City Lights

1978

First Impressions

I have arrived. Here I am, a small town kid who just got a good job, my first job that wasn’t working for friends of my parents. I am an employee at Woodbury’s Financial.   And it’s in the big smoke, the city. I did not ever think that this would happen. I have to admit that I am a bit intimidated. Everyone seems so sophisticated, so big city. I wonder whether the people I am working with are going to think of me as the very opposite, almost smelling like I come from a small town. 

After the First Week

For the first few days I didn’t know whether I was going to be accepted or not. I felt so stupid asking about the bus system, and having to write down the route numbers of the buses I would have to take to get here and back home.  I imagined that they could sense my fear of going to the wrong place.

Little things become big.  I have the first desk that I have ever had for a place of work. I had to look around to see how people organized theirs. Would they know what I was doing? Could I include a picture of my dog, or would that be a way of announcing that I didn’t have a wife or kids, that only a dog would have me? These were the kind of dumb, insecure thoughts that ran through my head for my first four days on the job.

           I began my Friday workday thinking that this had been a very long week, and that I would probably just have to be content to just come in, do my job, and then leave, looking forward a weekend with no social worries.

           But then Friday happened. The lunch break changed everything. As I was preparing to eat at my desk, to chow down on the two egg-salad sandwiches that my mother always packed for me, I discovered that I had forgotten to pack them. I had been in a hurry, as I had slept in a bit, doing a little drinking the night before.

           I was hungry. Where should I go? Then I saw about 10 of my colleagues, male and female go out the door. They would know a good place. I would follow them to , but discreetly, at enough distance so I did not look like I was tailing them like a puppy.

           They stopped and entered a restaurant. I halted right away and pretended to be looking for something in my left pocket. Once they were all inside I marched up to the place. It was a coffee shop with the name “City Lights” shining above the entrance. 

As soon as I walked into City Lights, I was made to feel like I was home. The woman who obviously ran the place asked my name, and said, “I’ve never seen you here before.” I felt strangely comfortable telling her that I was a new employee at Woodbury’s Finances and that I came from a small town.

           As I looked around the place, I saw that the walls were covered with pictures of movie and rock and roll stars. James Dean and Elvis Presley were particularly prominent. I knew whose idea that was. You would almost think that she knew them personally, or at least there would be autographs.

           One of the waitresses, when she heard the name of the company that I worked for, directed me to the combined two tables where my colleagues were sitting. According to the waitress they always sat there, and that her brother put the tables together before they arrived. I was greeted somewhat hesitantly by my colleagues, but still, one of the guys pulled out a chair for me.

           The place wasn’t big on menu by how we would come to measure such things in later years. Coffee was black, or how much sugar or milk or cream did you want in it. You could have toast, bagels and ‘we now have croissants’ with a limited number of toppings, and four different kinds of sandwiches.  There was one soup for the day. I reckoned that it was the social atmosphere that kept people coming back. The staff treated the customers like family, even newcomers like me. 

 After a few other lunches at City Lights, I would discover that two of my ‘sophisticated colleagues’ as I would refer to them when I talked to my parents, were from small towns too, and had felt lost for the first while when they began working with the company.

           This was the beginning of my adaptation to work and life and work in the big town. No more packed lunches – I wasn’t a child still in school. It was City Lights every day for lunch. And I began to make friends with my colleagues, those born and raised in a small town, and some of those who had been city boys and girls all their lives.

           The owner of City Lights, Madam Martha as we all called her, had a daughter, Julie, who worked there as a waitress.  She was the one who had directed me to sit with my colleagues on the first Friday. The third time that I went there, we caught each other looking at the left hand, specifically the wedding finger, of the other. There was a short, uncomfortable but still shared laugh.  Then she asked me if I liked any of the movies now playing in the theatres. I mentioned the only one that I knew about. Then there was a silence, with her first staring at me and then looking away. I was unaccustomed to the sophisticated ways and means of city girls, but I finally picked up on the hint. I asked her out clumsily – Are you busy tonight? She said ‘not at all, how about you?   Thinks moved quickly from there. After a couple of months of movies, music, and romance at her apartment, I made the big step of taking her to see my parents. While I knew that my mother could be quite critical in this department, she told me soon after meeting Julie that “You have picked a winner there son. Why don’t you marry her?”

2018

I have been working here for 40 years now, and have worked my up to being the CEO. Julie and I got married and found the ideal residence in a condo not far from City Lights. We had two kids, who have now moved away to create their own city life. Julie now works at City Lights part-time while one of her brothers has taken over as manager. I am a regular there. The menu has changed considerably – three different varieties of lattes, and even more modern and unexplainable, at least to me, avocado toast.  Whoever thought that one up? But the cozy atmosphere of the place has not changed, neither did the now slightly faded, but never dusty pictures on the wall. A much older, but still fairly energetic Martha comes in twice a week to dust the pictures and to talk to the customers.

The Newcomers

Now there have been three young new hires within the last month, all of whom are the children of immigrants, a sign of the times.  All of them are involved in IT.  They are competent enough in the job, but even after several weeks they have not fit in with the others. I have heard several people calling them ‘unfriendly’ or ‘aloof’, ‘like all of their kind’. The fact that they are in IT and are not part of the gregarious sales crowd has also led to some estrangement from the others. I had found it always easy to believe that IT people are talking down to me. It seems to be a general feeling that many get, certainly those of my age.

I had to do something about it, but not be seen to be doing so. I didn’t want the new people to be called ‘boss’s pets’. I didn’t want to ‘take someone aside to have a little talk’. In that path lay potential resentment. And I didn’t want to take the new hires there myself, as that was another road to lack of general acceptance.

I came up with a solution. I had my secretary give each one of them a package of gift coupons for City Lights. She was to tell them that she had forgotten to give the coupons to them earlier.  She was then to give them a story as well as the coupons. It was to go something like this, “I think that place was the secret of the boss’s success. When he was first here (my secretary has a year’s seniority on me) he felt isolated from the rest of us because he was a small town boy, and the rest of us were city folks. Once he went to City Lights he was accepted. He even married one of the waitresses.’ All of the new hires are single.

My plan worked. The next Friday they went to City Lights. The waitress (my wife) sat them down at a table beside the one where the other employees of our company had gathered. Julie asked them whether they wanted their tables combined. The ‘yes’ that she heard was rather quiet, but she started moving the new hires’ table anyway, with help from both sides. One of the regulars asked his new colleagues whether they knew who the guys in the pictures were. With the expected answer ‘no’, an explanation was forthcoming, complete with a mandatory “Thank you very much”, with a raising of the collar of the jacket of the questioner. This was followed by a James Dean sneer that had to be explained by pointing to the appropriate pictures. The rest, as they say, is history.  And the present and the future.