Lockers

I spent part of a summer working as a custodian at my daughter’s high school. It was not my favorite job ever, but it had its moments, and it was a little income, which helped put food on the table. I worked with some interesting folks: people for whom this job was a career, not just a way station, as it was for me. Some of them lacked work ethic, it’s true, but most of them were pretty good at what they did. They had occasional disdain for the school’s privileged and pampered students, but they also honestly loved them and wanted to do a good job for the district.

Cleaning a high school during the summer is done at a slower pace and offers a lot of opportunity to work with others. The team varies a little from day to day, as does our work, but for the most part we spend our time together cleaning classrooms. We fall into a rhythm: some prefer dusting lights and replacing bulbs, while others wipe down the walls, scrub the sinks, or scrape gum from every possible surface. I often choose to clean the windows. As a team we clean the desks and move them into the halls, and after the carpets are cleaned we move everything back in. There is enough variety and work to keep it fairly interesting.

Another big job summer for unskilled labor like myself is cleaning lockers. This is really a horrible job; everyone hates it. The head custodian grins a little when he gives me the assignment. Perhaps it is intended as a test of my character.

I work with Red, a career custodian and confirmed slacker. He’s kind of an institution at the high school, having worked there for over a decade. Many years ago Red served in the Navy, a fact that creeps into virtually every conversation. Perennially single, Red spends a chunk of each weekend helping to maintain his mother’s home. He’s mostly sweet and a little awkward. With him as my partner, I know that there will be little opportunity for meaningful conversation.

We gather our supplies and meander to the first hallway. Red picks a side, I pick a side, and we begin. My locker is number 1700, and they go up from there, so it occurs to me that there are several thousand lockers in the building. It’s overwhelming to imagine cleaning them all. I try not to think about it.

I open the locker and look for the remains of the life that had inhabited it for the past nine months. There are scraps of tape where photos had been positioned, and scraps of paper from homework or missives from friends. The scraps I toss on the floor, and I take my blade to the tape. Rags and cleaning products finish the job, and I’m off to locker 1701.

I move slowly down my side of the hall, meticulous in my work. In the back of my mind, it occurs to me that any one of these might belong to my daughter or one of her friends, and I want to make sure that their lockers are perfect. I find graffiti and use a special spray to clean it up. The spray smells horrible and is toxic—banned in California, in fact—so I try to use it sparingly. After I’ve used it on a few lockers I start to get light-headed, so I try to avoid sticking my head into the lockers to clean them, but I still develop a headache. It’s slow going, and Red is already far ahead on his side of the hall. I try to hurry, but the image of the students—my daughter and her peers—keeps coming to mind, and I want this little home of theirs to be in good shape when they come back in the fall.

To give meaning to the mind-numbing monotony of the task, I begin to meditate on the lockers as I clean them. I pray for the students who used it in the past, and I pray for the students who will inhabit it in the future. I pray that they will be successful in school and in the future, that they will be kind, that they will be happy. I pray for their health and for the paths they are on.

Red finishes his side of the hall well before I do and wanders off to find something else to do. I resist the temptation to touch up his lockers, mostly because I still have plenty left on my side of the hall.

When some people hear that I’m a custodian, they say that sometimes that sounds good to them: to have a mindless job with no stress. But it’s not low stress for me. The pay is low but expectation is still surprisingly high. The long-timers don’t worry too much about this, but I do. I’m genetically designed to want to do a good job, even for minimum wage.

The other thing is, if you’re a thinking person, you don’t stop thinking just because the job doesn’t require it. My head never shuts off while I’m working; I am always thinking, but without a way of expressing my thoughts, I am endlessly frustrated. Happy people are those who are able to use their talents, and while I am a good cleaner, it’s not my only skill.

So I add another prayer as I clean: I pray that the kids who use these lockers will not have to work as custodians, or in any other job that doesn’t make them happy. Of course, not everyone spends his or her entire career in the perfect job. So I pray that, if they do find themselves in such a job, that they can find something meaningful in the work. Finding a job you love is a special blessing. But if that doesn’t work out, it’s good to find the blessing in the job you have.