by Billy Coffey
This was serious business. I considered getting up and walking out rather than to face who I was and what I had become. Fear told me that filling out that application would prove me a failure once and for all. Better to just leave, go back home, and try again. Maybe tomorrow. Yes. There was always tomorrow.
But before I could ball up the application and stuff it into my pocket, Administrative Assistant popped her head out of the door.
“Hi there,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Just checking on you.”
“I’m still here,” I said, wishing I wasn’t.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll take it when you’re done. No rush.”
“All right.”
I wasn’t stuck, but I didn’t feel too good about leaving then, either. If I did, Administrative Assistant might be inclined to tell everyone the funny story about the idiot who tried to fill out an application, freaked out, and left. I’d always hated looking stupid in front of people. The only thing worse was looking stupid in front of people and not being around to defend myself.
So I took her pen and set to work, quickly checking yes or no to the easier questions, such as if I’d ever been convicted of a felony, if I was a legal citizen of the United States, and if I was looking for a part- or full-time position. So far, everything was going well. No surprises or disappointments. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
But I soon found that the questions left were ones I felt might pose a problem. If not to the college, then maybe to me.
“Name,” for instance. I knew it was a ridiculous thing to stumble over but I did. I was applying for a job, after all, and it seemed as though the object was to stand out. My name did not stand out. It was boring. It was normal. I had always wanted a cool name, like Gunnar or Luke or Donovan. And Boyd? Please. There were so many Boyds in this valley and in the mountains around it that you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of us. My name certainly hadn’t gotten me very far in life. My name hadn’t garnered me the recognition I longed for in high school. If it was pass or fail according to The Plan, then my name failed.
“Address” didn’t bother me too much, but “How long have you lived at this location?” did. The brick ranch my family lived in was the first house my wife and I bought. Both of us had sworn our whole lives never to be stuck in a subdivision, so of course that’s exactly where we ended up. Our house hadn’t been built with things like functionality and family in mind. Instead, all of the rooms were cut off from one another and chopped up to the extent that even though we had almost two thousand square feet of living space, we could never have our families over for a get-together. Unless, of course, it was warm and we could go in our half-the-size-of-a-tennis-court backyard.
I wanted to move. I wanted to find a place farther out in the country, where we could have a big yard and plant a garden. I didn’t want a house. We had one of those. What I wanted was a home. Somewhere to stay for good. Somewhere our children could always come back to, no matter what. And we were finally all set to go and find one, too. But then all the mess with the factory started. Now it looked as though we’d better get comfortable where we were. Log home at the top of the mountain. Yeah. Right.
“Position applied for.” Mailroom assistant—that’s what was called for there. But I realized that if there was ever a job that seemed less glamorous and less meaningful than that of a factory worker, it was an assistant in the mailroom of a small college. I couldn’t help but think that I was taking a few steps down rather than up life’s ladder. I began to think of all the things I wished I could have written into that space. Professor was one. Dean of the college. President. I even made one up—Executive Director for the Dispensing of Knowledge and Wisdom. Except for the last one, of course, all of them were positions I maybe could have attained in life, if only I had done a few more things and left a few others undone. But it was not meant to be. Whether that was God’s will or my own fault or a combination of the two wasn’t clear. What was clear was that thus far working in a factory had been the pinnacle of my professional career, and even that looked to be nearly over. I scribbled “Mailroom assistant” into the blank. Another failure.
“What is your desired pay?” was next. A loaded question if there ever was one. My first job at the 7-Eleven in town had paid $4.15 an hour. Big bucks for a sixteen-year-old kid who lived at home. Not-so-big bucks for a sixteen-year-old kid who lived at home and had to put his own gas into his own vehicle. It didn’t take too many paychecks for me to realize that I was barely making enough money to live on, which was a travesty given the amount of work I had to do. And thus I was taught my first of many great lessons in life—you’re never going to get paid what you think you’re worth.
As the years and jobs changed, though, so did my pay. Now at the factory I was making almost twenty-three dollars an hour. Pretty good money, as far as I was concerned. About as much as a guy like me could hope to make in that area. But that wasn’t nearly as much as I’d hoped to make when I was in high school. If anything pointed more obviously to the fact that The Plan and my life were on two completely opposite tracks, it was my bank account.
I might have been an amateur at filling out job applications, but I was experienced enough to know that putting a number in that space spelled certain doom. I thought about putting “Enough to live on,” but that sounded a little stupid. So I just wrote “Open” and left it at that. Still, in the grand scheme of things, it was another failure in my life.
“Employment History.” I decided to limit this to the jobs I’d had since graduation from high school, which was a grand total of two. That could be seen as a good thing, I thought. Most people generally went through more than that after fifteen years out of high school, trying to find their niche. I always chalked it up to a sense of loyalty. Then again, it might just display a resistance to change that I’d had my entire life.
