Minority Report

This evening I ventured out into the St. Patrick’s Day-saturated world – but not to carouse so much as to get a little culture.

There was a choral concert being put on, and I had gotten the heads-up about it from my friend Yuh-Rong, one of the folks who sings in my church choir. “You are cordially invited to my Chinese singing group’s annual concert,” she eMailed me awhile back; and as she does appear to be of Chinese descent, I suppose it made sense! It struck me as a good thing to go listen to – because it’s good to go support the people I work with or sing with (or both), and because I can always stand to acquire a little culture. And, in my case, because I really enjoy the occasions where I can sit and listen, while someone else takes care of the conducting or playing or organizing or whatever. I can function in the spotlight; I can lead an ensemble; but I’m not addicted to it. (It’s sometimes more of a challenge to mute my error-detection and -correction, music-teacher self and just listen for enjoyment, but that’s an occupational hazard and a tale for another day.)

So I spent a good portion of the evening listening to the Greater Boston Philharmonia Singers, which is an ensemble of 19 singers, few of whom are probably conservatory-trained (which is okay!), all of whom were clearly enjoying what they were doing (also good), and all of whom were happily presenting a repertoire which veered wildly from sacred anthems to Chinese folk melodies to Stephen Foster to African-American spirituals to Gershwin. And all of whom were of Chinese or at least southeast Asian descent.

The audience was large — to the point where in the middle of the second tune, there was some desperately muffled shuffling noises in the back which turned out to be the Singers’ support team frantically setting up more chairs in the back of the room – always a good thing to have more people come to your concerts than you anticipated!  And, as you might expect for a group of fans of a Chinese choir … the audience was very predominantly Chinese. I would judge that I was among the perhaps three or four percent of the room who didn’t look terribly Asian.  (Okay… okay… at all Asian.)

Which got me to thinking – not during the music-making, but during the intermission! … I’m a middle-aged white guy. I grew up in a town that was a bit diverse, but not very. I did attend a university whose student body could look like the United Nations if you walked past the graduate research building but often looked a hell of a lot more white than “ethnic”. And the towns in which I student-taught, and now teach, and do my church-music-making, are each, well, not overly diverse.

About fourteen years ago, I worked in Boston as one of the instructors for a summer band program for Boston high school students, sponsored by the Boston Police Department. The Crosstown Band consisted of about thirty high school kids from the city: two were white, one was Asian, two were Hispanic, and the rest were African-American. It was the first time I’d gotten to spend extended time as the only white guy in the room.

I was, in actual fact, a minority.

And when the three white guys who were the instructional staff chanced to venture across the street from the school where we held daily rehearsals, and grab a bite to eat … it was really obvious. We were in the minority, all right. We certainly didn’t have to imagine that people were taking a good hard look at us.

The band kids played well, performed successfully in front of a few important audiences, and were really fun to work with, but it was a worthwhile thing to do, just for that experience.

And again, tonight, I sat with a few other folks from my church, doing “silent cheers” for Yuh-Rong … and kinda sticking out as the only people in the room who weren’t part of the majority. I don’t think people were staring us down, giving us suspicious looks, or anything like that. We came to their concert; yay.

But there are people in the world – lots of people – average everyday people, but also lots of decision- and policy- and law-making people … who would really benefit, I think, from experiencing what it’s like to not be in the majority. It’s a useful perspective. It would inform some of the decisions, policies and laws that are proposed and made and implemented, a bit better, I think. It might keep certain decisions, policies and laws from being made in the first place. Whether it’s average everyday people, or people who happen to be selectmen, or mayors, or Congressmen and -women, or CEOs … we all could do with an experience every now and again that perhaps might enable a little empathy.

It’s worth it to know what it feels like to be in the minority.

“It’s Not the Years, It’s the Mileage”, Redux

The day after New Year’s, in 2004, I went to visit my sister and brother-in-law, driving through central Massachusetts on a wintry day. The snow squalls sweeping through the area were (to this seasoned New Englander’s eye) not enough to get overly worked up about, certainly nothing to keep one from having a Grand Day Out.

I took a turn that caused me to head for the church where I’m a church musician, instead of to my sister’s house. “Sheee!” I thought, “I really am on autopilot.” I had travelled far enough after making that turn that it wouldn’t have been worth turning around and taking the proper turn; I just kept going, knowing I could pick up another road further on, and get to the house from another angle.

As I topped a rise, I noted that the snowflakes were getting a bit less fluffy, about which I was perfectly happy. Nonetheless, I continued at a quite conservative clip, probably only about 25 miles an hour. Seemed wise. Coming down the other side of the little hill, I noted that a pickup truck traveling in the other direction had hit a slightly-slick patch of road, slipped, and was coming toward me. It corrected and swerved away from the center line … then corrected again and clearly was not going to be able to avoid hitting my little car and me.

