The Time Has Come

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.’

— Lewis Carroll

I was thinking you hadn’t heard from me in a year, and that was almost true, although apparently I posted once in May. So, half years. I hope to do better soon, although you’ve heard that before. (If anyone is still out there.)

But I might mean it this time, as I put close to a large chapter of my life: on Thursday evening I signed the contract selling Pat’s Screen Printing, the business I have been in charge of for precisely 27 years.

I was an accidental screen printer and business owner, with no idea of what I was doing in either realm. I had a completely different job, working security at the airport, when I went in one day to help out my friend Pat, who was off to Montrose for gall bladder removal.

Rather than the gallstones they expected to find, the surgical team encountered what Pat called “a swirling mass of schmutz” — the cancer that would take her life a year later. My security job at the small Gunnison airport did not keep me very busy, so I kept going back to lend Pat a hand.

On the very day my boss lost her contract at the airport and I declined to sign with the new company and its anti-facial-hair policy (although the man who told me this had a mustache) and the part where I would need to agree to be available for any shift with 15 minutes’ notice, Pat summoned me to her apartment directly above her screen print studio. “I don’t want you to argue with me,” she said. “I’m putting you on the payroll.”

“I can’t argue with you, Pat,” I replied. “I just lost my job.”

I quickly found a second airport job (maybe that same day) working on the ramp, a job I kept for 16 winter seasons as I launched into running a business I knew almost nothing about. My first hire was my friend Fred, who kept our books and taught math at Western Then State on the side. He suggested, a couple months after Pat died and I was still floundering with skills I barely had, that we go to a trade show. We bought him a plane ticket and I used one of my free ones (from working for American Airlines) and we bought our own meals as we went to Long Beach, Calif., for what turned out to be the largest trade show on the annual schedule.

We took a day-long printing workshop and hit the show floor, going all that way to meet an embroiderer from Delta and to find a vendor we didn’t know existed with a warehouse in Denver. We learned enough to keep going.

I officially assumed ownership in the summer of 2000. I had to move the shop across the street in 2003 after Pat’s son sold her building, landing in a portion of a building owned by Dan and Phyllis Rundell. Without realizing it, I blundered into very fair landlords who weren’t interested in imposing the triple-net leases that bogged down so many other Main Street tenants, and a building situation that allowed me to expand as Mr. Rundell neared retirement age and shrunk his own Leatherworks footprint.

I hired people. Lots of people. Lots of teenagers. High school students, college students. High school graduates. College graduates. A few started out as students and stayed on post-graduation. I hired Jennifer, who came in with her brand-new non-trad WSC art degree to be a printer. Somewhere along the way we both realized we would be better off if I did the printing and she handled the customer service and ordering. She became my first Woman in Charge, her official title on our business cards.

Four years later Jennifer left and Kara, whom I had known since she was 10 and whose mother I had worked with during my bookstore employment prior to airport security, came along. Kara not only became the Woman in Charge, she turned into my business partner.

Last year, after 20 in the screen-print biz, Kara left Pat’s and is now feeding her soul as a travel agent. Leaving my little bookkeeping corner in the way back of the shop where customers rarely saw me, I returned to the customer service that we decided decades ago was best left in the hands of others.

Then, as the looming part of our Winter of Discontent that I meant to tell all of you about but never did, Lynn and I both got sick for most of January. I got better, Lynn got worse, and when I eventually dragged her to urgent care, she spent two minutes in their presence before getting whisked to the emergency room and then straight into a hospital bed for an eight-day stay with a diagnosis of influenza A, pneumonia and a staph infection. Twice she was told it was a good thing she came in when she did or it might have been too late.

That was when Sarah, who took over an embroidery business just down the street from me from a man who was retiring, and I started talks about perhaps merging two complementary businesses and her taking over. She is about Kara’s age, 20 years younger than me, hard-working, ambitious and enthusiastic. I think she will be an excellent steward of Pat’s business, which turned 45 this summer.

In the meantime, I have about three weeks to finish clearing out 27 years of — well, let’s be honest, it’s mostly toys and games. A lot more paper than I really needed to save. Mementoes, many of those too.

And then? Well, it’s a whole new world out there.

I don’t envision retirement right away, although I’m thinking part-time, not responsible for other people’s livelihoods sounds like a good plan. But that’s about as far as I’ve gone.

I’ve never planned any of my jobs. I graduated from college thinking that I would get some unspecified, ill-defined job in the Denver area for $15,000 a year, and that I would commute in from Highway 285. What was I thinking?

Instead, I came home to get some things and my mom said they were looking for help at the newspaper. I was there 10 1/2 years, until the day an odious manager purged most of the rest of the staff. One of our stringers came in that very day and announced she had quit her job at the bookstore to concentrate on her writing. In essence, she and I switched jobs.

I loved my bookstore job, which only lasted three years, but one of the owners died and it became a difficult place to work. I landed at the airport, went in to help a sick friend, and here I am, 27 years later, ready to see what turns up next. I’ve done some other things along the way, a little adjunct teaching, a lot of middle-school sports officiating . . . it’s been a interesting path, and for now I’ll just wait to see which way the next fork takes me.

Not probably in the next few weeks — accounts to close, toys to remove, training to commence — but I’m hoping for more time to tell you all what’s going on in my life, highlights like the moose mom and twins that wandered past our deck last month and the rain we’re finally getting after a hot, dry summer.

We’ll see, right?

I’m sure there’s a retirement song out there, but this is what I found instead: