A Warrior's Album - Part 1

I've just started reading The Active Side of Infinity (Carlos Castaneda, 1998) after letting it languish on the bookshelf for eight years. I bought the book after hearing Howard Stern mention Castaneda's name during one of his radio shows.

Stern's guest (don't remember who it was) was rambling on about something and Stern piped up with, "Isn't that just Carlos Castaneda's theory?" Howard Stern may be an a-hole on the radio, but the guy is a sharp cookie and a well-read world-class geek. I hadn't heard of Castaneda so he piqued my interest and I bought the book.

Last night I went to the bookcase to get another book, and Active was next to the one I wanted. Hey, I'll read that one instead!

I wasn't very far into the introduction, page 6 to be exact, when a passage ended my reading for the night and started my brain spinning. By the way, I think a good book should cause you stop reading and start thinking, but I digress. The passage was by don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman from Sonora, Mexico.

"Every warrior, as a matter of duty, collects a special album [of events], an album that reveals the warrior's personality, an album that attests to the circumstances of his life."

"The [events] are memorable because they have a special significance in one's life. My proposal is that you assemble this album by putting in it the complete account of various events that have had profound significance for you."

"Not every event in your life has had profound significance for you. There are a few, however, that I would consider likely to have changed things for you, to have illuminated your path. Ordinarily, events that change our path are impersonal affairs, and yet are extremely personal."

I mulled that over for a minute or two, mentally whipping through the major events in my life. Yes they were major, but most unprofound.

Two brief moments in time, simple uneventful moments, did have a profound impact on my life. I still ruminate about them on occasion and have told the stories to a few folks. I'm sure there are more, but these two leapt to the forefront of the ol' gray matter just then. I'll call them The Nickle Raise and The Old Deaf Couple.

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THE NICKLE RAISE

I was fifteen years old and just starting my junior year of high school. I got a job as a carhop at an old-fashioned burger joint where the food is brought out to the car. Since I was under 16, child labor laws prevented me from working past 5:00 p.m. on school nights, so I worked every Saturday and Sunday until school was out for the summer.

There were three job categories at the burger joint: cook, fountain, and carhop. The cooks had the nasty greasy jobs of running the grill, cooking fries and dressing the burgers. The fountain made the drinks, sacked the food, and handled the money. The carhops delivered the food.

Since I worked only on the weekends, I saw pretty much the same people all the time. There was a day and night shift and the crews were all kids, probably the oldest one was a 19-year-old college girl. We all worked part-time to afford the luxuries of teenagerhood, like name-brand jeans and record albums.

Summer came and I starting working weekdays. The cooks on the day shift were Joan and Barbara, two ladies in their 40s who drove across the county line to come to work there. They worked Monday-Friday, 9:00-5:00, year-round, and had worked there for years.

Minimum wage was increased by $.05, so my hourly pay went from $2.10 to $2.15. I was underwhelmed with the raise. I worked at the burger joint for fun. The owner chastised me once because I had failed to pick up my last three paychecks and it was throwing off his bank statement reconciliation. Five cents more per hour made absolutely no difference in my life.

Because Joan and Barbara were long-time loyal employees, the owner had given them an additional $.05 per hour raise. They were not expecting this and when the paychecks came out, they were excited. I watched them standing there in their grease covered aprons, heads together, faces beaming, examining their checks. I can see them clearly in my mind's eye to this day, this moment of clarity in my life.


It hit me that for these two ladies, this burger joint was their life, their career, the thing they did day in and day out all year long to pay the bills. A grease covered apron was what they faced each and every day when they went to work. This was not a temporary job for them. They would not be moving on to something better. THIS WAS THEIR LIFE, and a nickel raise from minimum wage was the highlight of it.

I was saddened by this realization, and horrified. I don't know what forces of fate had landed these two ladies in the frybucket of life, but there they were. And from the looks of things, there they were going to stay. There but by the grace of God go I, some thirty years hence.

I resolved then and there that I would not be consigned to a life of grease and minimum wage. I was going to college and getting an education. I wanted to have options in life other than a fry cook at a burger joint. I didn't really know what "getting an education" meant at that young age, but I knew intuitively that was what I needed to do.

This brief but profound moment would alter my life's path in ways I couldn't imagine back then, but it set me on a course I would pursue for the next 23 years.

(continued)