Okay, so sort of related.
When I was in elementary school, my favorite person was not any of my teachers, not my principal, not my school nurse, but John the custodian. He was like Ned Flanders’ cool brother.
Every day without fail I would find him in the cafeteria or the hallway and tell him about my day and the cool things I was learning. I talked to him about my parents’ divorce. I told him about the stray dogs I was feeding and letting sleep on the back porch, and then told him how my mother made me stop and bring them to a shelter. After my friends, he was the first to sign all my casts (I was clumsy af in the third and fourth grades). To his credit, he always stopped what he was doing to listen and ask questions, and never once did he make me feel like I was bothering him. I always thanked him for making sure there was toilet paper and soap in the girl’s bathroom outside Mrs. Tewky’s room and never understood why he laughed whenever I did. He even let me wear his super cool sunglasses with the iridescent lenses (hey, it was the 90s).
I was devastated when I eventually moved to the middle school, because it meant I’d never see him again.
Cut to like a million years later. I was student-teaching at the high school and was having my first open house, and who walked in but John the custodian. Turns out, his daughter was one of my tenth graders. He came in not to talk about his daughter (who was loving the Hamlet unit), but to tell me how proud he was of me. He said the bright points of his time at the now-demolished Willis School were when I would come running down the hall to talk to him. “When you’re a janitor, nobody tends to look at you, let alone talk to you,” he said, “and here was this crazy-haired girl who would bring me drawings and trusted me enough to tell me about what was going on at home. You’ll never know what that meant to me.”
And once I stopped crying and we stopped hugging, he told me that he was now the head of the maintenance department for another city’s entire school system. “I always thought about quitting and maybe going back into carpentry, but I stayed because of kids like you. When I had my baby girl, I hoped she’d turn out a little like you. I hoped she’d brighten someone’s day.”
Every so often, I visit my hometown and I’ll see him in CVS or coming out of Nick’s Subs, and we’ll catch up and talk like it hasn’t been over two decades since a second grader with seriously insane hair walked up to the janitor standing at the front of the cafeteria and asked if he wanted some of her Gushers.
Thank the janitors and custodians whenever you can. They are people, they are important, and the world is better because of them.
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