In the next two seconds, in slow motion, I said several words that would have been inappropriate at my church gig; wondered if I could steer clear of the pickup truck; noted that the truck was not actually that large and might not exactly destroy my car; wondered if the fact that the truck also was doing only about 25 miles an hour or so might have some mitigating effect on the event that was clearly inevitable–

 

BANG.

 

“Ah, crud.”

Everything was blurry. Shortly I figured out that this was because my glasses were on the floor next to the brake. Still intact, happily, but that demonstrated to me just how hard a hit “25 mph to dead stop in half a second” really is. I put my glasses on and looked around.

My seatbelt was still engaged; so it had worked. My head had not tried to interfere with the windshield, so that was good. No cars had rear-ended me, or the truck, so no more wreckage than necessary. I could still utter both adverbs and gentle expletives, so my brain was still working. I was suspicious of the fact that I felt perfectly lucid – wasn’t it true that when you go into shock, you don’t feel pain? I hadn’t felt pain from the beginning. Good or bad?

I opened the car door and stood up. Good.

The driver of the truck got out of the truck, stood up, and did not attempt to accuse me of anything – rather, asked if I was OK. Good, good, and good so far.

While other drivers stopped and called for ambulances and such, she and I compared insurance information. Good (that I could find my insurance information at all!).

A police cruiser appeared, followed by an ambulance. The EMT hopped out, came over and asked the necessary questions, and asked if either of us wanted to be taken to a hospital. I don’t remember what the Lady Of The Truck said – whether she accepted the offer or not (although, to kill the suspense right away, I never heard from her again, so I assume that everything ended as well as it could have). I grasped each of my limbs in succession, shrugged and said to the EMT, “nope, everything’s accounted for!” and he looked at me like I might in fact be a loon, or at least need that lift to some version of the ER. But I convinced him and everyone standing around that I was fine. But I probably wasn’t going to be driving away.

 

My little green 1992 Saturn four-door and the (Nissan? Subaru?) pickup truck had made their mutual acquaintance by hitting left-front-corner to left-front-corner. Bent metal everywhere; little bits of headlight cover shining prettily in the snowy light; and my Saturn’s frame was slightly but distinctly bent. My image of a totaled car previously had been “folded, spindled and mutilated, and barely recognizable as a car”. Now it was more like, “because the left front wheel doesn’t point exactly the same way as the right front wheel anymore, no chance of driving away in it.”

A closer examination of the Saturn revealed that the thing was constructed in such a way that it genuinely saved my life. If the truck had continued any further than the Saturn’s frame had allowed it to, items below my knees would have been crushed; driving a car any less sturdily-built, our hero’s story might have concluded several chapters early (“is the driver–? Oh never mind.”).

Poor thing. I had really liked that car. Looked great, ran great, only had the usual Saturn brake / front-end suspension issues. Now it had a big ol’ front-end issue.

I should have taken a picture of the thing and brought it to my Saturn dealership and said, “either post this on your bulletin board with a caption reading ‘And Yet, Driver Alive’ … or make a TV commercial about me!”

Instead, I went to the dealership and asked to buy another of their cars. I figured, if one could save my life, perhaps another could as well. They were happy to sell me one. The thing had a curious name: the Ion 2. But rather than buying a charged particle, I was buying a grey four-door car with a rather surprisingly large trunk, and more bells and whistles than I realized any car even had … well, I’d bought the ’92 Saturn used in about 1997, and for the ensuing seven years, tracking car manufacturers’ bell-and-whistle improvements hadn’t been my highest priority.

And the thing was new. All my previous cars had been previously-owned. Never thought I’d buy an utterly new car, but the financing deal was good enough to make this positively sensible. It, too, looked great, ran great, and had the usual Saturn brake / front-end suspension issues. As I’ve chronicled, I don’t mind forwarding my worthy mechanic a few bucks every so often – he’s got a family to feed, after all. On top of all that, the car proved to be able to achieve 36 miles to the gallon; so, short of buying a hybrid car, I was doing the best I could for our fragile environment, and for my wallet to boot.

So, the Saturn has gone back and forth from home to school, home to church gig, central Massachusetts to western Massachusetts, Massachusetts to New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and DC and Virginia … carrying bass drums and bicycles … taking snowy Worcester hills with admirable gallantry, driving in summer heat-wave conditions unflinchingly … and never leaving me standing next to it on the side of the road clutching a cellphone and trading sad looks with oncoming traffic.

