No time to read

A writer friend of mine, Jennifer Niven, whose work and work ethic I admire, has a blog called “No time to bowl.”

I won’t steal her story by telling you why it is named so. You can find out for yourself here.

Jennifer’s blog title reminds me of all the years I thought I had “no time to read.” Perhaps you feel the same way.

Here’s what I now know about “no time.”

When I was a little girl, I loved having stories read to me. Later, when I could read myself, I couldn’t get enough of books and the tales they held between their covers.

Heck, I even read between the covers of my bed, using a flashlight to flip through the pages when I was supposed to be sleeping. I kept at that until I started high school, at least. It was then, I think, that boys became nearly as important to me – or perhaps more so – than books.

When I was sixteen, I began to work, going to school by day, cashiering in a grocery store at night. I guess I thought I didn’t have time to “read” anymore. I don’t remember many stolen moments with books in those years.

In college, it seemed most of what I read was that “required” stuff, then I got married had kids and kept working. My reading was limited to the newspaper, a magazine from time to time, and a few books I’d begin here and there when I wasn’t too tired to read.

I really didn’t turn to books again in earnest until I returned to school when I was nearly 40, and even after that, I sometimes went great lengths of time without making it through an entire volume.

It was many years later that I realized that, during those “no time to read” years, I was reading all along.

My job as a cashier in a grocery store, encountering hundreds of people day in and day out, was like an entirely new lending library. Each day was a fresh page upon which I could read not words, but people. They were as different as they were the same, and each encounter, each experience taught me something new, if not about that individual, then about humankind or the way the species interacts, one being with another.

So, where ever you are, what ever you’re doing, unless you’re locked in a cave away from the human race, when you have “no time” to read books, there is something just as interesting to read.

It’s people.

Try it. You might just see what you’ve been missing.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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Be like Abe

Ever have one of those days when you have to leave the house, but you hope beyond all hope that no one, not anybody, no where, no how, sees you?

Happened to me once – sort of.

I knew when I left home that I’d see a couple people, and I was okay with that. But, running into someone on whom my livelihood depended and on whom I’d like to make a good impression? Not so okay with that.

Just so you understand where I’m coming from here, I’m no prima donna, no prissy pris, no girly girl. I know people who won’t leave the house without lipstick, no less.

I’m not one of them.

In fact, I’ve gone months without a stitch of makeup, years without wearing a skirt or a dress. I’m just a jeans and t-shirt kind of gal. But I take a bath every day, and I wash my hair, brush my teeth and wear clean clothes.

Sometimes, though, even clean clothes don’t look clean, and in the course of a day of hard work, the most well-scrubbed bod can appear otherwise. This was one of those days.

For more years than I care to remember, we owned some apartment houses – not big complexes, not slums, just a handful of nice older two-family homes that we rented out to mostly nice people (though some fooled us a bit).

One summer, we’d decided we’d save money heating the homes come winter if we’d add insulation, so we called the local installation guy and had him do the job. He had some sort of high-powered blower that would fill the attics and side walls with the stuff once he drilled holes in the siding.

A few days after his visit to one home, I got a call from a tenant.

“Hi, it’s me, [name omitted to protect the innocent]. I went down to the basement to do laundry.

“You know that room next to the washer? It’s full of insulation.”

It sure was – pretty nearly, anyway.

When I went over to check it out on my lunch hour, I found that the area, originally the home’s coal room, a long narrow space about four feet wide and ten feet long, was almost half full of gray blown-in cellulose insulation.

Back then, I had Wednesdays off. So, the next Wednesday, I pulled on my work clothes – an old comfy t-shirt and a pair of faded, paint-splattered bib overalls. I took some garbage bags, a snow shovel, a broom and a dust pan with me and set off to un-insulate (Is that a word?) the overstuffed room. If I remember correctly, someone was helping me – another renter or a high school boy who worked with me. Thank goodness.

Within an hour or so, we’d made a lot of progress on the drift of gray snow. It wasn’t heavy, but it was messy, and I was looking the worse for wear. The insulation stuck to my clothes, my shoes, my face, my arms, and burrowed its way into my hair.

I needed a break, and if memory serves me correctly, I also needed more trash bags or boxes or something.

I headed to the grocery store where I worked, just a couple blocks from the house.

