Under the Birch Tree

by Nancy Chadwick

  What just happened? I asked myself.

  And then I answered my own question: I got what I wanted.

  It was late fall, and the office was busy with agency work and holiday planning. The festive mood enhanced a strong work ethic among the employees.

  By the following spring, the agency was cutting back on staff. Client account spending was down, and the agency had lost a pitch to a multimillion-dollar account. The summer months dragged with low morale and anticipation of more cuts, perhaps the agency being sold.

  The agency let me go in 1989 during one of their cuts. My thick skin was getting thicker, a painful but necessary process of surviving in the agency business and, as I’ve come to learn, the business of life. I learned how difficult it was for a small ad agency to survive. I was grateful for and valued the eighteen months I worked there.

  I didn’t make it to my birthday without drama. I was alone and unemployed on my special day, again, and it was like any other day.

  three strikes, I’m out

  December. Unemployment insurance would run out in February. I sent out a few Christmas cards and took a part-time job at Marshall Field’s department store in Water Tower to meet friendly people, keep busy, and be distracted. I enjoyed selling sweaters and casual wear to ladies with too much money and time and helping men put together an outfit for their significant other. I had patience for those who couldn’t decide if the blue or white sweater looked best with the black slacks and for those seniors who needed to take things a little more slowly. I noted how this working opportunity came at the right time, when I found that helping others and being productive brought calm to my anxiety and lightness to my depression.

  I stayed in contact with a recruitment agency and they to me. Our persistence paid off one February morning, and I smiled, looking up at bright skies as I walked briskly to the bus stop to escape cold winds. I was on my way home after accepting a position at a small PR agency. My eyes filled with tears because I’d gotten a job with only one week left on my unemployment insurance. God had never let anything bad happen to me, and he still didn’t. But then, answering phones and handling administration and other tasks for an eight-person, woman-owned firm turned mundane in a matter of weeks. I continued to wait for a return phone call from an advertising agency I had been pursuing.

  I missed advertising. I went to the Gold Star Sardine Bar on Lake Shore Drive after work one day for immediate relief of my anxiety by slipping back into a dynamic world where I was connected to a social extension of the ad agency. All three male partners of the last agency I had worked for were sitting along the bar.

  They didn’t hesitate to include me in that half circle.

  “Do you remember the afternoons here, drinking Taittinger, adding to Jan’s bill?” Alan asked. I remembered he had a commanding voice when he presented media strategies to clients. He was as confident in his abilities as he was in securing client signatures. We elbowed each other and nodded as laughter erupted, recalling when we took the afternoon off—or was it that we’d had enough of work for one day and spent the remaining hours in an intimate, dark piano bar drinking champagne? I needed to be in the present moment of the agency, to remind me of reciprocated attention and validation. I wanted back into a dynamic world where it defined me and where I was connected. I wanted home.

  Spring bloomed with anticipation of the coming months. The phone call I had been waiting for finally came. My spirit succumbed to the belief that if things were meant to be, they would happen. My confidence leapt when I was liked enough for this advertising agency to hire me. However, in a matter of weeks, my insecurities surfaced, and once again I questioned whether I was proving myself adequately. After a few months, I was back at the same position I couldn’t seem to get away from, handling administrative details on accounts, relying on direction from my account manager. Another low-level job. I was discouraged to think I couldn’t break that ceiling my head continued to bump against as I tried to move up the ladder. Is this it? Is this all there is? I thought that working in account management was where I wanted to be. I struggled to get there, but now I don’t want it. It’s not working out.

  I reasoned I had to let go of the weighty baggage I had accumulated from previous unsuccessful jobs in order to move forward. But I was afraid. I couldn’t shake the fear of failing again. There was something about the loneliness of failure that seemed to bowl a strike down the center lane of all my standing pins. I debated in my head if I was going to continue to pursue advertising at another agency or quit the field altogether. After my brain dialogue subsided, I was resigned that advertising was no longer for me.

  Most evenings I did not leave the office before seven at night. Actually, I didn’t dare leave until my boss did. He was tall and skinny and not much older than me. He was also a dad for the first time, and I attributed his anxiety to sleepless nights. Fits of yelling and finger pointing at his staff became the norm as his pale face turned red. He made his work environment stressful and the tension unbearable. One night was different. It was getting late. He called me into his office.

  With his finger pointing at me and my face aglow in red, he shouted, “I’ve asked you several times to put together a spending analysis, and most times I had to wait for it. I don’t understand how it could take someone that long to take information off a floppy disk and put it together with information from a book. Your ineptness is incomprehensible. You’re stupid; you can’t get things done.”

  “What? I … well … first of all, I admit I don’t have a strong computer background, especially when it comes to merging charts and numbers. I couldn’t find the floppy disc, so I had to recreate the information, and some of it wasn’t even there, as I understood it was supposed to be. I didn’t realize this job was in computer number crunching. I thought I was hired as an assistant account executive and not a research analyst. I’ve been working long hours to meet my deadlines … I don’t understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. I need someone who can do this. You’re fired. Leave now.”