The factory came first.
Compensation (starting): $12/hour
Compensation (ending): $22.40/hour
Starting job title: Spinning operator
Final job title: Warper operator
Why did you leave? Still employed
What did you like most about your position? The money. [It was serious business to be honest here.]
What did you like least about this position? Everything else. [Again, honesty.]
Then there was my job before that, down at the Amoco in town.
Compensation (starting): $6/hour
Compensation (ending): $10/hour
Starting job title: Cashier
Final job title: Assistant manager
It looked good on paper, but in truth the title was more ceremonial than anything else.
What did you like most about your position? Many of the people.
What did you like least about this position? A few of the people.
There. My fifteen years of post–high school work: a gas station and a factory. I wasn’t exactly doing something that could get me fancy cars and a big house. Failure again.
“Skills and qualifications.” Here I was supposed to list any special training or skills that could assist me in performing the position of Mailroom Assistant. That section truly did stump me. Special training? I’d never had any special training in my life. Skills? Please. I didn’t have any skills to set myself apart from anyone else. If I was extraordinary at anything, it was my ordinariness. I left that section blank. Failure number six. I was on a roll.
“List special accomplishments, awards, etc.” The last section. This was the one part of the application that could have redeemed me in my own eyes. Here should have gone the evidence that proved some part of The Plan was still alive. It didn’t have to be certain or likely, just possible. But again, there was nothing to write down. I left that section blank as well. Failure number seven.
My application was finished. All that was left was to add my signature and turn it over to Administrative Assistant. But I couldn’t. Signing that applicat
ion would make its contents official. It would say to whoever read it that I abided by what I had written. This was me. This was my life. And I didn’t want it to be.
I wanted more. Not more things or more money. Not The Plan. I had placed my life alongside it as a guide for measurement, but I knew it wasn’t The Plan that I wanted. Not anymore. That was simply the nonsensical definition of what an inexperienced and gullible seventeen-year-old once thought success in life meant. But still, I wanted more than I had. If not The Plan, then surely a life that meant something and counted for something. A life that mattered.
I wanted skills and qualifications. I had none. I wanted to have accomplished something. I hadn’t. I wanted an award for a life well-lived. But I could receive no such award because I didn’t have a well-lived life. Not in my eyes. The only hope I had, the only thing I held on to, was the fact that there was still time for me. I had blown the first fifteen years after high school, but that didn’t mean I had to blow the next fifteen as well.
This, finally, was me. All me. And there just wasn’t much I could do about it.
I pushed my pen across the paper to scribble my signature. It was done.
But it wasn’t. The pen Administrative Assistant had given me had run out of ink. Wonderful. If that wasn’t a sign, I didn’t know what was. I reached into my pocket to pull out my own and pulled out a wad of something else.
Two pieces of paper and a toy car. How and when they got there I couldn’t say. What the…? I thought. I carefully placed the items on the table and examined them.
First was the toy car. A Matchbox, not unlike the ones I played with when I was a child. But this was not your normal, everyday Matchbox car. This was Josh’s favorite, Lightning McQueen. It was scratched and dented from constantly being thrown into one wall or another and worn from repeated use, evidence that the car was my son’s life and constant companion. He slept with it at night and fed it imaginary oil and gas at the table and washed it along with himself in the bathtub. He never went anywhere without it. And yet here it was. With me.
The next item was a small piece of folded construction paper from Sara. On the front were two stick figures. One wore a hat and was tall. “Dady” was written over it. The other was shorter and had blond hair. “Sara” was written over that one. We were holding hands and smiling. On the inside and in another hand was written “Best daddy in the world.” Under it, for authenticity, was Sara’s name again. Also flowers, the sun, and a rainbow.
The last item was a small, folded piece of paper from my wife. “Good luck,” the note said. “Remember that we love you.”
Then it hit me. They must have put those things in my coat pocket sometime during my trip to Super Mart. That was why my wife wanted me to switch coats before I left for the college. She knew I would need the contents of that pocket.
“Remember that we love you.”
With reminders like that, how could I forget?
Leave it to my family to pick me up out of the doldrums. Leave it to them to put a smile on my face even though they didn’t know I needed one. If someone had walked by just then, they would have just seen a pile of scribbles and a junk toy. Food for the trash can. But to me they were much, much more.
Though I couldn’t use them on my application, there in front of me sat proof that my life wasn’t such a failure after all. They wanted accomplishments? How about earning my child’s faith so much that he trusted me with his most valuable possession? They wanted awards? I was “Best daddy in the world” and had won the hand of my wife. How much better did it get than that?
It was then I realized that though the application I had just filled out could display the facts of my life, it could not display the truths of it. I had plenty of evidence to corroborate the theory that I had turned out to be a disappointment. But this was one of those times when all of the evidence, however compelling, still led to the wrong conclusion.
