YOUNG SECURITY GUARD

I had a little bit of fun satisfaction tonight.  We have a new nightime security guard here on the complex where I live.  He parks his car in the spot that had been mine for two years before our underground parking space could be fixed from all the sludge that had been dripping down from the parking above.  My car was the worst hit by all this, so I am extremely thankful that that situatiion is now finally fixed.

One of the complex's managers had called me last month and asked me if I would go back to using my old underground parking space even BEFORE it being fixed.  She said that it would be finished befor the rains became.  Actually, it actually DID rain before that it happened, but I covered the car with a cover that I have, so that was okay.  I just don't want to have to put it on every day (it takes a while), that is why I have an underground parking garage.

Well as soon as I was no longer using the temporary spot--that is meant for maintainance workers--somebody else started using it, but only after the normal working hours.  From my spending a lot of time out on my balcony that looks out onto the parking entrance and the maintenance parking spots, I figured out that who was using it late at night now was the new security guard.

As you can imagine, I am totally in favor of secure guards.  And I could see that this one was a very young man, and it reminded me of myself when I was going to Law School, a very expensive private law school that in order to be able to afford if one's parents weren't paying for it, students had to get financial aid (which I did and it took me several years to pay back and I had NOT become a lawyer), the only other or supplementary way was to have a part time job or be already rich.

Having a part time job is NOT compatable with going to law school.  All the highest scoring students in our law school were married and the "deal" was that the wives would do ALL the "family" work and the husband students would just study 24/seven.  Othewise, according to many, you could not make it. (Sadly, a common end to those situations was that after the guys passed the bar exam and get a legal job, they divorce their wives.  Or as the concept went...)

I guess if you wanted to menorize every single legal case in all of United States jurice prudence...my attitude about that was no.  My tack on the law was what really makes since, what is moral, what is just. Of course one learns that that is NOT the standard...the standard is really a lazy and frustrating one, and that was simply "what had been ruled before".  Well, that bored me; how can you ever evolve?  And anyway, my strong suit is not memorization.

So I broke all the rules in the book--had numerous dinner parties, had sex all the time (at times I could not concentrate in class because I could smell on my fingers the powerful sexual scent from woman of the night before) AND I ended up getting a NIGHTIME JOB (which I guess you figured out stopped at that time the dinner parties and the sex).

One of the jobs I had while in law school was security guard at a luxury appartment complex.  My shift was midnight to 8:00 AM, and then the first law school lecture of the morning would began.  When I had that job, after classes I would THEN have breakfast, and then go to bed.  I had to disconnect the telephone, beause now I was trying to sleep during the day.  It was a very hard way to operate.  My parents HATED it, because I was to carry an armed gun and my parents were afraid that that I would therefore get shot.  Well, I could have been shot even I wasn't carrying a gun!

The rules of that job included that every hour I was to complete a total security tour around the complex grounds.  I had a device (a watchman's clock) that I was to use to clock into various spots on the grounds that would make an imprint on a reel in the device to show a person in authority the next day that I had been to each required spot and the times I had there.  Other than that hourly "tour" duty, and being available for the needs of the tenants ("Help, I locked myself out of my aparment!"), I could sit in an office and study my law homework.

This was a terrible job for me to have...uttelry lonely, nights in Sacramento during the school year were cold and damp, and I hated being outside to walk these grounds at night. I was chilling in my thick jacket while everybody else in the complex was warm and cozy in their apartment with the flikering fireplaces and lights of their televisions taunting me through the closed blinds of their living rooms.

So now when I saw our new securty guard here, my heart would go out to him and I yearned to at least acknowlege his existence.

Late tonight, I was out on my balcony, enjoying the night air and having a delicious night cap, I saw the guard come aroud, lean against his car, light a cigarette, and talk on his cell phone (of course).

I wished I could at least say hi to him, but I was up here on the third floor, and finally I realized, "Why not just go down there and talk with him for a moment?"  So I did.  I knew I was interrupting his cell phone conversation, but I apologized for that and said I wasn't going to be long. I identified myself, asked him his name (Colby).  I said that I had seen that he was working here and I was glad to see it.  I mentioned that I knew it is a lonely job (but I guess the cell phone with a girlfriend fills in the gaps), and he agreed, yes, it was a lonely job.  He was a very beautiful young black man, and most likely not the least bit similar to me, not doing work while going to law school, etc., but that doesn't matter, I wasn't expecting to be FRIENDS with him, I just wanted to acknowledge him.

