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Humble Lessons from a Custodian

The summer before beginning eighth grade, I landed my first job. For three months, I would serve as junior custodian at Fairview Community Center in the West Minneapolis suburbs. Day in and day out, for $3.85 an hour, I was charged with setting up tables and chairs for senior citizen lunches, sweeping floors, emptying trash, and scrubbing surfaces (including endless, forever skin-shredding,, room-length Venetian blinds). I worked for two veteran custodians who had been with the school district for decades. Tony, my direct supervisor, was a soft-spoken and kind man. He always offered a wry comment with a subtle, but infectious smile. And Tony was unflappable. Whatever was asked of him and in whatever time frame it was asked, Tony would get it done and done well. Three times per week over the lunch hour, he would slip away to swim laps in the center’s twenty-five meter pool. And many times when I happened across Tony with a rare lull in his responsibilities, he was engaged in the grueling exercise of wall-sits to prepare himself for his yearly skiing trip to Aspen. 

Dave, his associate custodian, had broad shoulders, an unassailable hairline of gunmetal gray, and eyes that smiled without fail. During breaks, he would sit on the loading dock, tell charming stories, and smoke a pipe (like someone straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting) held firmly betwixt his right molars. Dave loved to eat pies and would buy them whole on the way home from work (even bringing leftovers into work the next day). Dave could fix anything he laid his hands on and never failed to indulge an eight grader who broke mowers, trimmed prized bushes embarrassingly short, or peppered him with questions for which he had no time, even though he always acted like he did.

By summer’s end, my hands were callused, my body sore, and I was eager to get back to school. But I never looked at custodians in quite the same way again. From day to gritty day, I came to recognize how hard these men worked, doing undesirable, tiring, and often thankless work. Is there a spill on the floor, a broken air-conditioner, an empty toilet paper roll, or a full garbage? Call Tony or Dave. Often, the only times these invisible people would get noticed was when something went wrong, instead of  the countless times everything went right. Now, I know better. Now, I can see. Since working with Tony and Dave, I’ve winced as people have dropped trash on the ground in full view of a garbage can. I’ve witnessed people speaking condescendingly to Tony and Dave, barely mustering the courtesy of making  eye contact, much less recognizing how intelligent they are. I’ve heard people joke about the lowliness of custodians’ work, as though it was beneath them. But Tony and Dave just smiled and worked on. 

Praise the Lord

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