Here’s a glimpse for you. Dang ol’ eighteen-year-old Scout and her beloved carpentry instructor. We are in front of the first house I worked on, part of my vocational training program. I’ve carried this man’s influence with me on a medley of job sites, over the equator, through various personal paradigm shifts…
I had a fuckin’ nose hoop in those days.
I’ll think about how if I would have gone through that program when I was a high school student when I was a little more abrasive around authority and all it’s grotesquely narrow and conservative presentations in my bible belt strapped ecosystem… I will consider how there would have been a time I wouldn’t have been open to truly learning from that man. There was plenty we didn’t have in common. But I was eighteen, and freshly back from WWOOFing in Maui and decisively not pledging to a university after years of grooming and previous expectations. Trades school became more appealing than anything else, and I qualified for grant funding. I was late enrolling, the film and video production spots were all booked up so I decided the construction course wouldn’t be a bad default. That’s all there was to it. I was gonna give it a try.
“you know, you ask more questions than any of my other students” he’d say in a theatrically exasperated fashion, can of dip in his denim, cap on his head. I would bounce around and grin and say how “Geez that’s gotta be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me!” I’d bring bottles of kombucha to class and he’d ask if that was my hippie tea again, and I would only accidentally bump them off of scaffolding to shatter on the job site slab once or so -instances when his eye rolls could rival my younger sisters. He modeled support, getting me an extension cleared with the school so that over spring break I could spend more time at Cal Earth … while also referring to me as either a “tree hugger” or “princess”. He was integral in linking me up with my current employer -whom I couldn’t be more satisfied working for. The former instructor has been integral in more than that of course, all enabled by our mutual gameness to be open. To show up and learn from each other. The stark contrast of our general makeup makes it entertaining to have the bond that we do. He’s a figure I value immensely. Our rapport is one of the greatest reminders I have to be willing to go for knowledge over ego and presumptions about compatibility. In conclusion. He looks sorta like Kenny Powers and so does the guy that leads the no gi jiu jitsu class I’ve been going to recently, first time pursuing martial arts in the midwest, and I’m like “Okay, Oklahoma. I get it, gurus really come in all types.”
