Learning curve

When I was sixteen years old, I worked in a fast food restaurant in suburban Maryland. I took my job very seriously and figured it out in short order. My best friend, an older schoolmate of seventeen, and I were so good that eventually with a manager running the cash register, we could do an entire shift by ourselves. It only happened on off nights when other employees didn’t show. It was never planned. But we could make burgers, roast beef, fries, and chicken, with two doing the work of four. We began to think highly of ourselves.

One of the kids that the restaurant hired that summer was William. I trained William on every station. I trained and re-trained him. He didn’t take to it like I had. I thought that he was being deliberately obtuse. I was hard on him.

One day one of our cashiers took me aside. She was much older and much wiser. She must have been all of twenty-two. She said something like: “You are being very mean to William. Don’t you understand that he doesn’t and can’t think like the rest of us. This is easy for you but very hard for him. Quit being such a bully.” She probably used the word “retarded”. It was a very long time ago.

I have had very few such moments of clarity in my life where someone’s words completely changed my perspective. I immediately realized that I had been tormenting a sweet limited young man. I was the bad guy in the story. It has stayed with me for forty years. I became supportive of William, but I can’t say that it made up for all that I had said over the summer.

In my current job I have the opportunity to talk to victims of crime about their cases in city court. I was talking to a husband and wife team of bar owners who had an advertising statute destroyed by a customer and they wanted restitution. I had seen surveillance video of the crime and it was clear that the patron was trying to steal a large Styrofoam statute when he dropped and destroyed it. The bar was cool. The type that I would have liked back when that was more my speed. Turns out the husband was a collector of beer advertising. I was once such a collector and so we got into a lively discussion.

(Very little of this collection exists.)

His wife mentioned how expensive her husband’s hobby was in a good-natured way, but definitely with an eyeroll. I pointed to the Rolex Submariner on his wrist and said, “At least it isn’t watches.” Thus began a discussion about watches and fountain pens.

When the courtroom had cleared a new bailiff approached me. He asked “What do you think of the Citizen Eco-drive? Is it a good watch?” Before I could even respond he unclasped the watch and handed it to me. I had noted him earlier. He asked awkward questions in a flat affect. He seemed not to know what to do with himself. This job was hard for him. For him, I extolled the virtues of the technological marvel that he had handed me: fifteen or more years of battery life, charged by just going outside from time to time, solar panels well hidden in an attractive dial, radio controlled so that the watch would automatically set itself to the correct time down to the second. By all objective measures his was the best watch that money could buy. His parents had given him a fantastic gift and he should be proud of it.

I am still atoning for things that I said a lifetime ago. It is a great watch. No lies were uttered.

(The top photo is Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club in New Orleans. A favorite.)