Day 163 - Conversations

Three rectangular trellises at the front

Alex loves our house. He really does. He loves the inside, all on one level, no stairs, a view from one window of the mountains around San Diego, and a view of the hummingbirds at the feeder from the other large window. And he loves our yard. He would love it even more if it were large enough to need a riding mower to keep the grass short - his image of the American dream includes a riding mower. He loves the lemon trees in the back yard that provide the fruit to freshen up his gin and tonic in the evening. And he loves the flowers that grow in front of the house.

I like our house a lot, but I will never end up with the same deep emotions as Alex feels. Or maybe it is just that I won't speak the thoughts aloud like he does. You see, Alex is an extrovert, and while I have learned how to behave like one, I am still an introvert. That means that where Alex can't help but tell me what he thinks about everything. I keep my thoughts to myself unless I think it is necessary to speak the words. Our conversations are a combination of things he says and things I don't say.

This week, I did mention something to Alex about how I would like the flowers displayed in the front yard. While I was in Minnesota this spring, Alex spent a lot of time sprucing up the yard, including the purchase of a number of flowers in pots that he set up on the steps and on the table on the porch. He added petunias, hibiscus, and a few other flowers whose names I don't know in both the front and back of the house.

Two of the potted floral plants Alex put out on our steps have small white trellis frames in them. The plants don't seem inclined to climb the trellises, but I like the look of them. I suggested we get similar trellises to put up against the side of the house for the flowering plants that were already in the ground when we bought the place. They are vines, growing along the ground or on bamboo stakes Alex had put in for them. I thought the trellises would look good.

Rectangular trellis

Alex decided he would rather buy wood and make the trellises himself. I wasn't sure if it was the cost of the already made up trellises we found at Dixieline Hardware or his desire to make them himself that was the stronger motivator. But I said nothing. It didn't seem worth the time it would take to discuss it, and it really didn't matter. If he wanted to make the trellis, I didn't want to suggest that I thought it might not be a good idea. And if he thought the cost of the ones already made up was too high, I didn't want him to think I thought he was being cheap. I let him pick out the wood which we got home and added to his stock of wood for future projects. I thought the wood pieces were a little flimsy, but I am not the wood worker, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

Within a couple of hours, he decided himself that the wood wasn't substantial enough. He decided to take them back and pick up two rectangular trellises instead. I was pleased that we would have the trellises sooner than it would take for him to make up two, but what I really wanted were trellises in a different shape - more like a big "Y" than a big rectangle, but again I thought it would be better to get the ready made trellises right away (we had seen them at Dixieline when we bought the wood lengths) instead of having to look around further for the other shape. Alex came back with three rectangular trellises - all they had at that store.

Y-shaped trellis

Later, I heard him pounding the stakes into the ground to anchor the trellises on. While I knew he could do the work himself, and I didn't have to worry that it would put too much strain on his still recovering knee, I knew he would like me to help. He showed me what he was thinking of doing at one end of the house, but there are more plants at the other end, too. The three trellises wouldn't be enough. I was absolutely delighted when he suggested that perhaps we could get the other shape trellis for the end near the porch. I hadn't seen any, but when he realized there were no more of the rectangular ones, he had spied the others. I think he may have been hesitant to suggest that shape to me because they aren't the same as the first set. Inside, I was leaping for joy because that is the shape I had wanted all along.

All six trellises are now in place, with the vines and red flowers held up on the stakes ready for the vines to begin twisting around the boards themselves. Alex is happy. I am happy. And I barely had to say a word. I just needed to keep my thoughts to myself until they were also Alex's thoughts and then I could agree with him that his idea would be perfect. That's how an introvert and an extrovert hold conversations.

Day 161 - Cats and Dogs

Bunk

I am not really a dog person. I prefer cats. I am allergic to both, but I am somehow less bothered by cat allergies than dog allergies. When I discovered the allergies, I went through desensitization treatment, aka shots, which may explain why I am not so bothered by cats. It can't just be that I like them more than I like dogs.

In spite of my preference for cats, I have recently become somewhat attached to Bunk, Simon and Sarah's boxer. Bunk stayed with us for a week, while both Simon and Sarah were in Ohio. Bunk is such a placid animal, spending most of his time looking for just the right amount of sun or just the right amount of cool tile to lie down comfortably.

I have shared my life with lots of cats. There was Bilbo Baggins, aka Cat, and Karley, aka Kitty, in California. There was Sheikha and then Sharifa in Doha. The two of them made the trip to Barbados to join us and later Pooky joined the family. We lost Sharifa there. She went through all nine of her lives. And when we left for Moldova, we had to find new homes for Sheikha and Pooky because we knew we would be living in a hotel room at least initially. Sheikha stayed behind in Barbados and Pooky went with a

Sheikha

colleague to Iceland.

At that point, I agreed with Alex that we would have no more cats because it was just too hard to let go. But when we were about to leave for Abu Dhabi, a friend who was just about to leave asked if would take their cat, Violet, because they couldn't take her with them. And that opened the door for Fudge, Marmelade, RF, Missy, Eddie, and Missy's six kittens to move in on us. Missy, Eddie, and the kittens never really moved in, but they settled down quite permanently in our back yard where I fed them twice a day.

It was all Violet's fault. She was such a fussy eater. She would only eat from a freshly opened can of food. If the can had been in the refrigerator, Violet wouldn't touch its contents. And they didn't sell small cans of food in Abu Dhabi. She also wouldn't eat dry food, or Tender Vittles. So we ended up with large cans of cat food that Violet wouldn't touch.

Sharifa

 When we threw the cans away, the feral cats in the neighborhood dumped over our cans and ripped apart all the bags to get at the cat food.

That is when we decided we had to pick out a cat or two to feed in order to avoid the cat fights on our front porch. Fudge and Marmelade were just kittens. Fudge was very friendly, so he is the one we decided to feed. The plan was to keep feeding them outside, but they were so small and the bigger cats in the neighborhood harrassed them, loudly, leaving us with one good option - letting them move in for the sake of our sanity.

Violet wasn't happy. She wouldn't share the kitchen with them. She parked herself in the doorway and wouldn't let the two of them pass. So we had to put her food on the top floor to separate them so Fudge and Marmelade could eat in the kitchen.

