kickin' it

its 10:17 pm on thursday. at this hour on this day 2 years ago i was a janitor on the graveyard shift and in the middle of mopping a long tile hallway in a large southern baptist church. the hall was one of many, all of them made up of non-descript light grey 12 inch squares that seemed to stretch out one after the other for miles and miles. and for each mile of tile there were hundreds of sunday school rooms, each in need of my care.

i would enter any of the rooms and find the same situation, each of them disheveled and telling a silent story of what had gone on earlier. the old brown metal fold-up chairs would be out of formal arrangement and twisted into sporatic clumps of assymetrical compositions. my perfect vacuum tracks would be erased with footsteps, and the chalk boards would be marked up with scripture verses and words like "sanctification" and "propitiation" and "jesus." (here's a hint...whenever you find yourself in a bible study and faced with a difficult question, just answer with "jesus" and 9 times out of 10 you'll come out a-ok.) the wastebaskets would be overflowing with coffee cups and doughnut scraps or fried chicken bones and empty jugs of sweet iced tea. (another hint: any prayer meeting or bible study cant, nor shouldnt, properly start without doughnuts and coffee or conclude without fried chicken and sweet tea. there is a commandment for it written somewhere in the book of leviticus, i think.) sometimes i would get lucky and find some leftovers. during the clean up process i would almost always pick up someone's forgotten study notes. i would even find bibles. you should see the pile of bibles we had in the lost and found. there sure are a lot of people not doing there daily reading...

but anyway, back to my janitorial duties- i could pick up 5 folding chairs at a time, 6 on a good day, and i had all of the room furniture arrangements memorized. 12 chairs in a semi circle for room 102, 3 straight rows of 9 chairs set at right angles in room 54, 3 round tables with 6 chairs at each table in room 319. after arranging furniture i might vacuum, but only if it was absolutely necessary. i hated vacuuming. but my feeling for mopping floors was different. i kind of enjoyed mopping floors. in fact, there is something zen about mopping a floor and then buffing it to a bright shine. im really not sure whats zen about it, mind you. im not even sure what "zen" actually means, but i like telling people that i found "zen" in janitorial work. it makes me sound interesting and multi-dimensional and sensitive.

as a janitor specializing in floor maintenance my sworn enemy was the ever present scuff mark. you know them- the black marks in floors created by the shoes of a lazy walker that refuses to properly pick up their feet while shuffling along. in the scuff marks i could seize the many secrets held in a person's steps, reading the short black dots and long lines like morse code.

scuff marks make a clean floor look dirty, and on some nights i would just walk down a hall and kick them out with my shoe instead of mopping the entire floor. my battles with the scuff marks werent limited to the battlefields inside the church but extended outside the walls of fort jesus. i waged war on the scuffs on many fronts- at the grocery store and at the k-mart, enacting a comprehensive compulsion to rid the world of selacious stepping studders.

and today, whilst walking down a long corridor in an ancient building that once housed the department of war, my ongoing battle was loosened from a temporary truce, and i kicked a few scuffs out of the thick marble floor. a passer-by in an overpriced suit scoffed at me, but i dont care. what he doesnt know is that the path to enlightenment isnt going to be found in making marks while wearing italian loafers. instead, it can be found in the simplest of jobs, nobly kicking out the world's footsteps before the next group comes along.