Grace, part 1

I have a friend at work, I'll call him Jamey, not short for James, just Jamey.

He is an original.

He seems to the outside observer to be slightly off. Actually, he just doesn't care what you think, and he is willing to be "ridiculous" in order to make you smile, make a point, or just entertain himself. He delights in your belief that he is ridiculous; and his very being challenges you to be some more authentic part of yourself that is associated with whimsy or joy or both.

Jamey loves to talk to strangers; rather, he loves to make strangers his friends. He knows the name of every person we pass in the halls at work from the maintenance crew to the vice presidents. Often, he knows the name of their family members and inquires about their latest trouble or triumph.

There is no one I have seen that doesn't meet Jamey with the greatest smile, head tilt or shoulder drop - the sure sign that someone has really seen you. He never addresses someone without truly wanting to make a connection.

He is the kind of person you meet and instantly know you have found one of your tribe.

But from the outside, we might look like the most unlikely of friends.

Over the year plus that I have known him, though, I have learned to see that he shows that whimsical side in a carefully choreographed, even though it may seem haphazard, way. He is not open and vulnerable with just anyone.

I told you, he is one of my tribe.

Jamey seldom rests, either sleeping or sitting still. He is almost always exhausted and subsisting on daily runs and breakfast biscuits from the same (unnamed here) fast food restaurant. I imagine him ordering at the drive-through, but also wonder if he doesn't know the name of all the workers and their family members, too.

You might also think he was textbook manic/depressive.

If you peel back the layers, though, there is more evidence for a soul struggling with dark and light than a brain misfiring despite its best attempts at "normal."

Jamey loves music, especially of the stringed variety, preferably guitar. He makes them. And then he gifts them. They are art through and through.

He likes to give his gifts as anonymously as possible. I rationalize that it is because he wants to remove his presence from the gift. He wants the gift to be pure gift, not generosity, but purity of freedom. That's not quite right, but I need more words for gift than I can recall at the moment.

If you probed Jamey, and he were feeling particularly open and willing to be vulnerable, he would admit that he gifts the guitars in a spiritual way; that he thinks the guitar is finding its way to the soul that needs it, for whatever reason. I might say the guitar is Jamey's spirit animal; and I would say that his guitars are alive.

Jamey often speaks through music in his life outside of work. And Jamey's work outside of business hours is his life. He is that extremely rare person who is inordinately good at his work, yet that work does not dominate his mind or soul.

Our work is not creative work, though Jamey's title is "author" - an apt title though the work he does is anything but cathartically creative. It might be covertly creative as he tries to weave bureaucratic language into as authentic a portrait of a people as possible. But it is relentlessly bureaucratic, the definition of boring. So, Jamey build guitars, breathes life into inanimate pieces of wood, and sometimes plastic, weaves strings into these newly animated appendages and then hands that life/spirit to someone who needs it.

In his other work, the work outside of work hours and not in our building, he ministers to the dying.

I drew the picture of the work work and the guitar work so you could see the contrast - and begin to capture the meaning of giving life in all aspects of Jamey's toiling.

Others have said to me that Jamey's sometimes depressive mood comes from his work with the dying. They say it in an accusatory tone, one that makes you see that they think he brings it on himself.

I think it is just another generous, humble life giving act that is at the base of his being.

These acts, done without need for recognition or recompense, bestow on us that ineffable nourishment I will call here Grace.