An “Oh no!” moment

Did you ever have one of those times when you wished you could just turn invisible, say “Beam me up, Scotty, NOW!” and be outta there? It was one of them.

I wasn’t worried about my coworkers or customers seeing me in my “work clothes.” We’d grown up together and they were used to seeing me all scruffy on my quick trips to the store in the midst of cleaning or painting projects.

What I didn’t count on was walking down the produce aisle toward the double doors to the back room and running right smack dab into one of the store’s owners, an “older” gentleman in neatly pressed suit, starched shirt, shiny shoes and tie. He and his brother had come for a visit.

What I hoped, as I spotted him at the end of the aisle, was that I could just pretend I didn’t see him, and that he wouldn’t see me either. It was too late to take a detour down another aisle.

I’d seen him in the store before, but never met him formally, so I was hoping he’d pay me no mind.

No such chance. In his friendliest voice, the owner, a man named Abe, smiled, and said, “Hello, how are you?” with a warmth not often seen or felt -- as if he really cared.

“Fine, thanks. And you?” was my answer – or something of the sort, smiling back, but thinking “Oh, $@&#!”

Then, I went ahead, pushed through the doors and did what I’d come to do.

To this day, I don’t know if Abe knew I worked for his company, or if he was just being as friendly to me as he was to anyone he met. I like to think it was the latter.

Even before that encounter, I had always tried to be friendly to every customer, no matter how dirty, unfriendly or stand-offish they seemed. I always just felt it was the right thing to do.

But after the morning that Abe treated me as if I were wearing party finery and I was the most important person he’d ever met, I always tried to treat his customers – ours – the same.

I wanted to be like Abe.

I think he would have liked that.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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Work clothes

Work clothes -- what does that word mean to you?

When I was a little girl, my first “job” was a volunteer opportunity at my grandmother’s church, preparing catechism materials for the diocese. We’d walk down up and down rows of tables assembling loose-leaf booklets, picking up a page at a time and setting it on top of the others. My work clothes for that first job were whatever I’d brought with me for my stay at Grandma’s – perhaps shorts and a top, maybe a dress.

Later, as a young teen, I babysat. Those work clothes were my jeans and a sweater in the winter, shorts and a t-shirt in the summer.

'Real' jobs, 'real' work clothes

At sixteen, I started my first paying job, and I had to wear a uniform – a nearly see-through light green nylon dress with big white buttons in the front from top to bottom. It was the sixties, so it was short. The stockers in those grocery stores never seemed to complain about their female coworkers’ garb.

That uniform later gave way to a series of smocks, none as flattering to a youthful figure as the green dresses, but able to hide a multitude of unwanted curves and bulges on an aging, out-of-shape bod.

During those years, I wore a number of other work clothes, too, as the store where I worked had themed promotions a couple times a year or so. I was a movie usher, a clown, a bearded prospector and more. It was fun hitting the thrift stores looking for things like bold plaid slacks and Mork-style suspenders for my costumes.

When I began working in corporate America, my work clothes changed. I wore business attire or corporate casual, often tending to go on the dressier side, wearing a blazer or jacket over slacks, in leaner years wearing dresses and in frumpier days, a sweater and slacks.

Today, I work from home, so my work clothes are whatever I feel like wearing. Believe it or not, even though I could spend the whole day in my smiley-face flannel pjs, I do get dressed – usually in jeans, yoga pants or sweats and a comfy long- or short-sleeved t-shirt.

'But, I want them -- really, I do!'

There were a couple of items of work attire, I’d never owned, though, and long desired. I wanted a sturdy brown-twill lined jacket and bib overalls. You know, the kind the linemen for the power company or farmers or tradesmen wear.

Sounds silly for a woman, you think?

Not when there’s six inches of snow on the ground and you want to use the snow blower, but don’t want to have wet jeans in 15 minutes as 30-mile-an-hour winds blow the white stuff back at you. Not when you want to go out for firewood when it’s 10 degrees outside. Not when you’re heading to town on ice-packed roads in the middle of the winter.

Not when you want to lay down to work at making snow angels with your grandkids in the middle of the winter.

“Happiness is found in simple things,” says E.B. Michaels.

My new “work clothes” make me happy.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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