lenten journal: by the numbers

I spent some time this morning reading

by Donald Hall.

It’s not a new book to me. When I was finishing up at Winchester and preparing to move to the South Shore, my friend Jack loaned me his copy. Donald Hall was a poet who lived in and around Boston; his love for the Red Sox was as passionate as his love for words. The bookmark I keep in the copy I bought after I gave Jack’s back to him is a ticket stub from a Sox-Mariners game on Sunday, May 4, 2004. I sat in Section  27, Box 67, Row D, Seat 1. Hall was paying attention to Spring Training in the chapter I was reading today, much as I am, with the Sox just days away from opening an new season and, with it, new hope. Hall writes:

The numbers make a difference to me, somehow. At the end of the night, I can tell you how many burgers I cooked, how many onions we sliced for onion rings. I can also tell you my journal will be over 31,000 words after I finish today’s post. When I open my blog each morning, my first move is to click my statistics counter to see how many hits I got the day before. At least I am learning how to check it only once a day. In some way, each one of the numbers reflects some aspect of my effort, and they also have nothing to do with what I have done. If I cook forty burgers on an evening it’s because I got forty orders, not because I somehow worked harder. Whether one hundred or three hundred people come to the web site, I’m still writing a thousand words a day. Yet, Hall is right: we do prove ourselves worthy of the numbers.

Worthy. That’s a haunting word to me.

Worthy: having value; being suitable; desirable; meriting respect or esteem.

That takes numbers, if not to prove to other people, to prove it to myself. Five years of cobbling together a resume that includes line cook, security guard, and pastor – as well as extended segments of life where I existed as Unemployed Depressed Guy – and it takes some serious spin to make the numbers work, to make me feel like I’m pleasing the “dispensers of supper and love,” to make me feel productive.

When we first moved to Charlestown, I went looking for a job to help pay the bills. I ended up as Assistant Manager at the Blockbuster Video down the hill from our apartment. The pay wasn’t great, but we got free movies and there was always popcorn. I had fun roaming the store trying to suggest lesser-known movies to widen people’s perspective to more than the new release wall. Thanks to me, more people in Charlestown saw

and

than would otherwise have done so. One night, I asked a woman if she was finding what she wanted.

“Oh!” she said with some surprise. “I don’t usually talk to the help in places like this.”

I went back behind the counter in an identity crisis. Growing up in a minister’s home meant not being taught much of a distinction between who you were and what you did, at least in our house. Was I the guy who handed out copies of

, or was that just what I did? Did renting videos justify my place on the planet? Since when was I “the help”?

I learned to make a distinction. I was a person who happened to be trying to pay some of the bills by working in a video store. That wasn’t all of me. The lesson was a good one to learn and a hard one. If someone like me, who internalized early on that love was earned, figures out that what I do and who I am are not the same thing, how do I earn love? What do I have to do (be? – even the verb is an issue) to feel worthy?

Here’s one of the ways I have tried to respond:

It’s one of those questions I keep asking.

Peace,
Milton