I liked it that he pointed out that he saw that our entrance gate was stuck open (that must have happened sometime earlier today), so he was monitoring that situation.  I told him that at least once a month some bozo here crashes into the gate, but that the management get that fixed as soon as possible.

Anyway, it was a satisfactory few minutes, I had gotten to do what I wanted to, and maybe he feels a bit more appreciated on this otherwise lonely and thankless job.  I can see how valuable cell phone contact is for a young man of that generation.  It would have come in handy to me when I was in law school!

The Universe Wants It To Happen

A small kitchen window screen tossed away on the front of my house alerted me that I had had a burglary. Yes, indeed, the house had been under “ransack” for an entire working day, so a thief had been looking into every single thing I had so as to determine what would be the most valuable things to take on this first pass.

 

The sheriff who came to get fingerprints showed me how easy it was to break in despite all my locks and screws and dowels in the sliding glass door runners.  All he needed was one screwdriver, the normal tool of the burglarizing young drug addict.  The sheriff said they pick them up all the time; youths with a fanny back containing a screw driver and a pair of socks, that is their burglary kit and how they keep from leaving identifying fingerprints, socks on their hands once they are inside the house.  He warned me that the burglar would see that I have quite a lot of more valuable things, so if I wanted to keep them, I needed to begin moving them away from that house that every evening.  He said the burglar now knows everything I have and where I have it, and will be back for more, for as long as I live there.

 

So I began the process of moving away from what had been the best place I had ever lived and was the happiest period in my life, now ruined forever.

 

The neighboring people who came to my “garage sale” all asked, “Did he get any guns or knives?” and I said yes to both accounts, and one knife was a custom carved and forged knife hand-made by a good friend of nine who lives in northern Sweden; that knive I consider to be priceless (among several other things stolen).  Every person said to me “guns and knives, that is a sign of a young man”.  They now knew exactly who the burglar was, someone recently released from prison for burglary, now living back in the neighborhood.  Oh, that guy?  I would give him rides into town.  So that was how he repaid me, uh, learned my work schedule.  

 

But this blog entry is not about the burglar.  It is only to explain why I ended up living with my parents again when I was 45 years old.

 

It had taken me a very long time to find the place where I was now having to move away from, including leaving my friends and income and life style and renown in theater circles…but this time, the moving had to be done in a hurry.

 

Three other times in my life I had chosen to leave California to live in the east.  Each one of those had been definite destinations that I wanted to go to.  The first time to North Carolina, the second time to New York, and the third time Alabama…only to move back to California after a while.  So here I was going to do that yet again, but with no idea of where. Nothing grabbed me, which makes sense because I hadn’t really wanted to move.  Louisiana, Florida, the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, all left me flat when I looked around them, so I tried checking out inland into Pennsylvania, but I was only getting more and more depressed.

 

As I was by this point at the end of my rope, I followed a method that always worked, called my mother from a phone booth for advice or hoping for a quick motherly pick me up.

 

She had an instant solution. She said they she and Dad were both so old now that she could hardly even cook their meals any more and there was a lot of other things I could do to help them.  Well, I had always loved our home town of Asheville, North Carolina, and if I could help them, then that would get me out this bind that I was in. So I went there.

 

Believe it or not, it was actually pretty good.  My parents were really extremely wonderful and it was interesting to mutate our roles in life from me being one of their children to us being adults together.  Despite having some duties such as the afore-mentioned cooking meals, I had gotten a full time job, had made friends, went to movies, was in a play, as well as preparing meals for my parents and helping them in other ways.  They actually loved my cooking and sometimes I could prepare some meals ahead of time that they could just microwave, so I wasn’t even necessarily tied down even regarding that.

