Atlanta – Hindsight

The Intern

May 2, 2023May 2, 2023 Susan Greco

I’ve gotten back into the workplace for several months now and it’s opened my eyes to how much has changed, how much I’ve changed, and how much more there is to see ahead. Here are some highlights.

There are no stupid questions. Seems everyone’s computer screen in the orientation room was displayed as full screen, but mine was minimized and with a mess of distracting icons crowding the space. Noticing my lag, a helper walked over, “You might want to make your window full screen, ma’am.” I’ve gotten used to this elder etiquette lobbed my way, but this and at orientation no less made me cringe. Is it that obvious? Because inside I’m nowhere near fifty-nine. Accustomed to my Mac’s screen, I’d hesitated a bit. Ahh, yes. Full screen. Ok, this ma’am is all caught up. Since then, the IT folks have helped me with anything else that has cropped up and kept me ticking along beautifully.

You DO have something to wear. Up at zero dark hundred to draw a bath–well before my shamrock plant has even thought of opening–you find your makeup bag so you can sketch some semblance of awake onto your face, and cobble together whatever might be whispering business casual in the hall armoire. Then it’s out the door to see if you can travel six miles in under 30 minutes. Some things haven’t changed: Atlanta still bleeds traffic.

Go to bed! The first few days after work found me lying prone on the bed in my son’s empty room for several hours surrounded by cats, bored from coexisting in silence all day, hovering and hopeful that I would infuse the place with some energy. Sorry kitties, the tank’s empty. On any given evening, if you were to do a midnight drive by, you’d likely find our house ablaze in lights, very likely the only one on the street like this, the one with no sense. What are we doing except feeding fatigue? I actually fell asleep at a stoplight on my way home the other day. It wasn’t for so long that someone had to honk to wake me, but still, my eyelids closed for a pregnant pause, and for a second, I forgot where I was. I am finally learning that sleep is no longer some out of reach luxury. You’ve got a job to do, girlfriend. Get some sleep.

Put down the cookies. Always simmering on the back burner, my sweet tooth has flared up again and I broke down and bought some Oreo thins which I’d planned to use in the crust of a raspberry pie I wanted to make. But until pie making commences, I’ve been snacking on them. The other day, sated with cookies, I pulled the familiar, I’ll just lie down for a second on my bed routine, this time in my room. I was curled up for a most delicious catnap when I woke with a startle. It seems a little stream of drool had trickled out of the side of my mouth and onto my cream-colored bedspread. Not your run of the mill translucent drool, this was Oreo cookie drool. Lovely. Ok, people, nap time is over. There’s a bedspread to clean.

Structure is underrated. I’ve started and run my own business before, and I remember that you wear a lot of hats. Most days you’re Fred Flintstone propelling your own car with your own legs, also focusing on where you’re headed, finding clients, getting gas, repairing equipment, and orchestrating and paying for it all. In a larger work environment, engines are built into the cars so you can focus on all the rest. It’s that same feeling after someone took the first shower and you start yours when the water is already hot. You’re free to lather, shampoo, exfoliate, shave or even sing, but you don’t have to wait on the water to get hot or wrestle with the mechanics of getting it out of the showerhead in the first place.

The plumbing’s changed. Here, we boy moms consistently find sparkling clean toilet seats in the delightfully DOWN position nestled behind blonde wood louvered doors which extend to the floor. These toilettes it seems doubles as bidets. If you sit a little too long emptying that bladder, the sensors assume you’re all done and kick in and present you with a startling complimentary splash. Similar to the carwash you get if you fill your tank, here you get the freebie if you are too leisurely emptying yours. Also, there’s piped in music, which isn’t awful. Think tea at the Ritz versus Muzak.

People need people. Working alongside people together yet separate inside a thick cloud of silence leaves me feeling isolated and tends to sap any creativity and energy I brought with me. For me, collaboration and connection, even in tiny doses, is the missing link. I have discovered a non-negotiable absolute for my environment if I’m to pursue something more regular. I only know this because of what happened Monday, which was shaping up to be a fine, full day until I got into an impromptu chat with two colleagues, also recently back in the workforce. We briefly compared notes on work challenges and family and whatever else needed to spill out into the open in that moment, and then got back to our respective afternoons. The rest of the day rolled along pleasant and productive enough, yet something had shifted. I felt better about everything, in large part due to this wonderful newfound sense of belonging as if I were in the right place after all, and everything made sense–the work, the people, me. I’ve worked plenty of places, but I’ve yet to discover an easier, more perfectly controlled experiment which speaks volumes about myself. I need to interact with people, if only for a few minutes each day, if I’m going to be happy.

