Month: June 2017

1996. It’s 4th of July weekend and I’m hanging out all by myself at Paine Field in Everett, feeling bummed. As the sun goes down, I finally decide that feeling bummed is useless. “If I could do anything I wanted to this weekend, what would I do?” I ask myself.

The answer is immediate: go hiking.

It’s not that I’ve been an avid hiker up to that point. I used to go into the woods on occasion when I was growing up, but I’ve always wanted to go hiking. So why didn’t I? There were plenty of reasons, but none of them applied anymore. It was time to go.

The next day it rained, but the day after that, I got in the car and drove out Highway 2 toward the Cascades. I stopped at a mini-market and bought a gazetteer. Loved it immediately–all those topographical maps with trail markings and dirt roads! “Goblin Ridge” sounded interesting, but wait…”Fourth of July Creek!” It’s fate! Okay, so today’s the 6th of July. Close enough. Plus, it’s the squiggliest line on the map. That’s got to be good, right?

I go down Icicle Creek Road and find the trailhead. I start charging up the hill! It’s exhilarating! It’s fantastic! It’s…exhausting!

Switch back after switch back, it climbs and climbs. About two hours into it, I’ve stripped off my jacket and I really wish I wasn’t wearing denim jeans. I keep going. A lovely group of fit-looking 20-somethings comes tripping down the trail. One of the girls smiles cheerily at me and says, “You’re not sweating nearly enough!” Nicest lie I’ve ever been told.

I keep going. I’m can see more and more of the Enchantments across the valley. I’m up in the lupines now. Beautiful! I’m just pooped, that’s all. I put one foot in front of the other. The top of the ridge still seems to be way up there. My left quad suddenly cramps! I stop and massage it out. A few minutes later, I continue. Another thirty steps and my RIGHT quad cramps! Ack! I rub it out. It’s not totally gone, but now, I can hobble ahead again. NO! I haven’t gone far before my LEFT quad cramps AGAIN! I stop one more time.

As I try to make the painful spasm go away, I’m thinking: “This is NUTS! If I have to stop every 30 steps, I’ll never make it!”

But then, it occurred to me: If I don’t stop, and I don’t turn around, every step is progress. Making it to the top is actually inevitable. Seriously. I can’t help but make it!

I decide that’s what I’ll do: I’ll “rest my way to the top.” A few more steps, another rest. A few more steps, another rest. I avoid cramping again. Little by little, I make it, all the way to the top. I’m so excited that I even have enough energy to climb the garage-sized haystack rock at the summit. The view is amazing, all the way to the valley on one side, and up into the Cascades on all the others. I love it!

Now I have to get down. I chat with a local climber much of the way. When I get to the car, he asks if I want to do some rock climbing with him. I’m just glad to have made it to the car.

I drive home. Getting out of the car takes a series of handholds, a lot of arm strength, and gritted teeth. The next day, I go to work. I’m walking like a decrepit chicken. Getting up from my chair is a 60-second ordeal. This lasts for a couple of days, much to the amusement of my coworkers.

I’ve never forgotten 4th of July Creek. That’s where I learned to “rest my way to the top.”

Circa 1998. I’ve been working as an analyst at this Internet startup for a couple of years. When I was hired, I was employee No. 47, as I recall. It’s gotten a lot bigger since then. My last boss has moved on to another firm, and a high-energy woman from a world-famous software company has been hired to create a new department which, I’m told, will include me. I’m nervous. My actual position has never been clearly defined (typical startup) and I really liked my last boss.

Mary, the new department head, sends me an Outlook invitation to lunch so we can talk. Here we go.

To keep track of all my projects, I had created an Access database a few months back, and had been giving my previous boss a regular report, so I’m ready. Every entry has a task description, start date, deadline, priority level, recipient, current status, history, and next step to be taken.

I print out the report in priority and deadline order. Then I go to meet my new boss for lunch.

We walk to a nice Indian restaurant near the Bellevue, WA, office. Mary orders, since I don’t know much about Indian food. The table cloth is white. The water is served in stemware. Now I’m really nervous.

After a few bites, she says: “I’m not very clear on what you DO. What are you working on?”

With a brief verbal intro, I hand her the report. She stops eating. I try to swallow. She reads the first page and then starts flipping through the rest of it, probably 25 pages, all told. The whole review takes about sixty seconds: one whole minute to decide where to pigeonhole me and set my new career path.

She looks up at me from across the naan, curry, lentils, and tandoori chicken. She shakes her head.

“You’re doing way too much,” she says.

I’m not sure I heard right, so I keep listening.

“This is impossible. There’s no way you can get to all of this,” she continues, flipping through the report again. She takes out a pen and starts marking stuff. “Okay, I want you to do this one (circles it)…and this one (circles it)…stop working on this one (crosses it off)…and, actually focus on THIS one (big circle, #1). If you have time after that, you can work on the next few…but everything after this one here, take off your plate. Don’t do them. I’ll talk to anyone who needs to know why.”