  “But, maybe we can work this out. I’m not stupid. I haven’t even had a consistent place to work, a desk … you never knew where to put me. I didn’t get this far being …”

  “Just leave, out, go.”

  I walked out exhausted, mentally and physically. I picked up my two Marshall Field’s shopping bags filled with Field Days shopping specials and left the Merchandise Mart. I got a taxi quickly but then realized it was eight o’clock in the evening. I had done my best. My relief that it was over made me smile about the absurdity of the situation during my cab ride home. Here was this skinny, finger-pointing, hand-waving guy with glasses, getting all worked up, red-faced, angry … at … me. Why should he be so angry?

  I had no tears for yet another firing. First my internal resignation from the business and then termination of my job; it had all worked out. Breaking free of this job and its daily weight of underperforming to my boss’s requirements enabled me to look ahead freely to where I wanted to go.

  I acknowledged what awaited me the following day: unemployment. Oddly, I didn’t care. I’d been through this exercise twice before, which gave me confidence to step into unfamiliar territory again. I was going to be just fine. When I dropped my sense of urgency to get back in the agency world, I let go of my anger, anxiety, and fear, and for inexplicable reasons, I didn’t care about what I was going to do. I didn’t know where I was going to be, but I was okay with the unknown. I saw it not as something unidentified, but as a new place I would identify with.

  Letting go of my drive for a place in an ad agency was the key to unlocking my wellbeing and realizing it was out of my control. Liberation, as well as a belief that my place was forthcoming, took over my mind, enabling me to start job hunting once again. But I soon realized that my lack of belonging to any person or place was the antithesis of my connected self during my college years, and that I still had no idea where to turn or even what I would do. I continued to find my way,
my place, my home.

  docked

  On one of my mind-clearing walks, I took the opportunity to stroll down a long, unmarked driveway. Curious and always open to new forks in the road, I changed course and entered an unassuming, gravel-pocked drive, a welcoming strip to a boat dock mapped at its end. I took a respite on a thick strip of grass that carpeted a hill running in tandem with the driveway. This was my secret place, hidden, set back from the pedestrian and bike paths. This was undiscovered public grassland, yet it was private open space nestled against a boat dock. My spot was there, ready and waiting for me to sit and to mark my presence.

  My new spot became a constant; it wouldn’t leave me. It teased me with pleasure, and then I would walk away. I embraced its end, when meeting my haven after entering it with hollow feelings and drained spirit. The anchored boats adorned the sidewalk like baubles that soften a straight edge. These weren’t just boats; they were expensive yachts, toys with secluded slips for the rich and exclusive. These cruisers stayed for the summer, and hired help cleaning and fixing them was the only action they saw. On a bright day, the sun’s reflection off their white bodies made them look pristine and shiny sitting atop the shallow water parked between two skinny, sun-bleached wooden planks. The brightness was difficult to look at, however. I wanted the rays to bleed through my eyes and permeate the windows, which were a constant reflection of my inner soul. I wanted to envelop the sun from the top of my head down to the soles of my feet and grant its healing power to pass through my heart and flow outward.

  When I stopped and sat cross-legged on top of the slope, I was free from city noises—screeching kids and adults yelling in frustration in the park behind me as they tried to ignite their barbecues. A fence behind me outlined my isolation and muffled the background noise. While I looked at the yachts and the empty spaces of rippling water, a brush on my back tickled me. I looked over my shoulder and saw small birch trees interspersed to fill a forest of thick-leafed trees. My birch buddies bumped up against their overbearing tree neighbors. I, too, was a tree out of a forest, still able to stand, but needing the rest of my tree family to surround me in support.

  I thought of this special spot as I had thought of my birch buddy in its spot. I would pass it when leaving home and acknowledge it when returning. My spot reminded me that I would always have a place to come back to, to moor and be alone until the time was right again to set sail and be led away. I sat quietly, undisturbed, a part of the backdrop I greeted at the end of my walk—one I often took to shake the pesky loneliness and feel the comfort of birch tree sightings patting me on the back.

  The fall months blowing in reminded me of that October day when I left Burnett. The memories remained on my skin’s surface and were easily awakened. The third round of unemployment was no different from the first. I started to fill a notebook again with appointments, notes, clippings, and correspondence. That was all I had to show for myself. As quickly as I found a small grassy hill tucked at the end of a dock with a view I found soothing, my notebook and my spot became my docking stations. I continued to find my anchoring, my place to be.

  I had been let go three times in six years and spent what felt like half that time being unemployed and looking for a job. My job search in my twenties was my disguise for the many routes I had to take to find my place and the person who would be comfortable in her own skin. I wouldn’t have traded my blemishes for anything else. Tears shed on the outside matched some on the inside, but they always dried up, and I moved on.