Fudge and Marmelade

And that is when we noticed Missy, a calico we were pretty certain was their sister. She started hanging around in the back yard, so we would feed her, too. She had two kittens, a male and a female. The female disappeared, but the male, Eddie, kept coming back. In a few months he was bigger than any of the others, twice the size of either Fudge or Marmelade. And Missy had her second litter, this time six kittens. Eddie would settle down among the kittens and suckle from Missy along with his siblings.

Marmelade disappeared after a few weeks. That is when RF appeared. He was a miniature copy of Fudge, so there was no question he would join the family.

We had to leave them all behind in Abu Dhabi.

Bishop

Once again, we agreed no more cats. But we hadn't counted on Bishop appearing. Simon came to live with us and he also loved cats. He was especially interested in getting a black and white cat. He had a name already picked out - Hagrid. But on a stroll through a pet store one Sunday, he saw Bishop. And since Bishop was Simon's nickname where he worked in England before he moved to Virginia, once again, it was clear that there was yet another cat destined for our family.

Bishop, and for a shorter time his sister Ginnie, lived with us for 10 years. But when Alex and I left Virginia for California, Bishop stayed behind with our next door neighbor Carol.

This time there will be no more cats.

And no dogs either.

Day 159 - What's Going On In the Bathroom?

image by homespot hq,
via Flickr.com

Last week our toilet started talking to us again, gurgling and bubbling, so we called Henry the Plumber to come back to check out the lengths of replacement to our sewer that he put in back in January. We were worried that he might have to do more work, digging up our travertine floor, at high cost. So we were relieved to learn that we are dealing with low-flush technology on top of high-flush-required sewer lines. The solution is as simple as changing our choice of toilet paper and flushing twice. But the solution seems to undo the purpose for the low-flush toilets.

I had always wondered about those toilet paper commercials that started out with a woman saying, "It's time to get real about what goes on in the bathroom." Until that series of commercials came out, I never thought there were any mysteries about what goes on in the bathroom. I have more than 60 years of taking advantage of bathroom facilities and I never found it necessary to wonder about it.

But then we moved to California, the land of environmental movements and ecology organizations. John Muir formed the Sierra Club in San Franciso in 1892, nearly a century and a quarter ago. The first Earth Day was planned during a UNESCO Conference held in San Francisco in 1969. I was introduced to recycling in the early 1970s when I lived in Berkeley.

Image by MyEyeSees, via Flickr

In 1992, then President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act which mandated toilets not use more than1.6 gallons of water per flush, less than half the amount previously used. The reason: to conserve water, of course. But when only the toilets were changed, the sewers didn't always clear up with a single flush. Flushing twice is often necessary. So the reason for mandating the low-flush toilets, to conserve water, ends up being undone. And "what goes on in the bathroom" is about the paper that doesn't always make its way into the main sewers because of the lack of pressure. The biggest offenders - the softest paper.

That is what we have found. In spite of our desire to conserve water, especially since southern California rarely has enough rainfall for its needs, double flushing, wasting water, is necessary, because the alternative of settling for less than soft paper just isn't something we are willing to consider in our household.

Around the same time as our most recent gurgling toilet incident, Alex noticed workmen outside doing something to the sewer lines in the street. Cities in California have found it necessary to send pressurized streams of water through the sewers more often as a result of the increase in the number of low-flush toilets in use. That high pressure through the sewers in the streets can result in water in the lines between the houses and the streets being siphoned out, emptying the traps, allowing sewer gas to escape until the toilets are all flushed again to fill the traps. Clearly, something is going on in the bathrooms in California that my years of living in other states and countries hadn't prepared me for.

Day 143 - Home

312 Dudrey Court, Moorhead, MN, aka home

I noticed when I was in Iran that I started to think differently about what home meant. Instead of home conveying warmth about where I was currently living, I realized that I thought of home as the place I wasn't, the place I came from. I realized that when I lived in California after graduating from college, I thought of home as Minnesota. And when I traveled back to Moorhead from California, I thought of California as home. So it wasn't surprising when in Iran I thought of both Minnesota and California as home. Minnesota would always be my home state. And I expected to return to San Francisco. I went to Iran expecting to stay there two years, so it would never be home. But when after 15 months I traveled back to the U.S. on vacation, I surprised myself when I found myself thnking of Tehran as home. It happened both in Minnesota and California. I found myself talking about returning to Tehran as returning home.

Shellagh and Bill in my home in Tehran, Iran

After Iran, there was Romania, another place I hadn't expected to stay long, another place I knew I wouldn't ever consider home. So California and Minnesota were both home to me during that year. But while I was in Romania, California voters passed Proposition 13 which changed the way school districts would be funded. And the immediate response was for schools to stop hiring teachers. And that meant my return to California was no longer likely. Instead, after a few weeks in Minnesota, I was hired via a telephone interview to join the staff of the Center for English as a Second Language at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. It was a one-year appointment, although I thought I might be able to remain there at least a few years. But Minnesota remained home during my stay in Illinois.

After Carbondale, I ended up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, back in Minnesota. And while I was there, I only had Minnesota to think of as home, until I joined the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer. Now I was in a career where home was always going to be somewhere else. Minnesota would always be my home state. While overseas, home would be the District of Columbia metropolitan area.

An incident in Germany during my first tour emphasized this for me when one of the women I met there told me I looked familiar. She was a soldier, so I didn't think we had ever been in the same place at the same time, but I rattled off the list of places I had lived and when I lived there. We didn't find anything in common through that list. But then Lisa, another woman in the conversation, mentioned that she knew I had lived in Arlington, Virginia, for six months while I attended orientation and language classes at the Foreign Service Institute. The soldier asked me when and after I told her, she said that is where she had seen me. While she was stationed in DC, she had a part-time job as a security guard at one of the FSI buildings. She had seen me as I came and went each day.

The view from the kitchen of our home
in Arlington, Virginia

I learned a lot in that conversation. I learned that being in a place for a temporary period, even if only for a few months, doesn't mean it wasn't home. And I learned that it is all too easy to walk by someone every day without seeing. I decided that I would never do that again. I would look at the people in my life and I would see them, not look past them.

For the next 25 years, home meant three places - the one I was in; Washington, DC; and Minnesota. Then in August, we sold our house in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to San Diego. So many years had passed since I thought of California as home. I'm learning to think of it as home again. But a bit of my heart is still in Virginia, in the District of Columbia metropolitan area. Minnesota will always be my home state. And someday maybe California will again feel like home.

