Cafe 42 Blog

Had some yard work done that required cutting concrete. My gardener gave me a quote of $150 to do the job. I accepted his bid as fair and equitable and we agreed he’d do the work last Sunday.

He arrived promptly 8:30 Sunday morning and began cutting our concrete patio. He used a small electric saw with a 4-inch blade, which I thought odd, since the last guy I’d seen cut concrete had a major power saw that had to be held with both hands and came with a water supply to keep the blade cool.

Our gardener struggled to cut a mere 20 inches of concrete less than a half inch thick for over four hours. He left once, to buy new blades for his little saw. He did not take a lunch break. In fact, he took no breaks at all.

It was ninety-four degrees at mid-day when I brought him some ice water. Sweat dripped down his face and cut brown lines in the concrete chalk covering his skin. He gave me a crooked-tooth grin of thanks, took a long drink then wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Caliente!” (Hot!)

I nodded agreement and pointed to his little saw. Pequeño (Small), I said, closing the gap between my thumb and forefinger. Why so small? Harder to cut the concrete. I spoke in English, as my Spanish sucks, but he got it.

He laughed. You’re right. Yes! Si! Demasiado pequeño (too small). Herramienta incorrecta (wrong tool). He picked up his tiny cutter. Muy caro! Expensive! $100 for herramienta. $35 for blades. Aye yai yai!

I was paying him $150 for the job. He’d just spent over that buying equipment to do the work. I was mind boggled. I assumed he had all he needed to do the job when he gave me his bid. He went back to work and I went inside and got the receipt from the equipment rental place I’d visited the previous week. Only $24.99 to rent a jigsaw for 24 hours! At the time I rented the jigsaw, I inquired about renting a concrete cutter. $59.00 for 24 hours. Why hadn’t my gardener just rented the right equipment? He could have got the job done in half an hour and actually made money.

I took the receipt outside and showed it to him. Do you know of this place? Just down the road?

He took the receipt and studied the logo at the top of the paper. His expression brightened. Si! Yes! Alquiler de equipos. Rents. Yes?

Yes! Concrete saw is $59.00 bucks for all day. Thirty minutes, a half an hour, to do the job. That’s it. Why didn’t you rent a saw? Using hand signals and body gestures I somehow communicated.

Ah. No. No rent. Can’t. No license. No seguro (insurance). Not legal here.

Four years running our gardener’s been coming and he is easily the best gardener I’ve ever had. More than a gardener, he fixes our watering system, landscapes, trims trees, sets fences. He comes every Tuesday around 9:00am, rain or shine, and is on time, every time. He always smiles and waves when we cross paths. He is a stellar model of a dedicated hard worker for our children, and our community at large. I’ve recommended him to neighbors and soccer moms, as they have to their communities, allowing him to build a side business gardening and landscaping on weekends and evenings.

Yet, he can not get a Green Card. 

His company won’t sponsor him. He has no legal relatives here. He is not a refugee. Even if he could get one, the process of applying and then waiting for the Card takes years. My gardener needs, and in fact, has work now. He can’t wait years to get government approval to work for a living.

Why doesn’t he leave his job for Americans and just go back to Mexico? Without him, and immigrants like him, our free market economy would get even more expensive for us in the middle. Capitalism requires competition to keep prices of labor and costs of goods moderated.

I had three other bids on the concrete work I needed. A neighborhood contractor quoted me $1,600 to do the job. A mason didn’t want the job because it was 20 miles from his location and not worth the trip. A local handyman quoted $800, but couldn’t start the job for over two months, and required half upfront to hold my time slot. All were licensed, bonded, U.S. Citizens. With the right cutting tool, which was rentable for $59, I knew the job should take 15 minutes, 30 on the outside. I originally considered doing it myself, but the saw seemed heavier than I could manage.

I had no idea my gardener was here illegally and driving without a license until our conversation last Sunday. The man looks in his mid-40s but he told me on Sunday that he’s only 32. He’ll die young from hard labor, lack of medical care, working with poor or improper equipment, like breathing toxic concrete dust without a mask, carcinogenic construction materials, garden poisons. If he is graced with children, and I hope he is, and will pass on his excellent work ethic to them, he still will not be granted U.S. Citizenship. He is always at risk of deportation, more or less depending on who is in the White House. Like many illegals lately, he could end up having to take his American children back to live in the Mexico he left for a ‘better life.’ 

Sunday alone, our gardener put over $150 into the U.S. economy, counting just his little saw and multiple blades. He will buy his food here, pay for his housing here, his utilities, his fuel costs. He lives here, and contributes to our economy with every dollar he spends. He probably pays taxes, as do many illegals working for large companies. My gardener is an employee of a huge gardening and landscaping corporation.