Life is short. Get the frames. As most nearsighted 50 somethings have learned, the distance from book to computer screen to farther away requires different strength lenses. I’ve avoided getting progressives because I’ve heard so many whine that you must retrain your brain to look up then down and here and there, and they’ve all sounded so unhappy and this nuisance has left them full of regret. As a result, I’ve spent a decade too long flipping my glasses up to read and putting them back down to see far away, yet never finding that middle distance clarity you need to see a computer. Until now, and I will add I am in love with my new frames.

If you don’t get help here, please get help somewhere. This subhead is from an ad years ago for a drug treatment center in Atlanta. The idea is if you don’t come to our institution for help, get help somewhere. This instruction holds true for most things, including one’s career. At this stage of my life, I am appreciating how there needs to be a place outside your four walls where you can go and think clearly and solve problems and contribute, and cogitate on things that matter, things outside of your own life. You’ve invested years in your family and your home and all the trimmings, but there is still more out there, more to understand, invest in, contribute to. Yourself included. And if you haven’t yet found it, keep looking.

Not sure what’s ahead, but this sure feels like a start, and I’m grateful.

Empty nester, Uncategorized

Scar Tissue

March 16, 2021March 16, 2021 Susan Greco

I started physical therapy to restore range of motion in my shoulder and arm, left tight and knotty from a recent lumpectomy and radiation. Being able to reach behind and scratch my back easily and pain-free is a new goal, as is securing a bra clasp. Over a year since surgery and nearly that long since treatment, you’d think by now the healing would be all done, but seems the tightness has only increased. The tissue under my arm feels like fabric sewn with too tight stitches and all we need is a seam ripper to break through and pull the threads loose.

You’d think by now the healing would be all done.

Like you do when telling an infant’s age, I used to talk in months – I’m three months post chemo, six months since radiation, etc. – but thankfully now I can talk in years since all this started up in late 2019. My surgery and treatments have graduated out of their infant stage and into a toddler stage, with tantrums arising as this little blocked lymphatic circulation mess I must now clean up.

The physical therapy office is close by, convenient and calm — nothing like my last PT experience several years ago where the incongruously L O U D radio was routinely tuned to the unholiest of trinities – The BeeGees / Gerry Rafferty / Air Supply – and my physical therapist’s brash order-me-around style certainly didn’t fit my idea of a first-string player you’d pick for your healing team. Last week at my initial session, I was assigned an Emory student, a no-nonsense tucked-in clean-shaven guy who, after moving me through several stations working my arm and shoulder, moved into a deep tissue shoulder massage miraculously landing on all the tight unyielding spots which, albeit stubbornly, gave way. I left with a sheet of homework exercises, most of which I completed except the one involving a Theraband. Surely I own a Theraband, but, alas, where is it? Still haven’t brought myself to enter a Target or Walmart since the pandemic began, so opted against purchasing. I know, Amazon.

At today’s session I worked with a petite young lovely woman who moved me through various stretching and strengthening stations. The therapists toggle between several patients, like busy chefs minding multiple burners, careful to tenderly sauté and not let a rolling boil erupt or a pan sit unattended and burn. They move between patients rolling their laptops around on wheeled lectern style desks.

I might have blurted out to my therapist that the roving desk setup she maneuvers reminded me of the SNL skit with Melissa McCarthy playing Sean Spicer rolling her podium on the streets of New York. She humored me with an amused/mortified smile, probably not so happy she got assigned the clown who wants to inject humor into all of it, breaking up the calm focused room she and her colleagues have cultivated. I joked now she won’t be able to shake this visual and she smiled again realizing the truth of that unfortunate circumstance.

This weekend we went for a Sunday drive, winding through various parts of Atlanta — Edgewood, Inman Park, Poncey-Highlands. Other than looking at house paint colors for inspiration, my primary goal was to score a canelé, a small striated cylindrical French pastry flavored with rum and vanilla with a soft and tender custard center and dark caramelized crust, which I found at Ponce City Market’s Saint-Germain bakery. I’m working on not consuming much sugar, but occasionally the urge is real, and I’m increasing trying to locate something exceptionally good vs the first filler sugar I can get my hands on. By the looks of things in the Food Hall, but for the masks covering most people’s faces, you’d never know we’re in a pandemic. Throngs of loud-talking particle-spreading people filled the hall, the din of noise so visual and loud I nearly abandoned the much-anticipated sugar errand. I got myself a canelé and Joe a palmier, his favorite, plus a coffee éclair and raspberry and passion fruit mousse little round cake for later. We nibbled on the canelé and palmier and meandered through neighborhoods studying houses’ paint colors from our car for our some-day repaint.

