Excellent women

I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so-called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them.

--Philip Larkin on Barbara Pym

I met Val while doing time as a customer service representative at a chain of carpet stores in northern New Jersey. She was one of those women who could probably have taught Eisenhower a thing or two about organizing the Normandy invasion. In other words, she was competent, not just at her job, but at life.

In the hideousness that is the customer service office of a not-very-reliable carpet company, Val was an island of sanity, if not tranquility. When Mrs. So and So of Glen Cove had stayed at home for three days waiting for carpet that never came, Val would marshall the guys at the warehouse, the truck drivers and the carpet installers to see that Mrs. So and So had her carpet delivered and installed the next day. She would do this without either breaking a sweat or losing her temper. She could easily have run the department--in truth she could easily have run the whole company--and had been asked, several times, by management to do so.

But Val wasn't interested. She had organized her life around her priorities, in this case her family, and had negotiated her position so that she took off work when her children were home during the school year and she only worked part-time during the summers. Her children were both talented musicians: One played the bassoon; the other the trumpet. She didn't brag about her children, not more than any other mother at least, and she wasn't a martyr to motherhood. Rather, she enjoyed their company and she enjoyed being a mother.

Her younger son suffered from a rare, congenital defect that would, eventually, necessitate the need of a kidney transplant. She didn't complain about this. It was just a fact, something to be dealt with.

Val and her husband, who was head of the company's IT department, had a plan. When the kids graduated high school, they were going to open up their own business--buy a franchise perhaps, I forget the details--and move to Florida. They were betting that their house in a pricey Bergen County, NJ suburb would bankroll them, along with whatever they'd managed to save over the years. I've no doubt that they bet correctly.

Did Val ever suffer an "autumnal" pang that life had passed her by. No doubt she did. Likely she just laughed it off and got on with living.