 

So, (pant, pant) one morning I woke up late and didn’t have time to cook my own breakfast.  I decided to go to McDonalds for breakfast to take to work, and I chose to go to the Biltmore Forest McDonalds because it was the closest to where I worked.  Normally I would have gone thorough the drive-through, but this time the drive-through was shockingly crowded, so I parked and went inside.  Alas, they were packed solid in there, too, so I chose one of the three lines to get into.

 

Pretty soon after I got in line, an elderly man came in the door and got in line behind me.  I said something to him, like “Wow, they are really crowded this morning!” and that got us talking about who knows what…just letting the time go by faster.  When it became clear that we were getting close and I would be placing my order, the man said, “Well, it looks like you will be up there pretty soon, so let me tell you I really enjoyed our conversation, do you mind if I ask you your name?

 

I said, “My name is Tom Osborne.”

 

He said, “Oh, I knew an Osborne once.  A Bodwell Osborne.”

 

I said, “Bodwell Osborne, that is my father’s name, that certainly isn’t a common name!  Could this be the same Bodwell Osborne?  How did you know yours?”

 

He said, “I was a Mayflower moving man and in 1955, I moved Bodwell Osborne and his family from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He was going to be getting his master’s degree in Nuclear Physics at MIT.”

 

I said, “I was seven years old when we made that move.”  It was amazing to realize that this man actually had known my father from such a lot time ago.  I said, “You must have moved hundreds of people during your career with Mayflower.”

 

“No, thousands of moves,” he said.

 

“How on EARTH could you possibly remember the date of this one move, the name of the man you were moving, where you picked up the belongings, what the destination was, and the reason for the move?”

 

He said, “Oh, I would neverforget Bodwell Osborne.   Throughout the thousands of moves I had made as a Mayflower mover, your father, Bodwell Osborne, was the ONLY man I ever worked for who looked me straight in my eye and treated me as a man equal to him. Every other person treated me like somebody beneath them, to give orders to, not to consider as a full human being. No, I will never ever forget your father, who fully saw me.”

 

Now, I was way adult enough to fully appreciate the unique qualities of my father as a human being, who treated people by their soul and saw their unique value as human beings, and he had a special appreciation of hard working men as he, himself, was, despite his being a genius who had numerous patents and racked up various astounding accomplishments.

 

This experience waiting in line at McDonalds wasn’t to tell me about my father and his impact on others, as amazing as that experience was.  No, this was something else.

 

Six years later after that experience in McDonalds, my parents and I moved back to California and I was now working at a private school in Los Angeles.  Like the Parents-Teachers Associations at a Public school, our private school had something similar, the Parent’s Association that works very hard in providing various valuable services to the school and somewhere past mid-year in the school year, volunteer staff of employees at the school provide an appreciate breakfast for the members of the Parent’s Association, complete with entertainment by the staff.

 

I was one of the employees providing entertainment, which, like many others, might be singing an appropriate song, but some years, I would do something different.  One of those “something different” was that I the story I just provided here, my experience with the elderly man behind me in line at McDonalds who so cherished memories of my father from so long ago.

 

After I told the parents my story, I explain why I told it to them.  I said that I know how much they love their children, and how deeply they care about their education and hopes for a good and successful life when they grow up. And I knew they paid a lot of money when they choose to send their children to a private school; after all, they can get an education for free at a public school.  I was aware the other things they do for their children…and I pretty much bet that their children were probably too young to fully grasp and appreciate the sacrifices that their parents have been providing for them.  In short, they currently are unsung-heroeswhen it comes to appreciation from their own children.

 

But someday that appreciation will be realized and they all can count on that happening.  How do I know this?  Because my own experience led me to understand that the Universe wants it to happen, or for other goodness to come your way when everything lines up correctly.

 

Thinking back to what I experienced.  I had to be living in Asheville, North Carolina, which I normally did not; mostly I lived in California.  I had to wake up late one day.  I had to decide to go to McDonalds for breakfast.  I had to decide to go to the Biltmore Forest McDonalds.  I had to choose to go inside instead of using the drive-through like I normally would.  I had to choose a particular line.  And this elderly man had to choose to get in line behind me.  I had to have chosen to talk with him, and he had to choose to ask me my name.

 

All those unbelievable events had to come together to give me that message.  WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE ODDS?  It was astounding.  No person could make that happen.

 

What miracle lies in wait for you?