Driving through Edgewood, I noticed a ramshackle of a church with a sign out front and the message, “Your Grief is Valid.” We live in a world full of dichotomy – help is on the way with stimulus checks about to drop into accounts and Covid vaccines increasingly common, yet still there are long lines for those waiting for a bag of food to feed their family and scores of people pre- and post-Covid cloaked in a stuck-on heaviness they can’t shake. Last week, the TV networks broadcast highlights looking back on the full year since Covid was proclaimed a global pandemic. How do you bundle so much loss into a news segment? It was admittedly well done, but so sad, too. Smiling faces now gone leaving behind families who don’t know where to begin to climb out of their despair. Exhausted doctors and nurses, their virtues extolled, in search of a reset or second wind or both.

Your grief is valid.

We each heal in our own time. And time, for the most part, heals all things. But for those of us stuck in the middle between our hurt and our healing, and with a pandemic thrown in the mix, every morning can feel like Groundhog Day, a familiar rotation without much hopeful change in sight. Circling back to the church sign, your grief IS valid, despite however fresh or old, and the way you move through it is your choice. But until you feel well on your way, please don’t stoically go it alone or hide until your best self magically shows up. Because we all know things don’t quite work out that way. Instead, walk with someone, grab a coffee or a canelé and take some time together, comparing notes, taking notes, or soaking in the simple and reliable beauty outside. One day when you aren’t looking, you will feel it, a little less heavy and moving forward with a slight change that happened, when things starting looking brighter, sharper and you saw a shiny glint of hope in the distance. Try and break up the days, infuse them with connection. Sure, physical therapy can mechanically do it, but being together also melts scar tissue, and is what opens up space for all kinds of goodness.

Racism

Warning: The images you are about to see are disturbing.

June 16, 2020June 16, 2020 Susan Greco

How many times does Lester Holt have to tell me this? Each and every night. Another black man was shot and killed, this time in my hometown last Friday night. His crimes were passing out in his car from drinking too much alcohol and holding up a Wendy’s drive-thru line, then resisting arrest and stealing a policeman’s taser, and running away with said taser and shooting over his shoulder with it at officers in pursuit. Whatever the color of your skin, it’s just not smart to steal a cop’s taser and attempt to flee the scene. Nor is using deadly force when pursuing a suspect whose back is to you and who has only a taser compared to your gun. Yet now, a black man is dead, shot in the back, twice. Once again, a community grieves with a black family, this one with three children, including a sweet 8-year-old girl I saw on tv standing next to her widowed mama, tears rolling down her cheek.

Social media is blowing up with opinions, personal accounts and proclamations. Black boxes are now profile pics, Black Lives Matter our cover photos, and we are sharing #Lovingday photos and stories too. Those galling All Lives Matter posts even crop up now and then, and today I even saw a White Lives Matter post. No likes there. Over these last few weeks I’ve considered replacing my profile picture with a black box, but technologically ignorant, I don’t know how. Besides, adding the graduating senior frame around my profile pic was its own feat, and I suppose selfishly I wanted to relish this milestone – my son’s high school graduation and my little bit of technology know-how a little longer. Meanwhile, the real question looms… what am I learning or doing in real life to trample my own racism?

Should we first educate ourselves with white-approved black books and movies so we whites are better poised to voice an appreciation for the black struggle? Is this voice actually for blacks or are we trying to impress or maybe even convert our racist white brothers and sisters as we convert our own selves? Some are posting movies others have been watching – i.e., The Help – and criticizing their baseless choices, redirecting them to more suitable, on point films for these times. It was a white girl who penned this story turned movie who grew up in a family with “help”, and I believe she wanted to cast a light on the plight and fight of maids in the south in the 60s, a mere sliver of the shit pie so many blacks have had to feed on for far too long. Many, including one of the movie’s own actors, who expressed regret in taking part in this project because she felt it portrayed black struggles through an inauthentic white lens.

What am I learning or doing in real life to trample my own racism?

If one could only gain access to “the list”, the right movies or books could be the catalyst for immediate understanding and empathy, the anti-racist Cliffs Notes, bringing forth a genuine laser focused, potentially spiking and then petering out, finite effort. In addition to learning about black history, some whites are asking if they should now greet black people with their own white balled fist held high in solidarity with Black Power. From the responses I’ve seen, that greeting is reserved for black people and whites best go figure out something else.

I am not consuming black literature at an alarming rate; I’m not consuming it at all. I don’t know if many of the businesses I support are part or fully or not at all black-owned, yet I say to myself I’m in favor of supporting them. And truthfully, I am. Yet I remain ignorant in the many ways I can help. I suppose this makes me part of the problem. But I am beginning to ask questions and open my eyes. I am trying to start somewhere, not out of guilt but out of an intrinsic duty to bridge this gap I’ve felt and seen that’s been between us all this time. I want so much to say I’m sorry for all you are feeling, and I want to help carry the burden until it is no longer there, until there is real change, change that sticks. How and where and to whom can I say this?