  My docking station on the grassy hill allowed me a respite, a temporary place to be tethered while drifting, wandering in lateral directions. But as I moved into my thirties, I would discover that I no longer needed a docking station in the midst of the blossoming opportunities that followed.

  a new vocation

  A call from a headhunter in November of that year was in my response to an ad in the local paper. My game face kicked in, as I had drive and confidence that weren’t negated because of my failure to be in advertising.

  The friendly interviewer, a tall, curvy, middle-aged woman in a navy blue suit, invited me to sit at a round conference table. We were a small duo in a large den-like room with soft plaid carpet and upholstered stuffed seating arranged in conversational circles. She was all smiles with red lips and white button earrings peeking out from a short bob haircut.

  “I wanted to let you know up front that the job is not with an ad agency. In fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with advertising. How are you with that?” the woman asked.

  “Fine. I guess it really depends, taking into consideration my skills and experience,” I said. I had prepared myself with the typical responses I had made many times before when interviewing for an advertising position. Her failure to use any advertising or agency words caused panic, as I was out of my comfort zone.

  “This particular company has an opening for an administrative assistant with potential to move into sales and do some project management, marketing, really an all-around assistant to a manager and sales support staff.”

  “What type of work is it?”

  “It would be working for an international company with a small office here. The department is new, just established, and they need someone who has leadership potential and can do a lot of things and be a team player. Would you be interested in talking with them?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t have anything to lose, and my curiosity was piqued. I admittedly was relieved because I no longer was going to feel pressure to perform and impress an ad agency.

  “The company is Bank of America, and they are just down the street on Adams.

  “Bank of America? An old friend of mine works there. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. I wonder if I’ll see her.”

  Would you have any time now to stop over and meet with the regional manager?”

  “Now? Well, I guess. Sure.” A bank, really? I’m not so sure about this.

  “Okay, and give us a call when you’re done.” I stood and walked to the door. “And, oh, Nancy … you’ve got … a run in your hose … in the back, a long one,” she whispered.

  “Arrgh. Figures. I’ll make a quick stop for a new pair. Things happen.” Normally, something as unexpected as this would have made me an anxious bundle of nerves, because only perfection was acceptable in presentation from head to heels for an interview or for just being in public. I could hear my mother’s expression of mortification in my head. But I didn’t care. My new way of handling an otherwise-upsetting situation was reassuring, and I laughed.

  The regional manager at Bank of America looked young with an aw-shucks expression and a smirk that said he had a secret. His dark, charcoal gray suit complemented his white shirt and striped tie underneath. Banker attire. As he escorted me to his office, I surveyed the floor scattered with would-be coworkers, their heads popping above the tops of the dividers. I smiled as if to tell them I was coming and here was their first look.

  “You’ve got a great résumé with lots of experience. Can you tell me about some of it?”

  “I did behind-the-scenes work on projects and proposals, assisting AEs …”

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Deerfield.”

  I was immediately at ease with him and our conversation. I was someone beyond just a résumé.

  “And went to school at Marquette. That’s in …”

  “Milwaukee.”

  “You have your degree in journalism?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let me tell you what this job is, if I can. I’m not sure if I can, but I’ll do my best …”

  As he went on, his quiet voice and leisurely conversational style lulled me. John was a nice person whom I could never imagine getting mad at anyone, let alone pointing his finger in the rage and illogical speech I was all too familiar with. He also would look more appropriately dressed in old, faded blue jeans hanging loosely from his bony hips and held up by a worn leather belt, maybe with an outstretched T-shirt and wo
rk boots, a little dirt under the fingernails too.

  “There’s someone working here, a friend of mine. Her name is Martha …” I said. Though our contact with each other was sporadic, we always knew where the other was working. “We’ve known each other since kindergarten, went to the same grade school and high school, but parted at college,” I continued.

  “Oh, yes, for heaven’s sake. Her office is … well, come with me.” I was struck by the coincidence. Not only was the possibility of me working for the same company she did, but also in the same office, on the same floor, just a few feet away.

  We walked out of his office down a short corridor to her office to find her absent.

  The job came through before Thanksgiving, and I could not have been more thankful. God never did let anything bad happen to me.

  On my first day, I waved Martha down as she neared my cubicle. I stood up to greet her.

  “I’m working here now! Can you believe it?” I was more excited about seeing an old childhood friend than I was about having a new job, but I quieted down and dampened my animation.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, in a tone that didn’t match mine in enthusiasm. Her flushed cheeks made her look as if she had just come out of a difficult meeting. “Where … are you … who are you working …” she stammered.

  “I’m working for John.”

  “Well, it’s good to see you,” she said.

  “Well, I can see you’re busy and need to get going. We’ll talk later, huh?”

  With a nod of her head, she turned on her heels and was gone, leaving me hopeful that our connection would rekindle later. She was a connection from home, from the beginning, from where I started, where I grew up.

  A few weeks later, Len called to ask to meet at the Red Head bar after work for some wine and jazz. I didn’t question his invitation but thought how I would really enjoy some fruit of the vine, listening to up-tempo jazz, and talking with a valued friend. I also considered this meeting as closure to the loss of the best friend I had depended on through my most difficult times.