Living Room in El Cajon

Day 125 - Decisions

image by hang_in_there, via Flickr

I thought I was decisive. I made decisions, every day. I decided what to study in school. I decided what topics I would write about for my essays. I decided what to read. I decided what to wear every day, what to eat. I made big decisions and small decisions.

But then one day in San Francisco a friend told me he would like to spend a day with me where I would make all the decisions. He made me realize that I made decisions for myself, but as soon as there was someone else involved, I deferred. I think I was afraid to make a decision that wasn't the decision others with me would make. I didn't want to disappoint anyone. So I left all decisions up to others. That had to change.

Making decisions was an essential part of my first job with the Department of State. I was a vice consul, the lowest consular title, in the non-immigrant visa section of the Consulate General in Stuttgart, Germany. Every day I made several hundred decisions in response to applications for non-immigrant visas. Each decision was an either-or choice. For applications that came in the mail, the choice was either to issue the visa OR to invite the applicant in for an interview. For those who applied in person, either we gave a card with a time on it to return to pick up their passports with visas in them OR we invited them to take a seat until a consular officer could interview them.  When we interviewed applicants, the choices were either to issue the visa OR to reject the application. That's it. Every decision was an either-or choice.

It took awhile to reconcile myself to knowing I would never have all the information I needed to make the perfect decision.There was no difference between the reactions of two people to whom I issued visas; both would be happy even if my decision to give a visa to one of them was wrong. Similarly, there was no difference between the reactions of two people whose applications I denied; both would be unhappy even if my decision to refuse a visa for one of them was right.

Once again, just as I had concluded after Iran, I realized sometimes it is more important to appear decisive than to be certain that the choice was right. Since I would never know that my decision was the right one, all I could do was learn from each decision to make a better decision next time. The basic criteria was subjective: every applicant for a non-immigrant visa must overcome the presumption that he or she is an intending immigrant. There was no magic formula. There was no checklist of requirements an applicant must meet. There were some lines in the sand that could prevent the issuance of a visa, but those were rare. In most cases, it was the consular officer's decisions to believe what an applicant said about their intentions with regard to traveling to the U.S. It was my decision.

In Barbados, I once again made decisions about visa applications. By then I had adopted a new pattern. I had to make decisions, big decisions, decisions that affected the lives of those around me, every day, many times a day. When I got home, I did not want to make any decisions. When I arrived home and Alex asked me if I'd like a drink, I fell back into my post-Iran habits; I said yes. When he asked what I wanted, I told him I didn't care. He could bring me coffee, water, tea, wine, a gin and tonic, I just didn't care. I didn't want to have to decide now that I was home. 

Day 79 - Making Mistakes - Deliberately

Image by elycefeliz, via Flickr

From as early an age as I can remember, I didn't have much tolerance for making mistakes. It isn't that I expected others not to make mistakes; I just didn't want to make mistakes myself. I would bring home my test papers, crying the whole way, if the grades on them weren't 100%.  Frankly, 99% didn't feel any better to me than 70%. Anything less than 100% was unacceptable.

The thing about making mistakes is that making them is necessary to learn how to recover from them. I wish I had learned that much earlier.

The first time I made what I knew to be a deliberate mistake, to learn something, was in my first semester of studying German. The approach of the teacher was unusual for the time. Instead of being handed text books on the first day in class, we received no books for the first six weeks. Instead, we listened to our teacher and repeated after her, memorizing conversations which we repeated in pairs around the room. I can still recall some of those sentences, including Ich kann nicht meine Gummischuhe finden. Ach, hier sind sie, hinter der Tür. Translation: I can't find my overshoes. Oh, here there are, behind the door. After six weeks, we received our books. And that's when I discovered I had been using three different words in German, er, sie, and es, for the English word it, but the glossary at the back of the book said er meant he, sie meant she, and only es meant it. I didn't understand how this could be, so on the test where I knew which words to use because I had memorized the conversation, I used es for it in every sentence instead. I knew my chances for getting an explanation were greater if I chose the wrong answers. And it worked.

But I settled back into my old ways pretty quickly, again striving for perfect grades. The rewards were  largely symbolic, the honor role, the dean's list, National Honor Society. I'll never know how my life would have turned out without them, so I don't know what advantages came my way as a result.

While at San Francisco State University, my roommate Annie introduced me to the power of deliberate mistakes again. She had completed her Bachelor's degree in elementary education where she met some elementary school teachers in an art class. She told of one of the experienced teachers using a trick she learned from her students when she couldn't get the instructor's attention. She deliberately set out to do something wrong, knowing the instructor would run over to stop her, thus getting her the attention she wanted. Not all the teachers in schools are the ones getting paid to be there.

After graduate school, my next school experience was at Brown Institute in Minneapolis where I spent nine months in a vocational training course in computer programming. Now that was an experience where making deliberate makes really paid off. I watched all my colleagues trying to complete their programming projects without a mistake - the first time.  Not me, not this time. I realized that I would learn more about how to correct mistakes by controlling when I made them. I didn't know going in that I would end up working in a software engineering office in the continuation engineering section - that's the engineering euphemism for the group responsible for fixing bugs. I wanted to be a developer, not a bug fixer. I wanted to write programs that had no bugs in them when I started getting paid to write programs, and that's why I wanted to learn everything I could about how to fix bugs while I was paying to learn.

No one told me I was expected to get top grades. I imposed that on myself. It took a long time for me to figure out just why I might have set those goals for myself. Here is what I think happened.

When I was five years old, my sister was born.  Until then, my brother and I had pretty much all Mom and Dad's spare time. Mom read to us. She helped me write letters to my cousin Lois. Dad took me to baseball and basketball games. Dad took both of us both fishing. We had it pretty good. But when Joan was born, there were too many of us for Dad to take with him. He stopped taking any of us. I was jealous of my sister because she took Dad's attention away from me.

Then there were all the comments about Joan being so cute. I didn't remember anyone saying how cute I was. So if Joan was the cute one, I had to be something else. I had to be the smart one. At least, that's what I think happened.

Day 73 - Alex's Rehabilitation

Alex and I are getting very familiar with the physical therapy needed after total knee replacement and the process of recovery. His first two surgeries were in Virginia where his recovery involved climbing lots of stairs as the bedrooms were on the top of three floors, the dining room on the middle floor, and the TV on the bottom one. As a result, I don't recall him getting around so much in the earliest days of his rehabilitation. When his physical therapist came to see him in Virginia, he would head upstairs to the bedroom where Alex spent more time resting than he thought he needed, but probably not as much as he should have, and the two of them worked on the exercises together. When the therapist left, Alex did the exercises on his own. I don't know what exercises he did then because he didn't need my help.

