“Hello, ladies,” says a man’s voice. I look up from my menu to see the manager sliding up to our table. I guess that excludes me; at least I hope it does.
I am the only man in the middle of four women at this table, which is not necessarily a bad place to be. And as an elementary teacher, I’m certainly used to this. The manager puts his hand on the edge of the C-shaped booth behind Katie’s head and begins to make small talk with the other teachers, but I can’t stop thinking about the conversation he interrupted.
We had been talking about Kristen’s civil engineering husband. “Josh said the other day that he might like to get into education,” Kristen had said. To me, Josh seems like an extra character in a movie, and I think this is because I have no idea what a civil engineer does.
“Where are you from,” the manager asks.
“Chattanooga, Tennessee,” Heidi says.
The manager, a white-haired man with a goatee that spreads along his jowls like the pointed wings of a jet plane, steps closer and takes a drink of water. “I used to own a restaurant near Atlanta, Georgia. Back in the ‘70’s. Lost a lot of money there.”
I cannot imagine what it is like to have or lose a lot of money. How do you lose a lot of money?
The manager goes to do whatever it is that restaurant managers do, and Katie continues the conversation by mentioning her husband, who is also a civil engineer. “Thomas’s job isn’t what he thought it was going to be, either.” I ask Katie what Thomas’s job is like and how it isn’t what he expected. “Well,” she says, “He works for a wind power company, and it’s turning out to be a lot more construction.”
This does nothing for me, since I don’t know what I would do for eight hours at a wind power company, let alone eight months. What happens, though, is that I get a mental picture of a big, burly man with his sleeves rolled up and a hard hat tilted back; his gigantic Toyota truck is just off center in the background, gleaming in front of a skyscraper. No, wait; not a skyscraper. A skeletal Don Quixote windmill. He’s pointing at something and calling something out.
“Move that thing! …And that other thing!” And it takes me a minute to realize that these words, this construction-worker civil-engineer monologue is really a voice over from The Princess Bride, because I don’t really know what a civil engineer would shout out. “No more rhymes now, I mean it!” Thomas says, and Josh calls back, “Anybody wanna peanut?”
We leave the restaurant and walk back to the hotel. Since we’re going to attend a Lucy Calkins workshop on writing in the morning, I decide to go to bed early. With the lights out, I flip on the TV to the History channel to drown out some of the city noises, and I watch a dramatized version of people groups migrating to North America over the past 3,000 years. When it shows the sophisticated techniques Native Americans used to hunt buffalo, it tells it through a little story scenario. A 15-year-old boy gets to hunt with the men for the first time, but he gets spooked by a rattlesnake that slithers up under his wolf skin cloak. He freaks out and sends the buffalo running, ruining months of planning for this hunt. His punishment is that he must go back and work with the women and children.
I sit up in bed. I can’t believe it. My job in an elementary school is equivalent to Native American emasculation!? What does this say about me? What does it mean that I chose to work with the minds of children, Post-It Notes, and highlighters in a job dominated by women instead of power tools, power lunches, or wind power in a world of men? What does it mean that I love the decision that I’ve made?
In the dramatization, the boy earns back his manhood when he saves some children from a runaway buffalo by killing it at the last possible second. He goes off to hunt with the men; I go to the writing conference and listen to a gut-wrenching story about a mother that makes her eleven-year-old daughter wear a bra on the outside of her clothes to remind her to wear it at all.
But I hear something else, too. Lucy Calkins quotes, “What we do with our time is what we do with our lives,” and I think back to that fork in the road when I turned towards education. How I wanted a job that would make a difference in the lives of people. But I think of people like my colleagues, their spouses, and my own beautiful wife, and I realize that it isn’t the job that makes a difference in people’s lives—it’s the people. People that are truly awake and compassionate and intentional.
And it’s not until this moment—this very moment in which I am writing this out and wondering how I am going to tie up the ending "with a little bow"—this moment when I scan back to the beginning to see if I can connect to it full circle—when I realize what Kristen really said. Josh, the civil engineer, the man who took a manly job, is thinking about being an educator.
I’ve got just one thing to tell him: Using the basal reader is for wimps.