Next time you bite into that peach, remember it only costs $0.39 because illegals planting and picking the fruit are cheap labor. (Your iPhone is made in China for the same reason, yet Apple is rewarded with tax breaks instead of kicked out of the country.). Illegals contribute billions in tax dollars and consumer spending in the U.S. annually, yet they get none of the protections of citizenship. No medicare. No social security or unemployment benefits. No welfare or government handouts. Illegals are invisible here.

I am privileged by birthright for the lifestyle we live, and can provide for our kids. I haven’t a clue, and never want one, how it feels to be so far from home, without ‘inalienable rights.’ But I know one thing for sure—our gardener deserves the ‘better life’ he sought when moving here, the one [ostensibly] available to most citizens who work hard to prosper.

How do you get good at anything?

Practice.

How do you get great? 

Obsession—Practice most all the time.

Pick any famous author, artist, musician, and they’ll all have obsession in common. And while we, the public, enjoy the fruits of their creative labor, those closest to these individuals were/are generally left wanting more of them, more from them.

Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, “was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband.”

Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame, “worked 12 hours a day seven days a week, [and] his wife, Carol, tended to their daughters, Jodi and Anne.”

Adrienne Armstrong, wife of Billy Joe Armstrong of Greenday, said of her husband after the release of the album American Idiot, “I think it challenged us to a new level, pushed us pretty far, the farthest I ever want to go.”

The creatives above are all men. All married and all had/have children.

Now let’s explore a few famous women.

The romance novelist Jane Austen never married. She was, in fact, ‘relieved in later life to have avoided the pitfalls of married life, not least the huge risks of childbirth, “all the business of Mothering.’”

Georgia O’Keeffe, the surrealist painter, “wanted to have children but agreed with him [her husband, Alfred Steiglitz] that motherhood was incompatible with her art. She needed to focus all of her attention on her painting.”

Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul has never married. “The very idea of what it means to be a wife and the responsibility and sacrifice that carries — I wouldn’t have held that very well.” And she never had children. “If I had kids, my kids would hate me. They would have ended up on the equivalent of the “Oprah” show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”

Ms. Winfrey had the guts to address the unvarnished, unspoken truth when she referred to the “responsibility and sacrifice,” in being a partner. She understood the investment of time, physical and mental energy it takes to be a conscientious parent would have interfered, even waylaid immersion with her creative siren to grow a multi-billion dollar empire.

Men have historically been the breadwinners in the family environment. And while this trend is slowly changing, the fact is women who seek personal excellence, especially in the arts, often have to choose between pursuing greatness and being, at least, an available partner and parent. Even today, men rarely have to make this choice. Regardless of this disparity, anyone, man or woman, obsessed with becoming great [at anything] should recognize the sacrifice and costs of pursuing brilliance.

As a wife, mother, and a writer, my creative muse is constantly vying for prominence in my hierarchy of desires. When my kids were babies, my creative process encountered fewer distractions. I could stay rapt in storytelling, run dialog in my head while watching them play at the park or practice Lil’ Kicker’s soccer. Small kids, small problems. Now the parent of two teens, my muse is often drowned out by the very real traumas and trials of adulthood my children face every day. To help them navigate these tumultuous times, I question, probe, even invade their space to stay connected, be there for them as a sounding board, a trusted confidant, be their ground when they’re falling and envelop them in a hug.

I chose to marry and have kids. And while I was present, available for my family, forfeiting the hours I could have been making it with my muse was a battle I engaged in daily. Much of my fiction focuses on this internal war. My novel, Reverb, illustrates the cost of a guitarist’s obsession with creating music. Disconnected confronts the reality that women can’t ‘have it all’—be everything we want to be, and still be there for our kids and family.

We glorify the brilliant author, the renown artist, the genius scientist, successes in business, often secretly wish to be one of them. Entrepreneurs that have built global companies made their startup their newborn, investing their time and energy in growing the business. To become great at anything means obsessively working at that job or craft, honing a skill set with relentless practice, which is the fundamental reason why genius is so rarely achieved.

Google “Genius,” and “Einstein” is in the first several pages of search returns. Einstein had intellectually incoherent views on politics, economics, and psychology, and by most accounts from colleagues and family, he sucked at relationships. Focusing solely on math and physics, he neglected most everything else, but he was one hell of a physicist.