This time, however, is very different. Because of the extent of the repair needed to the knee, Alex is not supposed to lift his leg at all. But he still needs to strengthen the muscles in his leg. That means that each of the exercises his therapist here has given him require that I help. I lift his leg so that he can get strength back as he lowers his leg down to the bed. With a pillow under his knee, I raise the lower part of his leg to extend the knee joint and he lowers his heel down to the bed, to regain flexibility in the joint. With his leg flat against the bed, he extends his foot to point his toes and then bends his foot back toward his knee and I give his foot just a little extra push to stretch out his calf muscles. My arms are getting a pretty good workout as well. And I know that he is doing all of his exercises every day because I'm doing them, too.

toddler image by glenmcbethlaw, via Flickr

In contrast to our Virginia home, the whole house here is on one level, and that means Alex is almost unstoppable when he gets up to move around. Observing Alex getting around with his walker is good practice for when our grandson becomes mobile. I can just see the little guy in one of those wheeled chairs with the round tray in front and attention-grabbing colorful plastic thingies (that's a Geordie word, the equivalent to thingamabob) that rotate or make noise that allow pre-toddlers to get around before they can walk. Alex's walker makes about the same noise as he rolls it along the hard wood floors. So long as I hear a steady noise from it, I know he is making good progress. If I hear the noise start and stop, I worry.

One comparison with a toddler that doesn't work quite so well, however, is that toddlers try to do what they haven't been able to do yet while Alex needs to refrain from trying to do everything he used to be able to do until his knee allows him to bend down again.  He is so stubborn that he refuses to ask for help. Even when I offer help, he doesn't wait for me. And he just can't give up his compulsion to clean up every surface in sight. My explanation - which he hears as an excuse - is that I can't be everywhere at the same time doing both what I need to do and what he wants me to do. Something just has to wait. Alex is determined that it not be what he wants, so in the absence of my doing the laundry or the dishes or picking up a glass from the coffee table in front of the TV just as soon as I have finished drinking from it, he does those things. Occasionally he will apologize that he can't do something for me, like carry my dinner plate to the table, when I never expected him to do that in the first place. He has never made me feel that he does things for me because I am incapable of doing them for myself. He does things for me because he wants to; it's his job, he says.

Today is his ninth day at home after the surgery so he has begun to venture out without the walker. Even with a cane, I consider that his stealth mode. Unless he starts dragging his leg behind him, I can't hear him moving around. It is a good thing that I am usually in the same place for most of the day - at my computer for the eight hours I work Mondays through Fridays and then still in the same place while I complete my day's project. I don't want to round a corner and run into him, something that is entirely possible since he is in places I don't think he should be going yet, like the laundry and the garage.

Yesterday he went to the back yard and saw someone working on the neighbor's yard. He asked the guy if the lady next door was OK because he hadn't seen her for a few days. The guy said she was fine, but she was in the house recuperating from knee replacement surgery. And wouldn't you know it, Alex told him to tell her that if she needs anything, she should just call him.

Day 69 - Picking Out Potatoes

Potatoes image by lisibo, via Flickr

I learned another lesson from Mom that I use every single day of my life - both at work and at home. That's why this one deserves individual attention. And I learned this one before the age of 12 when we still lived in 307, before the move across the street to 312. It is a slight variation on the cleaning up spilled milk lesson.

I don't know that Mom set out to teach me anything that day. She needed help getting dinner ready. She gave me a potato and asked me to go downstairs and find five more about the same size.  With four kids in the family, we ate a lot of potatoes so Dad bought them at a potato farm in 50-pound bags, kept in the basement. I went down to the bag and pulled out five more potatoes, but I didn't settle for the little size of the one Mom gave me. I picked up five much larger potatoes and thought Mom would be pleased.

She wasn't.

She wanted six potatoes about the same size because she planned to bake them. If the potatoes were larger, they would take longer. If they weren't all the same size, they wouldn't be done at the same time.

I don't recall if Mom sent me back down for potatoes the right size or if she went down herself. No matter. The message stuck.

But I needed a reminder. While I was in college, I worked at my church in the office for one summer. During that summer, something went wrong with the transportation of the kids home from camp. Pastor  told me to prepare a letter to all the parents and send it right away. I prepared the letter, but I didn't see any point in sending it because it wouldn't arrive in time for the parents to get the message. Besides, I knew that all the parents were being called with the same message. So I didn't bring the letters to the post office. The next day, Pastor saw the stack of envelopes on my desk and asked me why I hadn't mailed them. I said it would be a waste of money because the letters wouldn't arrive in time. He looked at me and told me that sometimes it was important to take an action even if some other factor would interfere. In this case, he wanted the parents to know that we took every step possible to let them know about the problem. Instead, I hadn't mailed the letters. And that meant it was likely that some parents would complain that we hadn't told them. Answering machines were a thing of the future so parents who weren't home when the phone call was made would have good reason to think we hadn't informed them.

Once again, I realized that knowing the reason for the instruction would have been helped me avoid making an error in judgment. Now the lesson was firmly planted.

When my first husband Don and I arrived in Berkeley several years later, I again went to work for a church. Whenever my boss, Pastor Walt, told me to do something, I asked him "Why?" One day he commented that my generation seemed obsessed with knowing the answer to "Why?" I think he thought the question implied "Why should I do what you tell me to do?" when what I meant was "What are you hoping to accomplish if I do it that way?" With that explanation, he seemed satisfied.

How do I use this lesson these days? At work, nearly every day someone comes to me to ask me for "a SharePoint site." SharePoint is a web-based platform that can serve as a content management system (think libraries online), a content delivery system (think website), a workflow processing system (think applications, such as automated data processing for calculating and delivering payroll), or a collaboration zone (think wikis, blogs, discussion boards, or even Facebook). So "a SharePoint site" can mean any number of different things. So you see why my first question in response is some variation of "Why?" Sometimes what my customer needs is just a document library, not an entire site. But even if they need a site, I need to know what they will use it for, who will need to access it, what the relationship of the site is to already existing sites. Knowing why my customer thinks they need a SharePoint site is essential to providing them with what they need.  If I just gave them what they asked for, I wouldn't be helping them solve a problem or accomplish a goal.

