All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

35
making certain she had forgotten nothing
for the week’s trip and readying herself to
drive the 300 miles to her family home.
His daughter Grace stood before him,
looking up at Daniel in her pretty, travel
dress, while his son was behind her a few
paces, hopping up and down, typical of him,
a 6-year-old boy.
“Grace, I want you to look after your
mother,” he instructed his eldest child.
“You know she can work herself into a
state, when there is too much for her to
think about.”
His daughter looked and grinned at
her brother.
“What is it” Daniel asked her.
Grace did not mind replying. “Daddy, that
sounds like you, not Momma.”
Daniel considered the veracity of this.
Behind them, his son continued to hop up
and down.
“Sean,” he scolded his son, not able to think
of anything else to say.
When his wife and children had gone,
Daniel had walked around seemingly
without point to the back of the house to its
backyard, as he now looked out at it from
the kitchen window. The sun that morning
was also shining brightly and encouraged
his lingering. Daniel noticed that the roses
he had planted against a side fence earlier
in the spring were becoming a verdant
bush – a spectacle of red, pink and white
blossoms – and turning his glance, just for
a moment convinced himself he actually
saw tiny butterflies on the grass in the
far corner of the yard. Such imagination
succored him and soon he was thinking of
composing another haiku. While preparing
coffee and then the lunch to take to work,
Daniel again pushed words, syllables and
lines about in his mind, hoping to see if he
could capture his fanciful thought about
the butterflies and its surprise. Again, too,
for some reason, composition came easily,
especially the rhyme, though finding the
exact number of syllables for each line kept
him busy for more time than he really had
to spare. Finally, he wrote the second haiku
of the day:
While musing, I see
Pink butterflies on my lawn …
O, no. Just pansies.
Taking a bus the few miles into the city –
Emily had their only car – Daniel sat on
the side of the bus closer to the houses of
the working class streets, unable to keep his
thoughts exclusively on the workday ahead
of him. The bus carried passengers like him,
mostly government and civil servants from
the suburbs just beyond the city. As the bus
passed an intersection of cars and pickup
trucks and convenience stores, Daniel
thought of a conversation he had had with
his father weeks before. His father now lived
in a small town east of the city, in an area
virtually rural, which he preferred.
“Why do you do what you do” His father
was already retired.
Daniel was visiting, dutifully staying
in touch. His father had been a high
school gym teacher and football coach.
Daniel stood beside him in the finished
basement where his father had his workout
equipment, athletic awards, and a huge
flat screen television set for watching
sports events.
“I don’t know. I just want to.”
“Isn’t the work a bitch Doesn’t it get you
stressed out of your mind”
Daniel had to smile and nod. “Yes. It does.”
They had had this conversation before.
“Then why Is this work really what you
want to do with your life”
Daniel sighed. “It’s got to be done.” His
father surfed the television channels, like a
teenager. He was looking for an important
post-season soccer game.
“And when something good happens, really
good, it feels meaningful, as they say,”
Daniel added.
His father settled on a basketball game for
the time being. “I wonder,” he observed.
“Maybe that’s just rationalization. You’ve
always been a romantic. How long do you
plan to continue to do what you do”
Daniel had had to think about his father’s
blunt conversation, but now, as the bus
brought him closer to the city and its
government buildings, he found himself
noting the people in the streets, those who
lived and mostly rented in the buildings
only blocks from the city’s downtown.
To his chagrin, the pedestrians looked
impoverished or nearly so. Standing out
from others, a teenage couple walked
together holding hands in the morning’s
sunlight, and this image, too, captured his
imagination. Not wanting to lose the image,
Daniel quickly reached in his pocket for his
paper and pencil and raced to capture it,
his mind searching anew for proper words
and thoughts. By the time he reached his
bus stop in front of the building where he
worked, he had composed his third haiku
of the day, which had given him a bit of
trouble to work out. Daniel had fussed over
the connotation of key words and decided to
be satisfied with what he had written until
perhaps later that evening, when he had
more time to linger. Now, he read the tiny
poem to himself:
Youth, so lovely,
Strolling in the sun … While I tire
When I walk, thirty.
Whatever pleasure the unfinished haiku
had given him was momentary, for as
soon as Daniel ascended the flights of
stairs to where his agency was located,
he found it already furiously busy. Junior
staff members and interns were at their
work spaces or in cubicles on the phones
looking overwhelmed, as were his other
colleagues, not much older than the interns
and junior staff and not much younger
than Daniel. Seeing him, one of the interns,
Susanna, said:
“Daniel, thank God you’re here. The calls
are coming in every minute. I’ve been on the
hotline since … ”
“I’ll help, don’t worry,” Daniel told her.
Taking a handful of phone messages from
Susanna’s desk, Daniel crossed the large
main room of the agency and went into
his office. Pausing a moment to look out
his window, he peered down on the street
below and watched pedestrians passing
by his building, others sitting on stoops or
lingering across the street, or going in and
out of small stores. Finally, drawing in his
breath, he picked up the first message and
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011