eldest daughter, in whose house I now lived. “Give Mom a hand.”
I couldn’t let the opportunity pass. “Oh, shut up and leave him alone, Joanne. I don’t need his help. And he doesn’t need you nagging at him. I’m fine.” Will and I walked slowly out of the living room. Everyone made a point of looking concerned. I’m sure some of them were hoping for a fall, a broken hip, and a quick decline. Nobody knows how much money I’ve got, and I’m not about to tell them, but I can see they suspect it’s a lot.
The porch of my daughter’s house is one of the main reasons I live with her. It’s what people today might call a big, old-fashioned wraparound porch, but it’s what I think of as normal. Houses today don’t have porches, they have decks. And those decks don’t look out over the street, where everything is going on. They’re usually out back, looking over the neighbor’s deck, which is full of people trying not to be obvious about looking right back at you. That’s the way they build neighborhoods these days. Cramming more people into less space, and trying to create the illusion that we’re not all sitting on top of each other.
Fortunately, Joanne’s neighborhood has tree-lined streets full of big houses on big lots with big porches. These porches are places where a person can sit and think and watch the world go by. Or, in some cases, have real conversations with other people.
I lowered myself into the wicker rocking chair. Will sat down on the porch swing, looking uncomfortable. “Why don’t you grab us a couple of beers, Willie, and loosen yourself up just a little?” That made him look even more uncomfortable, as I knew it would, but he disappeared into the house and came back a moment later with two bottles of cold beer. Giving up the pipe had been tough enough; I sure as hell wasn’t about to give up the occasional beer. Of course, this stressed the relatives no end. Not that I really cared.
We sat in amiable silence for a minute or two, and then I said, “I ain’t getting any younger.” Will almost squirmed in his swing seat.
“It’s a tough thing to describe, Martha, really tough. And it’s mixed in with a huge sense of responsibility —”
“Jesus Christ, Willie, did ya hit someone with your car? Did ya knock Jenny up again? Steal food from the mouths of babes? What?” I love interrupting people with pithy comments like that.
Will ignored my digs. “It’s work, Martha. It’s got me in a funny spot, and I’ve never felt this kind of confusion about it before.” I sipped my beer and waited, deciding against any more silly comments. The man actually seemed to be in physical pain. He got up and started to pace. “For the last ten years I’ve been the company improvement specialist. I go in and fix problems, make things better. Or at least, that’s what I’m supposed to do. And I do more than just treat everything like a project. We’ve talked about that — all my training in those other disciplines and techniques. Granted some of them are more fad than substance, but there are still interesting ideas there.”
“I remember, Willie.” I wondered briefly if perhaps we would have talked more if I’d been a little less abrasive. But then where would the fun be in that?
He stopped pacing. “For the longest time, I believed I was making a difference, actually contributing something.” He took a long pull on his beer. “But then things changed somehow. Or I changed. It was as if the rose-colored glasses had come off. I started seeing how, despite all the wonderful things I was putting in place, people pretty much kept doing what they had always done. We dressed stuff up, but once I left town and the project team rolled off, what was really different?”
I blew some air through my lips in an attempt to make a raspberry. Sadly, my lips were getting old, floppy, and dry, so it came out sounding more like paper rustling in the wind. “You’re breaking my heart, Willie, you really are. Sounds like a good old-fashioned midlife crisis to me. Buy yourself a sports car. You’ll be fine.”
He gave me a look like a puppy that had just been kicked, which took the fun out of things. “It’s like I don’t understand people anymore. I thought I was pretty good at that sort of thing — understanding how people’s minds work and using solid logic and rational thinking to help them. I had real success with that. But something feels different now.”
It was my turn to sigh. “Youthful enthusiasm turning to middle-aged cynicism can do that to you,” I said.
He slumped into his seat. “Martha, I don’t understand why people do the crazy stuff they do. It doesn’t make any sense to me!”
I belched loudly. Beer does that to me. Plus, I wanted to lighten things up a little. “I don’t want to be contrary here, but it’s not that complicated.”
He looked at me skeptically. “Maybe not for you. Captain of industry and all that.”
I shook my head. “We can get to that in a minute. But first, why don’t you give me a few more specifics on your problem and why you’re suddenly thinking about it now?”
My great-grandnephew Ethan chose that moment to come screaming onto the porch with Mr. Doodles, my rottweiler. “You be careful with him, Ethan,” I said sternly. “Don’t be too rough.” Ethan is six and weighs forty pounds fully dressed and soaking wet. Mr. Doodles, who was named by my daughter — I wanted to call him Spike — is 110 pounds of muscle and extremely good natured, so my concern was just for show. We watched them romp together on the front lawn.
Will kept his eyes on the two of them as he resumed. “I wanted to come back to Hyler to get off the road, but now I think this disconnected feeling was really at the heart of it. Traveling a lot wasn’t so bad when I was loving what I was doing. I guess I thought if I came back here, everything would all fall into place again.”
“Ah, my buddy Tommy, he said it best. ‘You can’t go home again.’ ”
Will looked confused. “Tommy? As in Thomas Wolfe? You knew him?”
I shrugged. “Don’t change the subject.” I love name-dropping. I got to know a surprising number of people for whom history has reserved space, though I like to keep Will guessing as to what’s real and what’s made up. It so happens that Thomas and I did spend a little time together in the thirties . . . but Will was talking again by then.
“Like I said, it all made sense. The company had a problem, I went there, we talked it through, I had a solution. All the people stuff just fell into place. I always thought the people part worked because the solution made sense.”
“Willie,” I interrupted, “if you tell me something made sense one more time, I’m going to have to hit you with this beer bottle.”
“But that’s the key part of the whole thing. I figured out the right approach, we did it, and it worked. The making sense piece is important, because now nothing seems to make sense, and it’s driving me crazy!” He paused to empty his beer.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe you could give me an example of what doesn’t make sense, and we could use that as a starting point.”
“Fine,” he said. “The union at Hyler. Their actions make no sense.”
“You’ve dealt with unions before, haven’t you?”
“Well, a bit, but that’s not the point. Right here and now, we have a crisis going on at Hyler. Our productivity sucks, the demand for the products we make is soft, and there is a real possibility that in the next year I’ll be closing this place and moving all 500 jobs, 350 of which are union jobs, offshore. So