At home these days, knowing the answer to "why?" is essential when I help Alex with his physical therapy for his repaired knee. The first day the physical therapist came to see Alex, he hadn't gotten a full answer to "why?" from Alex's surgeon, so he started Alex out with exercises at the usual pace, too aggressive for Alex. As soon as he heard from Alex's doctor's office, he called us back to tell us not to continue with the exercises until he came back the next day. Then he showed me not only what to do but explained why Alex's therapy needed to be more conservative. If he hadn't given me that explanation, if I only knew what to do, I could be pushing Alex to do too much. For one exercise, it is important for me to lift Alex's leg to be as straight as possible and then for him to pull my hand down to the bed. But if I lifted Alex's leg up from his hip, that would be too much extension. The action would look the same, but the method would put strain on the wrong muscles.

In the house, we have a canister lighting system in the kitchen. There are six canisters, but when we flip the switch, we never know how many will turn on. We usually get four, sometimes only three. And every now and then - but not often - we get all six. We wanted to know why. We called our home warranty company to request an electrician come to look at what we believed might be faulty electrical system. The electrician looked at the lights and explained that there are two reasons that one of them might not come on: either the transformer was not functioning or the thermostat sensed the light was too hot. He eliminated the first possibility because if there was a problem with the transformer, the lights wouldn't be intermittent - once off, they would remain off until the transformer is replaced. But the thermostat is designed to turn the lights off when they overheat. His conclusion was that the canister fixtures themselves are faulty, but the electrical system is fine.

Now we know. We don't have to worry about the lights. We can put up with them until we can't put up with them any more. It is important to know the answer to the question, "Why?".

Day 64 - The Sleep Center

Image by Dell's Official Flickr Page, via Flickr

This is really a customer service story. I was the customer, and I didn't get much service.

It all starts with an equation I learned years ago:

Customer Service = Customer Experience - Expectations

When customer expectations are low, it is likely the experience will be greater, resulting in positive customer service. When expectations are high, it is likely the experience will be lower, resulting in negative customer service.

And the problem in this case is that the facility where my experience occured spends a lot of effort on setting expectations high. Outside the building is a huge banner identifying the hospital as one of the top teaching hospitals in the United States. They send out surveys to collect customer feedback. Between the two of us, Alex and I have already received 3 of these surveys. From the questions, it is clear that all staff members are expected to ensure that patients are greeted and treated courteously and especially that patients not have to wait longer than 15 minutes for an appointment. Just last week, I completed the survey for my first visit with the sleep center which is in the same facility as the hospital where Alex had his surgery yesterday. I gave them high marks.

Today I was at that facility for two purposes: to visit Alex, of course, and for a follow-up appointment for myself at the sleep center. My yesterday probably had something to do with how I reacted at my appointment. I should be ashamed of myself. But I'm not.

I arrived for my appointment very early, because I wanted to see Alex first. Since I was early, I thought I should check in and then go up to see Alex. I mentioned this plan when I was called to the counter and the woman on the other side said that once I checked in, I would have to stay in the waiting area. So I didn't check in right away. I went to see Alex first.

I got back down to the sleep center and checked in 15 minutes ahead of my appointment and was told to sit down and wait. There is a sign right behind the check-in desk that says if you are still waiting 15 minutes after your appointment time, you should let the check-in desk staff know, just another piece of data to indicate how important it is that patients not be kept waiting.

I waited. I had my iPhone with me, so I kept myself busy checking Facebook. Time passed and before I realized it, it was 4:00 p.m., half an hour after my appointment. I went to the check-in desk and asked the same person who had checked me in if she could find out what the delay was.  She looked at me as though she had never seen me before. She asked me my name and then seemed surprised to see that I had already checked in. She said she would check. She came back and said I would be called soon.

When I sat down again, I realized that I was the only patient in the waiting room. Ten minutes later I was brought to one of the examination rooms. After filling out the same questionnaire I had had to fill out earlier today, I had to sit and wait some more. For twenty minutes, I sat and waited while I heard laughing and conversation from the office across the hall. People walked by saying goodbye to others.

By the time it was one hour after my appointment time, my experience had depleted my expectations several times over. But instead of following my self-defined, sure-fire steps for getting good customer service, I marched across the hall and blurted out that I needed someone to help me because I had now been waiting more than an hour. The four people in that office looked at one another, no one said anything to me, and they scattered out of the room.

The Physician Assistant came in about 5 minutes later, looking sheepish. He explained that when someone checks in, it is supposed to show up on the computer in the examination rooms. In my case, it didn't. Usually he checks the waiting room when the time for an appointment comes, but his 4:30 patient had arrived early, so he decided to take that patient in. By the time he learned that I was still waiting, he was in mid-appointment. He said with a little shrug that he couldn't see both of us at the same time. Duh!

But that wasn't all that hard to say. Why didn't anyone think to tell me that earlier instead of implying that they were each going to resolve the problem, not just pass me on to someone else.

The PA didn't exactly apologize, which is all I wanted by that point. The time for explanations for what had happened had long passed, although it was useful to get the explanation.

My final word on the matter is that I suspect the high customer service expectations are well-founded and justified. The fact that those in the sleep center handled a disappointed patient so poorly is likely evidence that they don't have to do it very often. At least that's what I see with my rose-colored glasses.

Day 62 - Clara's Story

Image by Marco Crupi Visual Artist,
via Flickr

The senior pastor of the church I attend, Pastor Andy, uses stories to illustrate points in his sermons. One of those stories several months ago concerned one of his former pastors from his high school days who turned out to be one of my high school classmates, leading me to a small-world reflection. Last Wednesday at a new members class, he told us he hadn't always told stories in his sermons. He used to base his sermons strictly on theology. Clara's story changed that. Here is Clara's story which she had not told anyone until she was in her 80s and in a nursing home when she told it to Pastor Andy.

In 1930, Clara was a young wife and mother. That same year, her father lost his job and he and her mother moved in with Clara's family. Only Clara's husband had a job to support them all. But after just a couple of years, her husband died. Clara was able to keep herself together and her emotions under control until after the funeral. Then, when they all returned to the house, Clara went into a room by herself, sat down, and began to cry. While she was crying, she felt a hand on her shoulder and it calmed her. She thought it was her father, so without turning around, she raised her hand to place hers on her father's, but there was no hand on her shoulder.

