Chapter 3 - A Falling Action

The last communications meeting was Thursday, August 19, 2003. We were shown the new structure of the business unit. The reorg had finally been accomplished.

Everyone's names were on the new charts!

Granted, my Operations Manager was demoted in grade to a group level manager. My group level manager was moved to program management. What was immediately infuriating to everyone concerned is that for all the drama, we were still in the same positions, still in the same job functions.

Or, so we thought.

August 26, 2003. This was the fourth year anniversary of my father's death. I remember the trips I took between Texas and North Carolina to see him as cancer ate at his cells. I saw a man I once looked to for strength and wisdom slowly wither away. I saw once hard muscles atrophy and become languid. The steady frame that taught me how to box I now lowered gingerly into a tub to bath as he once did me. I saw the strong will that kept me from experimenting with the drugs that savaged my community become weak and... frightened. I saw a gray mane fall to the pillows revealing a head made bald, not by choice. I saw death and could no nothing, NOTHING to stop its natural process.

I called him "Pop" ala Elroy Jetson from the sixties cartoon show. He was a smoker and had been so since the age of ten years old. He stopped at 65.

I called him Pop as a mantra, a breath prayer to counteract the years of tobacco and alcohol abuse. I called him Pop because I calculated his age from my birth: 37 until his demise at 74 on August 26, 1999. I just turned 37 when I received the call from my mother: "he's gone!" I was literally half his age.

I'd been in contact with emotions I'd denied for so long - tumultuous, agonizing pangs of tears that would not stop. I would try to anesthetize the pain with teaching martial arts, poetry, sex, wine - no drug that offered a temporary fix seemed appropriate. That night, 11:27 PM central time, I collapsed into the arms of my wife and my children. Pop, grandpa was gone.

So today was the anniversary of his death. I was four years removed from the event and was curious as to how I would commemorate his passing. At each visit to his grave in North Carolina, I'd become a hopeless mess! Apologizing for not being strong enough, agonizing over every sin I'd ever committed, feeling that I hadn't measured up to his expectations.

Today I was in Texas, 1,500 miles from his grave site. I was in control of my emotions; melancholy...

"Reggie, could you come with me please?"

My former manager had a somber look on his face. I knew what was transpiring.

My former Operations Manager had tried valiantly to find me another position within the company. The severance did not come as a surprise; just the timing of the day they chose:

August 26, 2003.

My former manager led me to my former operations manager to a walled office with someone from HR. The door was respectfully closed. Both men were visibly upset - almost to tears - as the HR rep (not the Catbert/Stepford wife Android woman, but a male underling) reviewed all the paperwork now assigned to me discreetly behind that closed door.

It felt like rape.

Ironically, I'd read an article in Fortune Magazine, ominously titled "Finished at Forty" http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,375941,00.html. They were surprised at how quickly my office affects fit neatly into one box.

If you study the art of war diligently (for me, over two decades), a sense of your surroundings develop. I'd moved out slowly, prepared for what seemed inevitable.

On that day, August 26, 2003, I'd just turned 41 twelve days before.

The day after my forty-first birthday, I wrote this poem. I hope you're not getting tired of these tomes!

As I stated in the previous chapter and somewhat above, I think humans have a built-in sixth sense of dreaded things on the horizon. I am sharing with you, the reader, what I was feeling at the time. Downturns in the economy can make you a little prophetic and a lot crazy! As the last line suggests, I'd received my... falling action.

Laughing Through Wormholes
Copyright 15 August 2003, Reginald L. Goodwin

I wanted one door to close and another to open.

I wanted
to plunge through its orifice having intercourse
in lands flowing with milk and honey.

I wanted
to steer my own rudder working cow utters
wearing protective suits and screens
occasionally getting stung by honeybees.

I wanted
to stop acting like an engineer
intellectually propping up numb skull
regimes by numb and dumber
"pointy-haired" managers (see: www.dilbert.com)
straight from Hades
torments and screams.

I wanted
the death-rattle games to end,
played by "Catbert - evil HR directors"
to my chagrin.

I wanted
to flee the tomb of innuendoes; rumors and gossip.

I wanted
to stop hearing the doubts
seeded in my mind by doublethink demons
using my talent for their fat wallet profit.

I wanted
good health and financial independence,
dependent on my God-given gifts and not
"Leave it to Beaver"
"Ozzie and Harriet"
to-make-THEM-comfortable-with-my-kind
riffs.

I wanted
to fill my days with the hot haze
of door-to-door graze, knocking, clocking
fulfilling my dreams.

I wanted
time to think and self-publish
the great American novel, essay, anthology, chapbook.

I wanted
time to design one B-A-D web page
to which others would link and look.

I wanted
to see my dreams and my life fulfilled,
my children and my wife have FAITH in me.

I wanted
off the long, unending road going to nowhere;

off the steep rollercoaster to obsidian oblivion...

I wanted to STOP it!