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost. -Arthur Ashe

Seems we are all so afraid of what to say or not to say, and for good reason. It is astounding, shameful and egregious what is now happening, what we are all privy to that has been happening for years. Each of us has a response within us but have we perhaps become stuck in a damned if we do, damned if we don’t conundrum? Hello? How do you think blacks feel? Political correctness, social media and other influencers urge us to speak up, but we’d better do it the right way, or even worse, our noticeable silence will signal our complicity. We speak up, but do it wrong and get pounced on, so back into our shell we go. We go to a protest carrying thoughtfully made signs, bearing words we hope will make a difference, inspire someone, change black minds about us and white minds about blacks, convey that we understand, want to do better. But some are inclined to write this off as shallowness and remind us that signs alone aren’t enough (we already know they’re not). Those among us who truly understand blacks, these whites who are enlightening us, don’t need the crutch our sign affords us. They have been walking the walk with white balled fists held high for years, long before we decided to join the trend. Is it now a closed club we’re too late to join? Whites judging whites on supporting blacks. Surely this can’t be helping. How many black people for how many years have felt judgement weighing down on their own backs?

My potential is more than can be expressed within the bounds of my race or ethnic identity. -Arthur Ashe

While some of us are in the wings figuring it out, could it be we are missing the obvious opportunities before us? I realize our whiteness largely renders us unable to even begin to understand someone’s blackness. Is this even what blacks need from us right now, to get inside their skin and feel what they have been feeling for so long? Could it be simple civility they’re seeking, or could we achieve a deeper alliance even, such as understanding or friendship or both? Instead of figuring out how we should now greet blacks we pass on the street, how about for starters we just greet them, doing what is decent, the same you’d do if you passed a stranger? Wait, you are passing a stranger, only now their skin color – plus a heaping serving of our own white shame – intimidates us, rendering us unable to do much of anything. Do we face them or for the sake of Covid-19, cross the street? Was that simply a healthy decision or was that uneasiness and cowardice that perhaps came across as racism?

I don’t know how to explain it, this kindness I am envisioning as two humans pass on the sidewalk, much as I can’t tell you exactly how it is one falls asleep. You lie there still and somewhere between, say, ten and forty minutes you close your eyes and voila! You’re asleep. Such it is with greetings. You make eye contact, smile or wave or say hello, all or a few of these and in no particular order. For purposes of the pandemic, let’s assume on these walks and in most any public places where we can closely encounter other people we all are wearing masks. Please tell me we all are, aren’t we? Realize you CAN smile behind your mask and someone WILL see it and feel it. It takes a bigger, more deliberate smile, but you can do it, and you don’t need permission to do it the “right” way. Also, you can still wave like you always have been able to, too. We all are in our own way scared. I’ve seen too many posts with queries along these lines. These people you’re wondering how to greet, or hug or avoid or love these days are still the same as you are, the same as they’ve always been, pandemic or no pandemic, protest or no protest: they are still HUMANS. We don’t need to enroll in a class to learn or relearn civility, kindness, fairness and friendliness, or develop some proper strain to which blacks best respond.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. -Arthur Ashe

I know it is not enough to stick a sign in my yard or go to a protest or feel the same I can’t unsee this video horror we all do as we learn about yet another casualty of this trigger-happy society of which we’re all a part. But what can we do to do more? My instinct tells me I need to talk to black people – neighbors, friends, essential workers, for starts. Who better to learn from about what they need, what they are feeling and have felt? Yet is that frowned upon? Is it rude to go straight to the living and breathing source, the receiving end of such anguish, discrimination and exclusion and reach out from our place of white privilege to share, listen and hopefully learn and make things better for black people? Will this unchartered display of whites crossing boundaries to reach out to blacks appear as flagrant boldness or insincere back peddling? Is it better to remain in the wings with Renee’s or Oprah’s book club BLM pick in hand and glean what you can before determining you’ve consumed enough and are now eligible to step up and speak to your fellow black humans?

While I don’t necessarily want to go interviewing my black friends now, I do know I can and want to learn from them. I haven’t spoken to several in years what with changing work, family and geography now between us, and I’ll admit the self-consciousness I carry worries that I’ll look disingenuous if I reach out now. Besides, even if I could understand, would I make a difference? Would black people help me help them? Would they welcome these questions and want to share their ideas for solutions? I want to help in the healing.

They say start with kind. I consider myself kind. So what and now what? Black people are still getting killed left and right, missing out on their God-given right to chances they deserve. What can I do about that? Is my trying to understand it helping at all? Do blacks want or need to vent to whites? What about poor, hungry or homeless whites, those who can’t hire blacks or support their businesses? What can those whites do? Can they make a difference? Absolutely. I believe we all can. Black lives matter and I think blacks need to not only hear us say they matter; they need to feel it too. It doesn’t have to be perfect or rehearsed or white- or black-vetted, but it does needs to be honest, understanding and come from the heart. There’s no time like the present.