The next day, she walked out of the house and down the street. And in a window she saw a sign advertising a job to be filled. She got the job and was able to support her family until her father was able to find a job and her children finished school.

After telling Pastor Andy the story, she asked him if he thought that it was God's hand she had felt that day. Pastor Andy's response was that of course it was God's hand. But Clara had been too worried that people wouldn't believe her that she had refrained from telling anyone.

Pastor Andy said it was Clara's story that changed the way he prepared his sermons. He asked Clara if he could tell her story. She gave him permission. Pastor Andy thought about all the people who would have benefited from Clara's story, if she had shared it earlier.

So I don't want to put off telling this story until I am in my 80s and in a nursing home. A few weeks after Mom died, I felt a hand on my shoulder, too. I thought it was Mom just letting me know she hadn't left for good. I had been worried that her prayers for me and my siblings would stop protecting us. But the touch on my shoulder gave me assurance that she would still be watching over us. And I've tried to pick up the slack when it comes to praying for my family. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I'd like to hear if you have. And if you have felt a hand on your shoulder, when you know there was no one else in the room, tell your story, too.

Day 61 - Reflections on Gloria Steinem

Image by cathredfern, via Flickr

The other day I read about a woman in El Cajon who was fired because she got pregnant but wasn't married. She worked at San Diego Christian College. She wasn't a teacher. She was a bookkeeper. The school claimed she had signed a contract that committed her not to engage in certain behaviors and her premarital pregnancy violated that contract. It wasn't pregnancy that was the unacceptable behavior; it was the behavior that causes pregnancy because it was outside of a marriage that was the unacceptable behavior.

But the school next did the unthinkable. They offered the job to the woman's boyfriend, the father of her pre-maritally conceived child. He turned it down.

How did they think she got pregnant? Of all the possibilities, immaculate conception does not seem to be one they would accept. But they were prepared to apply their standards selectively. It isn't that the behavior is unacceptable; it is getting caught that is unacceptable. And when it comes to pregnancy, only women get caught.

The story reminded me of a far too similar story at a company I worked for in Minnesota. This story contained no pregnancies (at least I never heard such details mentioned) but it did involve a man who was married carrying on with a woman who was not his wife. What the two of them did outside of working hours was not visible or known by any of those I knew. The man worked in the same division as I; the woman worked in the division that took orders. Both of them spent most of their work day on the phone as their jobs required. They both spent a lot of time on the phone with one another. But she was fired for spending excessive time on personal phone calls during work hours.

What did they think he was doing? Why was it acceptable for him to spend all those office hours on the phone with her, but not for her? I never learned what brought on the decision to fire her. I suppose it is possible that the man's wife found out and insisted she be fired. What isn't likely is that her bosses were unaware of whom she spoke to during all those hours since they walked around the halls holding hands when they met to have lunch together. Or maybe she spent time talking on the phone with others, too. But the story that made the rounds only mentioned phone calls between the two of them.

The first of these stories is from this week's news. The second is from 30 years ago. Both illustrate the issues that Gloria Steinem and the other founders of MS Magazine and the National Organization of Women began raising 40 years ago. In spite of the progress in the past 40 years, in spite of the change in attitudes of so many in our culture towards women choosing non-traditional careers, choosing to have children either through traditional means, through artificial insemination, or through adoption, without partners, we still have work to do. So long as any woman is punished for behavior that men are free to indulge in, we have work to do. So long as the distribution of power is not equal, we have work to do.

After the interviewer stopped reframing his questions about the pressure on women in western societies to Ms. Steinem earlier this week, he turned to other questions he thought he knew the answers to. He stated that he assumed Ms. Steinem had chosen not to marry, not to have children. Again, she surprised him. Because she grew up in the 1950s, she said she had always expected to marry and to have children. But she realized she could choose to wait. Her choice was to wait; not marrying and not having children were what happened with the passage of time. Last week I saw an interview with Dana Delaney, the 50-something star of the TV series Body of Proof. Her interviewer asked her if she had made the choice not to marry and not to have children and the contrast was quite remarkable. Yes, she said. She chose not to marry, not to have children. She chose to concentrate on her career. I chose to marry, but so long as I was married to someone I was concerned would not be a supportive father to a daughter, I chose not to have children. I chose not to have children because I thought was the only way I could remain married. When that marriage ended, not having children is what happened with the passage of time.  Twenty years have made a difference. But we still have work to do.

Day 56 - More Flying

Image by mauren veras, via Flickr

I spent most of yesterday in airplanes or in airports waiting for my next airplane. So I saw a lot of people, inspiring stories of what brought these particular people together at that particular time and place. Lots of fodder for future 365 Project pieces.

But the person who left the biggest impression on me is someone with whom I spent the shortest length of time: the flight attendant on the 20-minute flight from Los Angeles to San Diego. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about her just rubbed me the wrong way.

The first event that drew my attention to her was when the woman across the aisle asked for an extender. Now I will admit that I had no idea what she meant by the word, but then, I don't work for an airline. The flight attendant also looked at the woman as if she had just spoken to her in Greek, so the woman clarified that she wanted an extender to the seat belt so that she could hold her child on her lap during take-off. Now that the attendant seemed to understand. Her response: "Oh, no, we don't have such a thing. That is not allowed. That just isn't possible. The child will have to sit in his own seat." And she hurried away down the aisle.

That seemed funny. If there is no such thing as a seat belt extender, why would the woman ask for one? Maybe other airlines provide them? Or maybe they are available on larger model planes? The attendant's response didn't ring true.

Then we moved into that portion of the flight when the attendant rattles off what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing and so on. Usually I can sleep through those speeches, or recite along with the speaker. They are so predictable and boring, except on Southwest Airlines when they are stand-up comedian-worthy. But this attendant had a tone to her voice that came across condescending. I wanted to get up and punch her. I am not sure I could replicate her intonation pattern. It was a little sing-songy, with her intonation rising and falling in an exaggerated pattern, like a kindergarten teacher reading a fairy tale to her class. Really, really annoying,

The flight was so short, that we barely got off the ground before she was back on the public address system telling us to shut down all electronic appliances, bring our seat backs into the full and upright position and return the tray tables to their locked positions. And that is where she irritated me yet again. Apparently not everyone paid close enough attention. She was back on the system again in a few seconds to repeat herself after first stating that apparently not everyone had heard her the first time. This time the sing-songiness came with a slight giggle that she seemed to think softened the edge. It didn't.