I’m flabbergasted. I think Mary notices.

“Look,” she says; “you can do only so much–probably just your top three priorities. And you should always know what those are. The way I see it is, if you can’t tell me your Top Three, then I’m not doing my job.”

She meant it. It was awesome.

Over the next year or so, I was more productive, more motivated, and more satisfied at the end of the day than ever before. I learned to turn down tasks that didn’t rate as high as my Top Three.

Mary backed me up on that, too–even against herself. If she burst into my office with some new thing (“bursting in” was standard), I listened to her rapid-fire description of the highly urgent, gotta-have-it task and then I said: “I’m working on this, this, and this: which one do you want me to move?”

It was not unusual for her to think for a second and then say: “None of them. Never mind.” Otherwise, she’d tell me which one to replace or where to shift priorities. Then she’d be out the door.

It was great to feel like I was always working on something valuable, something important, something necessary, something DOABLE. If I didn’t feel that way, I would review my Top Three with Mary.

She never failed to do her job.

These days, I’m my own boss. Do I know my Top Three? I always feel better when I do.

It’s 1969. I’m nine years old. This is sound of my mom (bless her heart) trying to cut my hair Not Quite So Short:

Scissors: Snip…snip-snip…snip

Mom: Oops.

Scissors: Snip…snip

Mom: Oops. Oh, shoot.

Clippers: VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

…Aaaaand I have a buzz cut once again.

While Everyone Else On The Planet seems to look like this in 1969:

or at least THIS:

I looked like this:

It’s not my mom’s fault. She does her best. My thin, fine hair is hard to cut properly. Eventually, though, my dad grows out HIS crew cut, so I get to grow out mine, too. Still, school rules dictate that boys’ hair must hang no lower than the earlobes. Here’s me, following the rules, circa 1973:

Yes, that’s basically a Dutch Boy cut “above the earlobes.” Maybe it’s an improvement? It’s arguable.

It doesn’t get much better over the next couple of years either–a little longer, maybe, but still a bowl cut:

I say I want it “tapered a bit,” but my mom knows her limits, so bowl cut it remains.

1976. There’s this girl at school named Esther, who can cut hair. In fact, she can cut ANYONE’s hair, from “Hoss” Hostetler’s kinky ‘fro to John’s super straight locks. I wonder if maybe she would cut mine. She says she will.

As a self-conscious 15-year-old, I’m going over to Lorri’s house (a girl on whom I had a secret crush) where Esther (a very nice cheerleader who nonetheless beat me in the shot put on Field Day back when I was 11 and she was 12) is going to invade my personal space and cut my hair.

“You have to wash it first,” she says as she and Lorri set up a stool in the middle of the kitchen.

I had NOT expected this. Hoping they don’t see me trembling, I awkwardly strip off my shirt and wash my hair in the utility sink. Somehow, I make it to the stool without my knees buckling.

Lorri and Esther look me over. I’m probably beet red, but they don’t mention it. They’re looking at my hair.

“You should part it down the middle,” says Esther. Lorri agrees. To prove the point, Esther parts it down the middle. Wet strands hang down on my left cheek like a bad comb-over.

“Yeah, you should definitely part it down the middle,” they declare.

Change is HARD! Change is SCARY! What will my DAD THINK if his son parts his hair DOWN THE MIDDLE?! (Only girls part their hair down the middle!) (Wait, where did I get that idea??) (I DON’T KNOW!). None of this internal monologue is verbalized, of course.

Lorri and Esther have no idea why it takes them fifteen minutes to convince me. I even call my mom, for Pete’s sake! Finally, I allow it. Esther cuts my hair parted down the middle. Two people think it looks decent. I’m too freaked out inside to know. It’s definitely different.

I walk back home. I can hear the radial arm saw in the backyard before I even get to our gate. My dad’s back there, slicing through screaming pieces of lumber with a sharp, spinning, carbide-tipped steel blade. I approach, heart pounding, and take one of the pieces off the end of the machine as he’s done cutting.

He takes one look at my hair. “You parted it down the middle.”

I nod.

He nods.

He feeds the whining machine another piece of lumber. No big deal.

I go to school the next day, half scared of what people will say. They like it.

Sometimes a little thing can start a chain reaction. This haircut altered my whole self-image. I have thanked Esther and Lorri many times over the years, though never personally. Maybe this will get through. THANKS! You have no idea what you did!

By the early 1980s, I’d pretty much caught up with the Beatles. Okay, maybe not George and John, but Paul and Ringo, anyway.

Later on, I sported more of a– Well, that’s a whole ‘nother story.