I’d like to hope I’m not jinxing it by saying this, but … holy heck. The thing runs. And runs. American-made, no less. And this afternoon, as I drove home from a regular ol’ school day, the odometer (my first-ever digital odometer!) went from 199999 to …

 

200000.

 

Heck of a car.  And sadly, thanks to the discontinuation of the Saturn brand, it’s also a collector’s item. Ah well. Only 38,000 more miles and I’ll have made it to the moon.

Word of Mouth

In the spirit of “don’t wait until it’s too late, to say what you think of someone” … particularly when it’s something nice! … I now offer up a brief testimonial for a local merchant.

Some years ago, as I was making the late-afternoon commute from my workplace in the Blackstone Valley to my home near Boston College [yes, I know it was a long commute], I stopped at a supermarket to grab some mobile supper, and when I came out of the store and tried to start my Saturn, it wouldn’t start. I turned the key and heard a “click” and absolutely nothing else. It was dark, and I was many miles from home with a car that was acting only as a gigantic paperweight.

Happily, luckily, across the street was a gas station with service bays, and it was open. I asked them if they could help with a dead battery or whatever it was. They could. The gentleman somehow produced a tow truck and got my car across the street, and did something (which escapes me) to fix the problem (the exact details of which also escape me). He allowed me to go home that night – and not have to, oh, I don’t know, spend the night in the produce section of Shaw’s, maybe.

Since then, I’ve taken my car to him when it needs a-fixin’. Currently I live in Worcester, MA, and this gentleman’s automotive service business is located in Milford, MA. Via a pair of major highways, that’s a 45-minute drive if the traffic behaves. Neither my first Saturn nor my current one have broken down since that night, so all my repairs have been of the sorts that have allowed me to bring my car to this gentleman to have it worked on.

His name is Ray Geara, and he used to run Milford Getty, until something happened and now the BP logo is out front. But it was, is, and will be, just Ray’s place.

When you visit Ray’s service station, many times you can’t find him. He’s there, okay; he’s just moving very very very fast. He’s running around – shuffling cars about – checking in with his talented staff of mechanics – checking in with newly-arrived customers, customers waiting for cars, customers who call his mobile phone … and he is always, without fail, the consummate customer service professional. Everyone he talks to, he treats as if their car is the most important one in the lot.

When I visit Ray, even if I arrive unannounced, nine times out of ten he will immediately find a way to clear a service bay and perform my oil change, inspection, or whatever other little tiny thing I need done. No waiting. Right in. Now. And that tenth time, he will apologize profusely for not being able to (and usually the reason is because he has a zillion cars in the lot, and I’ll look at him and say, “Ray, you’re a busy man”). He often says to me, “you come so far, from Worcester, you’re so good to do that, of course I take care of you.” I often reply, “I come this distance because you do great work, man.” And our Mutual Admiration Society skit spirals out of control. “You’re awesome.” “No, you’re awesome!” –Well, we’ve never actually performed that dialogue, but we sometimes get close.

And any time I’ve been sitting in Ray’s waiting room, while his folks are working on my car, and there’s someone else sitting there for the same reason, inevitably we get into a conversation that starts out, “Ray’s great, isn’t he?”

When I was growing up, my family took our cars to a pair of mechanics in town who knew our whole family by name; it wasn’t the era where guys in spiffy uniforms came charging out of the gas station, wearing white gloves and checking your oil, wiping your windshield and making conversation while they filled your tank … but that little routine was still a relatively recent memory.

But for most of the first years of my driving life, I got car repairs done at dealerships. Dealers’ maintenance people have two jobs: to fix things that go wrong, and to find other things to fix, usually fixing them first and telling their customers about it afterward. “Oh by the way, we found this and this and this and this. It’s all explained on the bill.” Which is of course, by that time, humongous.

By contrast, Ray and his people do great work; they do what you need done; and if they find something else that needs fixing, they talk about it as if it needs doing in order for your car to run safely, and never give a sense that they’re suggesting this because they need the extra dough. They don’t, as the Car Talk guys would say, appear to have boat payments to take care of.

In the past year or so, I’ve had a number of contractors and other professionals come to my house and perform work (chimney; roof work; removal of deceased animals; extermination of live insects; etc.). If I like their work, I make sure to recommend them to other people. My exterminator came highly recommended by a friend of mine. In short, I think word-of-mouth business is the best sort. It beats closing your eyes and landing your finger on a random spot on a Yellow Page.

So this is all a giant word-of-mouth reference. If you live anywhere near Milford, MA, and you need a car mechanic whom you can trust, Ray Geara’s your guy. He’s on Prospect Street (Route 140) in Milford, just down the street from the Milford Regional Medical Center (corner of Routes 140 and 16).

Across from the Shaw’s supermarket.