I closed my eyes as the plane began its descent so I didn't see her when she came up behind me. I just heard her say to bring the seat back up. I turned around and told her I had never lowered my seat. She laughed, OK maybe it was a nervous giggle, as she pointed to the man in the seat next to me to say he was the one who hadn't returned his seat to the upright position. Now I hadn't talked over my impressions of Ms. Attendant with my seat mate; he seemed quite comfortable in his own bubble. His reaction to her appeared consistent with mine however. He said nothing. But his eyes did. Ms. Attendant did all the seat adjusting while reaching over me, giving me a more up-close look than I wanted.

By this time, I thought there was little more she could do to add to my impression of her. But I was wrong. The plane was on the ground. The captain had reminded us to keep our seat belts fastened until he had turned off the sign. Most of us were following directions well, just like well-behaved kindergarten children. But then I heard her voice once more over the loud speaker. "Keep that child in his seat." It wasn't a suggestion.

Day 50 - WWNESP

Image by Joey Yen, via Flickr

My journey to San Francisco State University wouldn't have happened if it had not been for Dorothy and Work With Non-English Speaking People (WWNESP), the Methodist Church's program to provide English language classes for Chinese immigrants in the San Francisco area. I was put in touch with WWNESP when I completed a course to  volunteer to teach adults to read through Laubach Literacy's Each One Teach One program. When it became clear that I was not going to be able to find a job in the Berkeley area teaching English at the high school level, I looked into options that might help me move into teaching through volunteering first. The Laubach method volunteer program appealed to me and when I completed it, I learned that some of the adults who wanted to learn to read were not native speakers of English. I volunteered to tutor Angel, a Spanish-speaking man, because it offered me the opportunity to teach English as a Second Language. But instead of being assigned to Angel, the Laubach program coordinator gave my name to Dorothy who was looking for someone to teach a Chinese woman to read English.

The majority of the Chinese speakers in the WWNESP classes were women and immigrants. Guan-yin was an exception. She was the wife of a Chinese American citizen and the two of them owned a Mom-and-Pop grocery store in Oakland. She had lived in the United States since the end of World War II. Because of her experience in the grocery store, she understood and spoke quite good English. But she wanted to become an American citizen like her husband and for that she needed to learn to read English. Guan-yin was used to recognizing patterns within words so she could locate items in their store when customers asked for them. She knew, for example, that "oo" could be found in both the word "book" and the word "noodle." But she was not certain how to figure out how the letters around the "oo" changed the word. Every short word with "oo" in it was "book" to her and every longer word was "noodle." She was interpreting English words as Chinese pictographs.

For a year, I met with Guan-yin every Tuesday, using the Laubach method to try to teach her to read. I hate to admit that we didn't make much progress, although we had many interesting conversations. I also used a textbook that was prepared by the San Francisco PBS station specifically for Chinese speakers. I couldn't help but wonder why one of the first vocabulary items taught in this series was the phrase "elevator operator." L's and r's were challenging for Chinese speakers to hear, let alone pronounce. In addition, most Chinese words were one or two syllables, not four syllables, long. Guan-yin laughed whenever I tried to get her to say elevator operator. Then she told me how frustrating it was that her daughter named her daughter Valerie. Guan-yin couldn't pronounce her granddaughter's name.

After I had worked for a year with Guan-yin, Dorothy asked me to teach one of the classes that met Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Chinese Methodist Church in Oakland.  I enjoyed teaching groups of students more than one-on-one tutoring largely because the one-on-one tutoring put Guan-yin under pressure the entire hour. With a group of students, no one student was under too much pressure and I felt that all of the students made some progress at each meeting. At the end of six months, I knew that teaching English was what I wanted to pursue, so I looked into taking some classes through San Francisco State University's evening extension program. I found three sessions, each one meeting once a week for a month, in February, March, and April. The first session focused on teaching conversation, the second on teaching reading, and the third on teaching grammar. I mentioned the classes to Dorothy because I wasn't sure that I could continue teaching classes both Tuesday and Thursday as well as attending the classes at SFSU. Dorothy was enthusiastic and encouraged me to sign up for the classes. She also agreed to pay for the classes if I couldn't afford to pay for them. I didn't need the help, but I needed the support the offer provided more than I realized.

I completed the three courses which were taught by three staff members of the American Language Institute, Pat, Al, and Vern. I had no idea at the time that I would later also work as a secretary and then later teach at ALI.  But I did know at the completion of the third course that I wanted to enroll in the masters program.  I applied without knowing how I was going to be able to afford it, with my windfall still many months in the future.

WWNESP and Dorothy's willingness to pay for the extension courses were the beginning of my journey.

Day 44 - Lutheran Church of the Cross

Lutheran Church of the Cross,
University Avenue location

The church I worked at in Berkeley, the Lutheran Church of the Cross, was unique in many ways. It was the result of the merger of four separate Lutheran churches in Berkeley that until the 1960s had been in four different Lutheran Synods. In 1962, with the creation of the Lutheran Church in America, the four congregations found themselves in the same Synod and the pastors of the four churches began discussing how they could work together to build up all of their congregations without competing with one another for membership. In 1967, the merger was approved by all four congregations and the LCA synod leadership. But each congregation had a different expectation of what the new church would look like. One expectations they all shared was that their location would remain and weekly worship services would continue there.

By the time I arrived in 1970, three of the original four pastors had gone on to new ministries, leaving only one pastor for what were still four quite different congregations, one German, one Finnish, one associated with Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, and one associated with UC Berkeley. Each congregation continued to refer to themselves by the names of their pre-merger churches, Bethany, St. Michael's, Shepherd of the Hills, and Holy Trinity. Three of the properties remained, with the property near the University having been sold.  A chapel near the University provided space on Sunday mornings so that services continued to be held each Sunday in four locations.

The office of the church was in what had been the largest of the buildings in the center of Berkeley, on University Avenue. That property was surrounded by businesses and concrete parking lots. The small patch of grass between the sidewalk and the window of my office that overlooked the street was the only patch of green for miles. As a result, I frequently found people sitting or lying on the grass when I glanced out the window. Pedestrians often stopped in front of the building, apparently enjoying the gardens that edged the building. And occasionally some of them even knocked on the door of my office.

Image by Franco Folini, via Flickr

A middle-aged woman was a frequent visitor without an appointment. She was single, most likely past child bearing age, and she desperately wanted to have a child. She stopped in to see if she could talk with Pastor and occasionally even slipped envelopes with cash under the door when the office wasn't open, hoping that it would encourage Pastor to help her get a child.

A middle-aged man whom Pastor called Sterling Hayden because he looked so much like the actor was also a frequent visitor without an appointment.  He never asked for anything. He just came by to talk.

Another man, Robert, was a frequent visitor at both the University Avenue property and the building that had previously been Holy Trinity, the Finnish congregation, on Rose Street.  Robert suffered from shell-shock during World War II which resulted in his being periodically unable to stay with his family. During those times, he would sleep outdoors, sometimes on our lawn, sometimes on the lawn of the house behind the church which the church owned.

The woman who rented that property came into the church one day to complain about Robert sleeping in her back yard. She had elementary school-aged children and the night before Robert had started a fire in the lawn to cook his food. She was afraid Robert would burn down the house.

Rya rug image by planetutopia, via Flickr

After Pastor discouraged Robert from sleeping near the University Avenue building, Robert discovered how he could get into the Rose Street building at night. He slept rolled up in a rya carpet that the ladies of the church had made.  Because he knew the carpet was important to the ladies, he took it away to get it cleaned, and then couldn't remember where he had taken it.  Robert also took all the knives out of the kitchen and all the scissors out of the classrooms and hid them because he said he didn't want the children to hurt themselves. Robert also understood, incorrectly, that the public address system in the Rose Street church wasn't working, so he took it to a shop to get repaired. Then he couldn't remember the name of that place either, although he did remember it was on Telegraph Avenue across the street from a hardware store. The next day I spent many hours calling all the hardware stores on Telegraph Avenue to find out if there was an electronics repair shop across the street. Apparently Robert gave a solid performance when he brought the PA system in because when I found the electronics repair shop, the owner wasn't about to let anyone else come to pick it up.

Robert's last straw was when he left the building after having turned on one of the burners in the kitchen of the Rose Street building, almost burning the building down. The next night, Pastor slept on the sofa in his office to be there when Robert broke in so he could arrange for Robert to stay somewhere in order to keep him out of trouble and our property safe. The next day Pastor asked me to call the facility he understood Robert had been committed to in order to find out if he was there. For reasons of privacy, the facility staff wouldn't tell me anything. Thankfully, Robert called the church later that day from the facility to ask Pastor to come and get him.

Image by Bazule, via Flickr

But the most memorable character I met while working at the Lutheran Church of the Cross was Kenny. Kenny was a four-year-old version of that 8-year-old orphan I had imagined taking to basketball games and movies when I was in college. He was blond, blue-eyed, and full of energy. I met Kenny along with several other boys many years older than Kenny when they discovered the grassy area in front of my office window.

The boys were young enough that their differences didn't divide them. Two of the boys, brothers, were of East Indian descent, but their family came to Berkeley from Kenya so there was no way they would accept being called anything but Africans. One of the boys was African American and he wouldn't tolerate being called African; he was American. Those three were about eight or nine, while Kenny was four. The families of all of the boys lived in an apartment building next to the house behind the church. There was a fence between the church property and the apartment building, but the boys managed to figure out how to get through it.

The first day I saw them, I happened to have some cake in the office. So when they appeared at my window, with their faces and hands pressed up against the glass, I invited them in. I told them they were in luck but that they should not ever expect this to happen again. I had some cake that needed to be eaten. The four boys sat on the floor to eat their cake. It was obvious that the older boys weren't happy having Kenny tagging along with them, but he kept up.

From that day on, the boys would stop by to wave at me, looking as far into the office as they could see, to check whether I had more cake. Kenny was the only one to come into the office without my inviting them. I think he found his way to my office when the older boys pressed him to leave them alone. I remember Kenny asking me to come outside to play with him. I told him I couldn't because I had to work. Kenny looked up in surprise and said his parents didn't work, so he didn't know why I had to work. I said I worked to earn money to pay the rent and to buy food. That didn't seem to sink in.

Image by  Elizabeth/Table4Five, via Flickr

That first day, the older boys asked me if they could take the empty soda bottles that were in the kitchen. They were not bottles that required a deposit, so I told them they could take them. I learned later that the owner of the small store around the corner where I bought my lunch each day would take all bottles the boys brought in and he gave them a nickel for each one, even the no deposit/no return bottles. He thought it was important to make sure the bottles didn't end up broken on the street and was willing to pay the pennies the boys were so eager to get.

One day when Kenny was by himself in my office, I saw him pick up bottles from the counter and walk toward the door. I stopped him and told him I didn't like it when he stole my bottles. Again, he looked at me without understanding in his eyes. He said he wasn't stealing them. I responded, not realizing how significant my word choice would be, that he was ripping me off. Now that Kenny understood. He put down the bottles and put his hands on his hips and declared, "I am not ripping you off. I would never rip someone off." Later I learned what a clue that response was to Kenny's home life.

All the boys were well dressed, but Kenny's clothes were always spotless and obviously new. I assumed that Kenny's parents were concerned about him, as I expected all parents were.  But I learned that one of the reasons Kenny hung around with the older boys was that his parents would lock him out of the house for hours at a time, something that didn't quite fit with the image of concerned parents.

One time when Kenny came to my office alone, he sat down at the second desk in the office. He picked up a stapler and asked me for some paper. I gave him some sheets that I would have thrown away and Kenny started stapling the papers together. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was working because someone in his family had to earn money for rent.

Image by freefotouk, via Flickr

My friends Doug and Nancy lived in an apartment above the garage at the end of the church parking lot. Their back windows looked out over the parking lot next to the apartment building. One evening, Doug called to tell me that the police had been in the parking lot that night and they had taken Kenny and his parents away, the parents in handcuffs. Doug had talked with a few of the neighbors and learned that Kenny's parents were arrested for dealing drugs.

The next morning, Kenny showed up in my office full of energy. In spite of his small size he nearly threw the door open and rushed in with a big grin and said, "Guess where I was last night!" Without waiting long enough for me to answer, he continued "I was in the pig station." This time he didn't stay around. He rushed back out, probably to share his news with others. I learned later that Kenny was taken away from his parents and put into his grandparents' custody. I never saw him again.