You could say my SAP Month of Service began last week, on Michael’s birthday — but I’ll have to hold this story for a little longer. It’s still unraveling.
Today I was lucky to participate in my first official SAP Month of Service volunteer activity at Coit Tower. It was one of those rare gorgeous warm days in San Francisco — with not a cloud or threat of fog in the sky. Organized by HandsOn Bay Area, we met the sole gardener in charge of the gardens of Telegraph Hill. In his job, Milo continually battles against non-native invasive vegetation. Today we got to help play a tiny role in this fight. We got to revel in the soil of San Francisco; we weeded invasive grasses; we replaced our divets with native grasses.
Below is my silly short compilation video of the day — the long version is 12 minutes and also seems ridiculously long — but what a beautiful day it was. How lucky we are to be able to serve our community in this way; how fortunate that I work for a good community citizen. Thanks SAP; thanks HandsOn Bay Area; thank you Milo!
In the fight for LGBT equality we are often told that voters have already — several times in fact — disapproved of this concept, and presumably we should therefore just give up and yield “to the will of the people,” or certainly at least shut up about it already. While I fundamentally disagree with this conclusion (not to mention with the idea of silencing a minority according to majority will), here is one small and powerful element of truth: To win votes, if people don’t know you, sometimes you need to go door-to-door.
While it may seem unfair to treat matters of civil rights like regional sales campaigns, I think it’s true that the heart of lasting and meaningful social change is in the profundity of the human transaction, person-to-person, in ordinary, daily life. In fact, hard-working folks such as those at EQCA have been redoubling just such a “Sinead’s Hand-like” door-to-door effort at gaining acceptance ever since Prop 8 passed. And of course few know about the importance of going door-to-door as well as the Mormon Church.
During the past few weeks at work I’ve been thinking a lot about the “door-to-door” element of diversity. My company (a giant global enterprise software company), has an annual celebration of Diversity Days during which it reaffirms the commitment that the key to success is in embracing the value of the rich diversity of its workforce. One of the featured talks during this year’s Diversity Days was about people working with disabilities. It was good to get a look at this form of diversity in our workforce, often only all-too-invisible in my experience. There is such unique “explosion of value” in any particular form of “disability” or diversity, as presenter Gary Karp cited, for example, with IBM “master of invention” (and deaf person) Dr. Dimitri Kanevsky.
The 2002 movie Door to Door about American salesman Bill Porter brought the humanness of the sales and disability diversity transaction to light: “He tries everything and even goes door-to-door:”
Though I’ve never really liked the concept of “salesman” and probably would be more likely to slam doors in his face, from the early days of the door-to-door salesman humans have engineered ways to make the seemingly heartless financial transaction seem more human. I love this example of Bill Porter because it shows how elements of acceptance and tolerance also come down to the great sales job.
In an age where we transact more and more online, this notion of going door-to-door seems at the very least, at first glance, ironic. I would venture to guess that many of us prefer shopping online not only because we can find things more easily from around the world, but exactly because we feel socially inept, and maybe it’s Scary to Actually Meet Real People.
But this is the very thing that makes all the difference. Not so long ago a man from a place called SaveEnergy Company visited our house and chatted with us about our family and our lives and learned what was important to us. It was a low-stress visit, hardly what seemed like a sales call, and we were not intending to contract for new windows that day, yet by the end of the day — of course you know how this story ends — we had contracted for the new windows.
In this case, money seemed to change hands among friends, at a friendlier, less lonely, human occasion. Were we tricked into transaction feeling like we were acting socially rather than financially? Does it matter if in the end the windows – and the experience – were good? Is it possible that many people choose online transactions specifically because they are afraid of feeling “tricked” to be human in exactly this way?
Nowadays we Yelp and Facebook and Twitter to find out what our peers and community think about local vendors and beyond and we regularly connect with friends we know to vet a business before we go. This is of course not new — it simply replicates the in-person experience of door-to-door salesmen or earlier bartering communities online.
Recently I did just this for a major purchase decision — a new (used) car with the help of car broker Bay Area Hand Picked Cars. I read the glowing Yelp reviews and transacted with this business, and in the end I had not only a new car but a new perspective. Now I don’t feel like I ever want to consider large sales transactions in any other way (here’s not looking at you, Target). I also feel like we have a friend in Ioanna Stergiades of Bay Area Hand Picked Cars who would go door-to-door for us, should the need ever arise.
