I really missed out on an interesting opportunity by not calling up the good folks who produce the TV reality show “Hoarders.” I have a feeling that if I had shown them my office at Carthage, they would have featured me in a three-pwrt mini-series. That’s how bad my office is right now . . . although I’m not sure even a team of their organizational experts armed with boxes, brooms and blowtorches would have much luck making sense out of such chaos.
The one silver lining to being a borderline hoarder (and in fact, the current state of my office makes me wonder about the word “borderline”) is that when you do some cleanup, you run across some amazing things. Yesterday afternoon, in the space of fifteen minutes, I came across: the program from the first sing-along Messiah I conducted at First United Methodist Church back in 1998 . . . the final exams I gave for choral conducting back in the spring of 2001 (and in fact I set aside the exams of Nick Barootian, Erin Tetting and Kerry Heckel in case they might possibly want them as a 10th anniversary present) . . . the Kenosha News from January of 2008 which featured a photo I took of the freak tornado that touched down on the north side of Kenosha . . .
. . . but for sure the most surprising artifact I uncovered in yesterday’s excavation was a sheet of paper which looked pretty nondescript at first glance, but in fact was something from 1985, when I lived in Chicago. My apprenticeship at the Lyric Opera of Chicago was about to finish up, and I had this vague notion that I wanted to remain in Chicago if I could— except that there was the small matter of how to pay the rent. The sheet of paper pictured above is a momento of those very unsettling weeks when I did not have the foggiest notion what was next for me.
I knew I needed to find a job – my last name isn’t HIlton or Trump – but I was pretty clueless on how to go about it, especially in a huge city like Chicago where I felt like a tiny, nameless, faceless drone in an immense hive of activity. (I had found nice little jobs in both Atlantic and Decorah – towns with a population just under 10,000. This felt completely different – and ten times scarier.) And I had no illusions about finding anything even remotely related to music, as you can tell from the job openings that seem to have attracted my attention: a teller at United Savings of America (requires “light typing”) . . . a clerk at Video King (the person needs to be “bright, energetic”) . . . working behind the fast food counter at Lainie’s (“will train”) . . . an ad taker at Lerner Newspapers (“must be personable, have typing skills”) . . . and my favorite one of all, a job with Brooms Unlimited: “reliable people to clean apartments and houses.”
I applied for most of these jobs and more – and the closest thing to a music job was on the loading dock at Tower Records. Otherwise, I went after your basic clerking positions, and made a point of avoiding anything in Sales. (For as clueless as I was, at least I knew that I would never have the stomach for hard sell sales.) By the way, on every job application form I dutifully filled in all of my education degrees, including my masters degree; it never occurred to me that my masters degree would be of no help and in fact a hindrance to being hired for most of these jobs. Applications submitted: between 25 and 30. Number of nibbles: zero.
With time rapidly running out, I did what I should have done right away- I asked for advice from a couple of my fellow opera apprentices, one of whom suggested a call to Kelly Services. The next thing you know, I was earning a paycheck at the National Telephone Center, doing phone survey, which gave me enough income to remain in my apartment – especially if I limited my diet to generic pasta & pasta sauce / and generic grape jelly on generic bread. And then one day, my mom called up to tell me about a job in Kenosha, WI at an NPR radio station: WGTD- and most of you know what has happened from there.
I am so thankful to have found this tattered remnant from my frantic, scattershot job search of more than a quarter century ago- not only to remember what those worrisome months felt like (which in turn helps me to identify with the many people who find themselves in that very same predicament today – and in turn helps me appreciate the wonderful jobs I have been blessed to have) but also to get me thinking about how differently my life might have played out had Unlimited Brooms decided to take a chance on me. Or Video King.
I have no idea where any of those untaken paths would have led me. All I know is that the path I did take has been all I could have hoped for – and more.