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Macaroni Dad

'Cause Dads Love Macaroni, Too!

October 1, 2015
Time Well Spent

I was in the midst of a long Wednesday this week and about halfway through my evaluation while visiting a regular client I realized that I hadn’t seen one of the regular guys I usually get to see and walk with. This guy is the guy you think about when you talk about grandpas. He is a happy little guy with a mostly bald head and a strong European accent that makes me think he is from Austria or Bulgaria or something. You can tell he has a good heart and gentle character when he interacts with his employees. He is friendly to a fault and always exceptionally motivated to do better and fix concerns from things we found the month before. Although I don’t have his permission to use his name, we will give him something similar...Zorby.

Zorby is one of those loveable characters that always treats me with kindness and respect. I feel the same way about him and admire his energy and his stamina that brings him into his restaurant each day. No matter what type of mood I might be in that day, I can’t help but smile when I see him because I know he works hard and takes a great deal of pride in his work in his restaurant. He always appreciates the good things I see and always accepts the issues I point out while we walk through his place of business. Regardless of how the day’s evaluation is going or has gone, he seems to take ownership of the concerns, he then smiles and shrugs it off knowing that there will be room for improvement next time. 

Back to Wednesday when I was stepping into a walk-in cooler with one of Zorby’s co-workers. “Hey I haven’t seen Zorby today. How is he doing?”

“Oh you didn’t hear?” He looked at me wondering, “Zorby had a heart attack and a stroke the other day.”

My eyes got big. I turned around in disbelief and fell back against the cooler wall. “Is he okay?”

Through our conversation over the next 5 minutes I learned that our old friend was still alive and kicking and recovering at home. I found out that he had become dizzy and disoriented at work and that he had to be taken away by ambulance the day it happened. He had been working like any other day and doing everything he could to manage his time and his fellow employees when something quietly snuck up on him. The news affected my mood and my thoughts for the rest of the day. I was glad he was still...uh, alive and my only thought was that I wanted to let him know I was worried about him and hoped that he was okay. 

On my quiet drive home I began to think and wonder about what would have happened if that day had been Zorby’s last day. Gosh man, who wants to head straight from work to the pearly gates....not me. I took a deep breath and realized I was as tense as I’d ever been. Some days it seems like I carry all the angst and anxiety of everyone I talk to. We all have jobs to do out there, but my job involves stressing people out....almost always. Then I thought to myself, what if the same thing happens to me. 

It’s the same message I try to beat into my thick head each and every day. A job is something you do. It sustains the income and hopefully puts food on the table. Maybe it helps with vacations and college tuition and piano lessons, but the place we belong is as close to our loved ones for as long as we can be. It would be a tragedy if the stress and the worry overcame me and my last few moments were spent somewhere on a cold tile floor away from my family. I’ve got weddings to attend, daughters to walk down the aisle, and grandkids to hold. We should all have the choice to go when we want, where we want and with people we choose to be around. Unfortunately we don’t always get a choice like that. 

It seems like my 9 year old was just 3 only a year ago. Somehow the time accelerated and she is exhibiting the signs of a pre-teenager before my eyes. Macaroni mama told me this last week that my daughter was upset with me. She said, “Daddy is never home, he is always working. I hate his job.”

When you hear something like that quitting is usually the first thing that comes to mind. But then reality sets when you imagine cooking grass and tree leaves over an open flame in the back yard because the electricity was turned off...also, of course, groceries come from a store and they usually need some form of payment. Yea, reality is a bear sometimes and unfortunately not all of us are in line for the Rockefeller inheritance. 

What will my friend Zorby do? Will he decide that he almost spent his final hours at work and it might have not been the way he wanted his wife to remember him? He is a tough guy. He is a good man. He is the guy that we can all relate to. You might say that there is a little bit of Zorby in all of us. Maybe it’s the message I needed to have at the time I needed to receive it. If nothing else, I know I need to keep things in perspective and at an arm’s length. Stressing out at work and giving everything to a job is not the right balance of time and energy. The worst thing ever would be to be away from the ones that matter most at the final few moments of life on this earth.