The point is that today the online transaction is hardly less human than the in-person transaction, and becoming less and less so every day. The massive “in-the-moment” coexisting, casual status updates that lead to stronger connections, “accidental” business-to-friend conversions, and particularly my pals at my company who follow me on Twitter and then happen to see my live-Tweeting from the courtroom trial against Prop 8 — and then DON’T unfollow me: These are how the keys to humanity are played these days. Far away from the temporary online momentary monetary transactions we’ve come to presume, I submit even these tiny transactions alter us, little by little, every second of every day.
Back at Diversity Days at my company, I could not help comparing battles for LGBT civil rights with the battle for the rights of those with disabilities. The fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of a disability — whereas 20 years later we still can’t pass a similar protection based on sexual orientation (ENDA) — was not lost on me. We may yet learn a lot from the patience and persistence of someone like Bill Porter, the true salesman, whether we interact online or offline.
We may think we go to the Web to avoid people, but we don’t. Every transaction we make, door-to-door, click-by-click, matters. Be maybe afraid, yet utterly human.
PS: End Don’t Ask Don’t Tell THIS WEEK — find out how.
A memorial, it would seem, is about the memorialized, so my own journey in figuring out how to speak at Louise Doggett’s memorial today should have been secondary to Louise herself. In the end, though, so much was said about this woman by so many different people at this great event, that it struck me how any given person is so much all about who that person touches and how they are touched. In speaking about someone who is gone, we talk about how they live on through the lives of others. Often we talk about things that maybe never actually happened, but in our memories, this was what became real through someone else’s influence. We transformed. Perhaps this is what it means to be a perennial.
My family was greatly touched by the Doggett family; for me those were especially formative years. I was honored to speak and this is some of what struck me at three in the morning about what I wanted to say today:
Let’s go back to the decade of the 1970’s, when the Watson family moved to Sacramento and met and began our long love affair with the Doggett family.
I spent a lot of time in the Doggett house on Crocker Road, and in my memory the house itself was like a garden in the wilderness. To me, it was a huge and magical place where all sorts of wild things grew.
Through the front door, when I listen I can still hear Louise calling “Victoriaaaaa” – kind of like a bird, and I can see inside the house. The piano stood just to the right when you walked in. Music was an undercurrent, like a blood flow through the house, and it seemed to me Victoria was particularly adept at playing anything at all she wanted — like “Beth” or “I’d like to teach the world to sing.”
The master bedroom was to the left, which I strangely remember as being a place for foot baths (this drew much puzzlement from Victoria when I said it, so it’s clearly a piece I invented all on my own). Wendy’s room just beyond was the image of sunny lemon yellow and a matching sunny smile from Wendy. Then there was a back room with a TV that regularly played Monty Python and the Carol Burnett show, complemented by an assortment of medical books that were somehow treated like porn what with the naughty pictures in Greys Anatomy books. This seems to be the scene of many ghost tales during slumber parties in my memory too.
I don’t remember Louise hanging out in the kitchen much. The cooking I best remember in the kitchen was to create Ethel’s Sugar Cookies and Scotte’s boiled, peeled tomatoes. There was a kind of forbidden attic place where the strong and somewhat mysterious Scott had his lair.
But I spent the majority of my time with Victoria, Orangie, and Blackie in Victoria’s sunny front room.
Where was Loiuse? She was in the garden. In the huge back yard. With a hat, a basket, gardening gloves, a flowered mumu, and probably a few various forms of magic potions. And a rabbit named Petunia (or was it a guinea pig?).
Louise gave me one of the most significant relationships in my life in her daughter Victoria, and her tremendous spirit continues through the many untold passages of creativity from person to person to person. Almost like navigating through the wilderness, in a garden that she not so much tamed as tended, she wrought — and she gave — great gifts of life. What more could be said? Thank you Louise.
In the end many people spoke of many things today, and I did stand up and talk about some of the things above. Just now they seem not so much all Louise — but not so much all me. Somehow I feel both introspective and universal.
Moya Watson 