ElementalMom

This morning, my galley is spotless.

An old roommate of mine once mentioned that if she could control no other thing in her world, she could keep her kitchen clean. The chaos level in her personal relationships was high, but her kitchen was always gorgeous. And so today, my galley is spotless. Today, Sun, where I’ve worked for eight years and three months, is laying off 6,000 people, me amongst them.

Dishes, washed.

Thankfully, there were enough whispers on the wind that I think it won’t come as a surprise to most of us. I think most folks have some sort of backup plan, or else they’re going to be smacked hard with the Wet Fish of Denial. Although it’s going to be a bear, financially, I am deeply looking forward to some dedicated mommy time… some time where I am not telling my children “Mommy has a meeting” when they ask me to read to them or play with them. I’m looking forward to focusing in, getting work done on our boat, and putting energy here instead of there.

Stove, scrubbed.

I‘m basically just leaving my LinkedIn profile up all day today. Requests keep coming in, and going out. I don’t want to lose touch with any of these people I’ve worked with, or miss any opportunities for further wage earning. And judging from the speed with which messages are being traded, they feel the same. It’s one of those Joni Mitchell moments, where everyone feels better for having contact, no matter the circumstances.

Counter, wiped down and bleached.

I have been thinking that it was time to do something else with my life for a while now, but my day job was really not bad as they go. Good pay, good benefits, excellent teammates. The rest of the company was sheer madness, and I’m quite sure the drama above my head was unbelievable. But within my team, life was good. So I probably would have stayed forever. It’s like I was a cat at the door, indecisive, and this is the Big Push Through.

Appliances, wiped down.

It would be harder on me were I alone in this. I’m not. 5,999 of my Sun friends and coworkers are being cut today; good, intelligent, talented folks. Friends got cut from O’Reilly and McGraw-Hill last week, and I hear that Microsoft and IBM are cutting people today too. So it’s not like this is a reflection on me. It’s a reflection, and frankly, a condemnation, of the entire system. Endless growth is not possible without violent course-correction. And what makes me laugh is that these cuts are for the benefit of the stockholders; but we’re the stockholders, because I don’t know a single person being laid off who doesn’t have some Sun stock. I have this great fantasy of us all showing up to a board meeting and telling “them” what we really think.

Tea kettle, polished, filled, and centered on the burner.

As I look behind me, at my lovely galley, I realize that really, I’m as well-prepared for whatever comes next as I can possibly be. I don’t exactly know what’s coming next, but I know that Louis Pasteur was right, that “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” I’ve done as much as I can do, and now, as ever, it’s time to sit back and let the adventure unfold.

Everyone knows you never pick up hitchhikers.

We were driving home from Christmas in Nevada, at my parents’ place. We’d had a white christmas, the boys’ first ever, and ours too. It was cold cold cold, snowy, and perfectly wintry. We’d had a lovely time (which I’ll talk about in another post). And as we drove past the truck stop and onto the onramp of the I-80, a hitchhiker caught our eye.

He looked young. He looked familiar. And he was holding a sign that said “Sacramento, CA. Any help would be appreciated, thank you!” It was the exclamation and the small smiley face next to it that got me. We drove past him, made it a few hundred yards down the road, looked at each other, and turned around at the next off ramp to circle back and pick him up.

And thus began our journey with “Chip”. That’s not his name, it’s just what he goes by, because someone a long time ago noticed his chipmunk cheeks. It’s a name that suits him.

The boys were instantly thrilled to have someone in back with them. They chatted with him about their bionicles, about the snow, and the cold. They were entranced. He told them about sleeping under the freeway overpass, and they compared that to the warm beds they’d been in. There were some thoughtful looks. They asked him about the feathers dangling off his backpack, and he promptly untied them and gave each boy a feather.

As we chatted, he warmed up considerably. We talked about books, about politics, about world situations, about the state of things. He was stunned that a family in a minivan could hold world views so close to his own. And eventually, we asked the question, “How did you start traveling?”

Tired of the drugs and the chaos in his family of origin, he ran away from home at 14, and hit the road as a Traveler. Apparently, when your expectations are minimal, the world is your oyster. You’d think a kid with a start like that would be rough around the edges, wary, cynical. But not Chip. He was absolutely fabulous. He talked to the boys like they were people, he talked to Jason and I like we were still trustworthy, he talked about the world like he was grateful to be in it. Having slept under the freeway overpass for four days I knew for a fact to have been below 20 degrees, Chip only talked about the beautiful snow, his most excellent sleeping bag, and the kindness of the folks running the truck stop across the street where he got hot coffee in the mornings.

As we drove on, we decided that largesse was in order, so we offered that Chip could come with us, have a hot meal, a shower, and a warm bed, and then head on his way in the morning. So that’s what he did. And a nicer, more colorful, more engaging houseguest, we could not have imagined. He told us tales of his adventures, we told him about our plans for the boat. There was a great deal of mutual admiration on both sides.

So what’s the lesson here? Depends on you, really. The lesson I chose to take from this is that it’s possible to be a whole lot happier with almost nothing than it might be with a whole lot of something. It’d be easy to be a whiner, were you to find yourself in Chip’s circumstances, without anything more in this world than the pack you carry. But that’s overly simplistic. He had friends all over the world, he had places to see, and adventures strung out in front of him as far as he could see. Tomorrow was going to be spectacular, as far as Chip was concerned. And I think a lot of us could try that.

OK, I’m his mother, I’m biased, I get that. But is he not beautiful enough to break the heart?

Jason just took these shots randomly the other day.

A fun post, about the effects of the family’s Jackie Chan obsession on Rowan’s education.

http://www.blog.lifewithoutschool.info/2009/01/ali-i-needed-to-know-about-pe-i-learned-from-jackie-chan.html