Why Eductation is Important

The Emily Griffith Opportunity School spans an entire city block. Even from the institution’s inception at the beginning of the century, its name was synonymous with “trade school”. The overly pragmatic structure, a three-story brick building with many of its external features unchanged since its construction in 1882, was strangely utilitarian and welcoming at the same time. Students of all ages meandered through doors whose paint was chipped and worn away from repeated entry and exit. They came to learn a skill: plumbing, carpentry, nursing, hair-styling or auto-mechanics.

I sat parked in a pay lot across the street from the sun-baked building, measuring my thoughts and the extent to which I was about to commit. Should I really be doing this? My wife would suffer, supporting me as I split my time between the class and my work. My job would suffer, as I would no longer be able to mentally consign myself to the betterment of youth as my empoyer had required. I would suffer in a manner that I was sure I hadn’t even grasped yet. I gazed at the entrance where, years before, a tenacious woman with a dream had opened the doors of a trade school to a horde of people wanting to learn.

The inside of the car was heating up. The windows were open on each of the truck’s four doors, but still the afternoon blaze was beating down on the gray paint, boiling the car and cooking my flesh as I sat. I incessantly consulted my watch, waiting for the hands to reach a point that indicated acceptable departure. I didn’t want to enter the classroom too early, knowing I would then have to sit torpid in my seat while anxiously anticipating the start of the session. It was possible I might even have to converse superficially with a classmate, a scenario I was trying to avoid. I felt a sliver of shame poke my heart as I recognized that, for the previous two years, I had been teaching youth and ridiculing them for being so shy on their first day.

At ten minutes to noon I sighed loudly, cut the radio, locked the car and strode through the waves of heat emanating from the tarmac. I moved past a closed garage door where, through dirty panes, I made out the scratched corpses of emancipated cars sitting pointed towards the rear wall, waiting to be resuscitated. Above a metal door just the other side of the garage was a small placard that said simply, “Auto Shop”. The door was locked.

Stiff-legged, I moved further down the sidewalk trying a successive series of doors, all leading away from the auto shop and all locked. At the end of the building a banner hung from the brick: “Donate Your Car!” it proclaimed in large white lettering. As I angled around the corner my heart rattled away like a snare drum and I began to wonder if I were here on the right day, if the time was correct. I had checked the paper, reading it over and over, but my mind had been clouded as I had processed, for the umpteenth time, my internal struggle. Perhaps I had not truly registered the numbers and times printed on the enrolment form.

Halfway around the school an alley dissected the main building from the shop. At the mouth of the dirty passage lay an open door through which I saw a grizzled man who appeared to be a teacher. He was milling around a classroom filled with scraps of twisted steel and heavy, oily machinery.

“Excuse me,” I asked, a weak shadow of my teacher’s voice issuing from me, “Can you tell me where the entrance to the auto shop is?”

He took me in with his eyes. Sized up my skinny frame and clean hands.
“Right up there,” he said pointing into the alley, “Just through the gates you’ll see a door and some stairs. Head up the stairs and you’ll find the classroom alright.” I could feel his eyes on my back as I turned and skittered away.

Past a parking lot of rusted-out cars and found a door that permitted entry into a cool foyer. A second shop, separate from the one I had seen through the garage door, and filled similarly with dilapidated vehicles to be tinkered with, was visible across the threshold. To my left was a shadowy progression of stairs that led up to a nearly lightless hall. I ascended quickly realizing that the class would begin shortly. The chilled, black hall gave way to a room radiating with fluorescent light. I could make out nothing from my vantage in the corridor, but the sounds of people shuffling around indicated students were present. The final steps were before me, the return to school after a hiatus of 8 years.

The classroom I entered was the cookie cutout of that in any other school across America; save for the slew of automotive extracts, mostly unidentifiable to me, that lay pell-mell around its border. Still, some of the polished relics I recognized as differential, transmission and engine components thanks to the book about automobile fundamentals I been reading at night before I went to bed (my wife had recounted, mockingly, to friends of my evening literary choice). The pieces lined the floor’s edges and populated tables on the fringes of the desks. The room was half-full with other souls who, in the obligatory first-class format, had chosen the seats farthest away from the front as possible. They sat quietly, waiting.

The room was dead silent except for the occasional scrape of chair legs across the floor as someone adjusted their seat, reached for something in their backpack, or craned their neck around to search for a missing class leader. The clock read five minutes past the hour.

When the teacher entered, my eyes were immediately drawn to his hefty belt with champion-sized buckle that reminded me of those won by the reigning heavyweights of the World Wrestling Federation or perhaps a bull-rider of the highest caliber. He walked with a kind of swagger, perhaps because the jeans were too tight, or perhaps because he had just ridden in on a horse and had yet to lose the saddle from his stride. However, all elements of his appearance were superseded by the crowning glory of his hair. Granted, this was one of the first things I noticed on a person, mostly because mine was slowly abandoning any effort to live, but in all honesty, I failed to see how anyone could not take note of it. Immaculately coiffed, it was a thick swatch of symmetry-perfect lines held in place by gel that gave it the appearance of lashings of cable on suspension bridge. Shaped like a helmet, it would take a hurricane-proportioned wind to move a single follicle from its home. You could almost hear the wind whistle through it as through a chain-link fence somewhere down on the Texas-Mexico border.

“Wellllla…” He said in a deep baritone, “would you look at this class!”

Humble Beginnings

I get asked quite a bit how I got into the crazy business of car-repair and coffee shop cavorting when really, my background is in non-profit work and music performance and a dabbling in web-design. Let me make it clear, I wonder the same thing myself pretty much every day. You see, it's quite possible that I could sit behind a computer and write code, and make, uh, septuple the amount of money I make now. In addition I would have weekends off, let somebody else deal with the stress of overhead and cash flow and profit and loss...

But, really, I'm still gunning for that book deal!

Actually, I just like knowing that I'm helping people. I know it sounds cheesy and that there are a ton of other ways to help people and never worry about having dirty fingernails, or being second-guessed about my motives; but this business is exciting.

The same year that I got married, my poor, then unaware wife, agreed to my going to school even before the vows were out of her mouth. I enrolled in classes in Denver to begin learning what the heck I was getting myself into; which became a catalyst for the writing that was to follow. When the business opened, the writing got sidelined and only three years later began to imprint itself on my brain whenever I awoke.

I've decided to split the difference between owning a business and writing a book by putting out small excerpts of my experience on this blog over the next several months, and just seeing if you find it as hilarious and strange and disturbing as I did. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes...

Happy reading!