Regardless of where we began, obsessive practice, to the exclusion of most everything else is a reliable indicator of achieving genius status. And now that my kids are grown and on their own, I have more time to make it with my muse, and I do. But truth be told, while years ago it mattered to me to be someone, achieve ‘famous writer’ status, or at least a Wiki page, not so much anymore. I’d never have been an art director, or an entrepreneurship educator, or cultivated the intimate relationships I now have, or earned the status of partner and Mom if I’d chosen the road of pursuing the genius title. I’d miss too much living such a hyper-focused life. Besides, it’s much easier to hang at home and watch Netflix than it is to pursue greatness. {- ;

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the world wide web. It was 1995. I was in my rented townhome in Alameda, a small island on the east bank of the San Francisco Bay. I already had a dial-up modem plugged into my Mac LC that I used to send graphic files to lithographers and printers through FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

I don’t know where I heard about Netscape, probably from a business associate. But I remember the afternoon I logged on for the first time. The interface was full color visual, the first I’d seen, since FTP was only black text on a white screen and no images. The Netscape logo— the uppercase N sinking into a black globe against a starry aquamarine sky, was… beautiful.

Once I registered, the next screen had bright, colorful illustrations of a spacecraft, a construction site, a radio tower and more. Under each drawing white text against the black frames said, “Explore the Net. Company and Products. News and Reference. Community.” I was floored, drop-jawed. The interface gave me choices to go anywhere. Netscape was a portal to news sites, businesses with ‘websites,’ online communities, a virtual store, and reference libraries from around the world.

I called my roommate into my bedroom/office space to show her what I was seeing on my screen. “This changes everything,” I practically whispered, sure that this portal was the beginning of a connected world I only dreamt of as a kid.

As I sat there clicking on each navigation link, then exploring each site the Netscape browser delivered, I recalled when I was 8 years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother’s huge Chevy while she drove me and my sister home from school.

“One wish,” my mom asked us spontaneously. “One wish. Right now. If you could have anything you want, what would it be?” She often came up with non-sequiturs like this to fill the void of silence after she’d asked about our day at school and got, “Fine,” from both of us.

I answered instantly. “World peace,” and I meant it. My brother had come back from Vietnam a wreck. Depressed. Angry. I’d watched war on TV nightly.

“That’s a stupid wish,” my sister said, sitting up front in the passenger seat. I cowered in the back seat, and shut up. “It’ll never happen. Human’s are selfish. It’s part of our nature. We can’t change who we are.” She was 2 yrs older than me. Surely, she must be right. She wished for a new purse.

“This changes everything,” I’d said to my roommate as I browsed the internet that first time. And I believed it. A portal to the world would let us see how others lived, and let others see what was possible. In 1960s to 1990s U.S., most of us had a place to live in, and enough to eat every day. Most kids were vaccinated from horrific diseases, and didn’t die from the flu. We got a free education, through at least high school, and 20–30% of the population got a college education as well. And in California, college was cheap, making it accessible to most anyone.

My roommate stood over my shoulder staring at my screen as I went from site to site through Netscape’s ‘portal.’ She seemed unmoved by what we were seeing, and in short order went back to her room. I stayed online the rest of the night and into the early morning hours, amazed. I perused news sites, read articles from all over the world. We could never ignore atrocities happening anywhere. Millions would know instantly, and the United Nations would have to stop them! The privileged would no longer be able to turn a blind eye on poverty or disease, even in the most remote places seeing it daily on their computers. We could talk to people around the block or in other countries we’d never meet, and share ideas, and feelings. We’d see how similar we all are, how we all feel sad, or happy, or mad at times. We could connect 24/7, and never feel isolated or lonely again. The internet was a window to the world, and the view would surely motivate all of us to care for each other like never before.

This is the argument I gave to my dad at Saul’s Deli, eating bagels and lox a few years later. As a lover of technology since childhood, he too was on the internet, one of the first adopters in his advanced age group. He shook his head and gave me his indulgent smile, pausing before taking another bite of his bagel.

“The internet changes nothing. It is a tool, like a screwdriver. It won’t change human nature. And it won’t save us,” he said. “We’re going to have to do that. Until we learn to care for each other beyond ourselves, we are doomed.” He took a bite of his bagel and savored the mix of salmon, onions and bread, satisfied in the moment.

“You’re wrong, dad,” I exclaimed with certainty. “The internet is connecting the planet. For the first time in human history we are becoming one world.”

“One very small world, which everyone wants their piece of,” he said. “We’ve invented technology we can’t handle, from the Bomb to this internet. Getting bombarded with information isn’t going to change how we react to it. And the more technology we invent, the more likely we’ll implode with it.” He sighed, looked at me lovingly. “You can’t change the world, baby. Best just to focus on taking care of yourself, and your family.”

It was 1998. I had no idea what was coming with Web 2.0 and now 3.0, how the internet would evolve into the dangerous, manipulative MARKETING PLATFORM it has become. But I left Saul’s Deli that morning sure my father was wrong.

As it’s turned out, he wasn’t.