now?

I am young and restless, but mostly young. Listening to this old man rant, I began to understand that he has seen far more history pass than me, and if we got past his fear of windmills and the present state of America, I could really learn something from him.

Young people should have large ears and small mouths. I am determined to spend the next few months learning as much as I can. There is no syllabus, there are no lesson plans. There is only an open door to my store and my open ears to any stranger who wanders in. Even in plain-old Blaine, Minnesota there are people with stories worth hearing.