For instance: true, my name was not a unique one on the surface. There were, after all, about a half dozen Peter Boyds in the valley. But this Peter Boyd was named after his father, the greatest man I ever knew, and an uncle who had died long before I was born. My father was close to his uncle, and his death was devastating. To be named after a well-loved relative you’ve never met might not mean much to some people. To me, it was an honor.
And though my wife and I had lived in the same old house for eleven years in a neighborhood we swore we would never move into, that house still held many wonderful memories. It was the house our children first came home to from the hospital when they were born. Sara’s tiny hand- and footprints were still painted along the walls of her bedroom. And in Josh’s room, a Winnie the Pooh mural was painted by myself, my wife, and a close neighbor who had since moved. Our house kept us warm and cool and dry. There had been much laughter there, and much sadness. To move away to a log home in the mountains would be wonderful, yes. But it would be awfully hard, too.
And on second thought, I didn’t think I was professor material, or dean. Certainly not president. And if there were ever a position I was underqualified to hold, Executive Director for the Dispensing of Wisdom and Knowledge was it. I was always more the kind of person who stuck in the background. I was a watcher more than a doer. I was a stagehand in life. I kept things running along so the actors could flaunt themselves and the show could go on. Sort of like a mailroom assistant.
Desired pay? How much did I really need as long as I had a place to stay, food to eat, clothes to wear, and people to love?
And yes, all I’d managed to get since high school was one job at a gas station and another at a factory. So what? Because of those things I’d gained friendships that would last my entire life. Because of them I’d gathered enough stories to last through my grandchildren. Sure, not all of the memories from those places were good ones. But where can you find only good memories?
“Skills and qualifications”? Maybe none that stood out. But give me the time and I could make most people laugh at least once. And I was usually, eventually able to see the brighter side of things. And I was trustworthy. All useful things, whether in a job or in a life.
Maybe I wasn’t an example of success in the eyes of the world. But maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe what mattered was being a success in the eyes of God and the ones you loved the most in this life.
I reached into my pocket again for my pen and found it that time. I then signed my name across the bottom of the application. It was a big, bold signature. I wanted the person who read it to see my name. I wanted them to see that I was proud of the life I’d had. Proud of the blessings God had seen fit to give me.
In the end, it didn’t matter that I might lose my job. That was out of my hands. And it didn’t matter that things had to look so bleak at Christmastime. Maybe Santa’s sack would be a little lighter this year. So what? Come Christmas morning, what was under the tree didn’t matter nearly as much as who was gathered around it.
I got up and took the application back to Administrative Assistant.
“All done?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.
“Great. We’ll get back to you.”
“Fine. Have a good day.”
“You, too,” she said. “And Merry Christmas.”
Merry Christmas, she said. God bless her.
“It sure is,” I said.
20
The Detour
The sun had begun its long good-bye to the day as I made my way home. In another couple of hours it would set behind the mountains, casting streaks of orange and purple against the still-lingering clouds, and be gone. Gone, too, would be my snow day. It was a shame; seldom did life grant what amounted to a time-out to catch your breath and remember some things you had maybe forgotten. But of course all things must end at some point, if only so they could be made new again later on. I managed to convince myself that was the case with that day. It would be made new again. There would be other snow days, I promised myself. Ones even better than the
one I’d just had.
In the meantime, I would have to tend to the business at hand. I knew I could well stroll into work the next day and be told that while my contribution to the company was appreciated, my services were no longer needed. There would, no doubt, be some rough times ahead, times that would likely test whatever hope and faith I had left. But those times would also end at some point. Night lasts for only so long. The sun will rise again. Such was our existence upon this earth, alternating seasons of trial and joy that ultimately either wore us down or built us up. As with much of life, the choice was ours.
The kids would be wondering where I was. Dinner was probably being fixed. I wanted to go home. As enjoyable as my day had been, I was exhausted. But between the stoplight where I was sitting and home was the detour. Again.
As I sat there waiting for the light to go from red to green and thinking about the next day at work, I realized that my life had just taken a detour as well. Like the road that led home, the road through life I thought I should be traveling on was blocked. Maybe there was construction going on in my life, too. Maybe God was doing some improvements to make my ride a little smoother later on. I didn’t know. The department of transportation was saying I had to take the long way around to get where I wanted to be. God seemed to be saying the same thing. I wasn’t very fond of either of them right then.
But just when my mood was about to turn really ugly, I drove past a little mom-and-pop store. The owners sold Amish-made furniture mostly, along with an assortment of quilts, pictures, and homemade toys. In the warmer months they would sometimes offer horse rides and sell some pretty good barbeque chicken, too. A marquee out by the road was usually reserved for the newest sale items or the hours of operation. But all of that had been taken down in favor of a small bit of wisdom, no doubt placed there to soothe the rage of all the other people besides me who were being forced to take the long way around.
