The courage to do what I knowMay 1995 My friend Ed and I traveled to Grand Rapids to watch a performance by a group led by Roscoe Mitchell. It was a bit of a shock that this event was playing in my home town. Roscoe Mitchell is one of the founders of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and one of the pioneers of freely improvised music. One can trace his music right back to the "new thing" era in the 1960's that John Coltrane helped launch. When I left West Michigan in 1981, music like this usually wasn't played in the confines of one's home, let alone in a public performance. Many teenagers earn the derision of their elders for blasting heavy metal. I got it for blasting Steve Reich, George Crumb, and Gyorgy Ligeti. It didn't matter what the music meant. Among many friends and family, it was just bad music. I was pretty interested to see what Roscoe Mitchell was doing in Grand Rapids. Who was going to listen to music like this in that town? The week before the event, I started to hear radio spots about the concert, and things got more and more exciting as the days went by. I've always wanted to learn to play the guitar. I think it's the perfect instrument. If I started playing, I thought it would be cool to try to take lessons from A. Spencer Barefield, a student of Roscoe Mitchell's who lived in nearby Detroit. So I was mighty geeked to learn from the radio that Mr. Barefield was going to be in Mitchell's band in Grand Rapids. Reggie Workman, the first bass player for the John Coltrane Quartet, was also going to be playing. This was shaping up to be quite an event. Ed and I drove up to Grand Rapids on this beautiful Sunday morning in May. The concert was to be held at The Underground Studio, which I had never heard of before. When we found the place, it was located in a building in the old warehouse district on North Monroe, on the banks of the Grand River. We parked in a dirt lot across the street from the building. As we got out of the car, we saw a guy sitting along the bank of the river. He looked like he might be someone who lived on the street. His beard was dyed green. He was playing beautiful music on a violin. In Grand Rapids??? The Underground Studio is a small modern art gallery. When the band walked in, it was a mighty surreal sight. On one side of the stage were Jaribu Shahid on bass and Tani Tabbal on drums. They both had hair I can only dream of having now -- way down past their waists. They were wearing sunglasses. Mr. Shahid was wearing a Cat-In-The-Hat hat. On the other side of the stage were Reggie Workman and another drummer, Gerald Cleaver. They both looked like they might have just come from church. The contrast of the two sides of the stage created quite a yin-yang effect. In the middle were A. Spencer Barefield and Roscoe Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell was wearing some kind of neon jump-suit thing.
When the concert was over, I went and talked to Mr. Mitchell. I was probably a little incoherent. I think I said something silly like "Oh my god! Thank you soooo much. This was incredible, etc. etc. etc." Then I went and talked to Mr. Barefield for a bit. I asked him if he ever took new guitar students. "Sure," he said, "send me some email." Now my brain was going in circles trying to figure out where I was going to get money to buy a guitar. Then I turned around and saw Mr. Workman. He had his back to me while he looked at some of the art on the walls. "Oh my god. This man played with John Coltrane," I thought. I froze. I couldn't talk. I guess he knew I was there though, because he turned around and nodded, and then went back to looking at the art. That afternoon was the greatest musical experience of my life, and it had happened in the last place on earth I would have expected it. August 1995 At their annual meeting, the Michigan Economic Developers Association presented me with the Mike Conboy Professional Development Award for the work I'd done to advance the economic development profession in Michigan This award was named for my mentor, and it came from a special group of people who I had worked with for 10 years. It was the greatest honor of my life. The woman who nominated me for this award and who gave the award presentation speach was Susan Lackey, the director of the Washtenaw Development Council. After the banquet, a group of us where sitting in the bar. She looked across the table and said:
Months later, when I reminded her of this, she said it was only a joke. It didn't set like a joke with me. It flipped a switch somewhere inside, and I spent the next few weeks contemplating where I was. I had learned a lot in the past few years, and I wanted to live based on what I was learning. The more I considered it, the more I felt that where I was wasn't a place where I could continue to learn and grow. This wasn't a big surprise. University bureaucracies aren't good environments for people who want to embrace change. On top of that, the technology-related economic development work in Michigan had been the domain of a group of "centers of excellence", political camp followers, and government money for over 15 years. That wasn't going to change any time soon. I, on the other hand, was ready for change. I started searching, and the first place I explored was the last place I would have considered before last May. The best economic development organization in the state of Michigan is the Right Place Program in Grand Rapids, and it was led by Birgit Klohs. Birgit has one of my role models since I started in this profession. I think that she's the best economic developer in the world. I gave Birgit a call and we had lunch in Ann Arbor a while later. We had a great conversation; we believed a lot of the same things about technology and economic development in Michigan. There wasn't anything open in Grand Rapids, but she suggested I come on up and visit sometime soon. While I was searching in West Michigan, I was looking at other places too. I visited Boston. I visited Cleveland. I applied for jobs in Europe. Once my name was in circulation, I got calls from lots of different places in Michigan. These were all pretty neat opportunities, but I didn't have to jump at anything right away. I could wait until the thing that felt right and I found each other. While I was exploring, someone else beat me to the punch. My boss left the department in December. Soon after he left, the College of Engineering put my entire department under review. This wasn't a big surprise. The College had never really warmed up to economic development since we had moved into it two years prior. But the threat of elimination created a poison atmosphere at work. I wasn't interested in bureaucratic survival. The nice, gentle exploration of the world I had been engaged in was suddenly gentle no more. Just about this time, I was going through a box in my apartment, and pulled out the piece of paper upon which I had written the speech I had delivered to a bunch of high school students three years before: Well, well. It was time to take some of my own advice. February 1996 I had made a couple trips to Grand Rapids the prior month. The first was to a conference on technology and economic development in West Michigan. I thought I was going there to hear lots of folks talking about manufacturing technology. What I experienced was a day full of people talking about the Internet. The talking was being done by some unlikely people, too. I don't think I met another net-geek all day. The best talk I heard -- about how to prepare people, companies, and communities for what the digital revolution will bring -- didn't come from a propeller-head, it came from a gear-head: the CEO of Diesel Technology, the R&D arm of Detroit Diesel. A week later, I returned to see what the Grand Rapidians were doing with what they were learning. I attended the unveiling of GrandNet, a huge effort to put the community on the net. I arrived a little late, and found an auditorium so packed full of people that I had to sit on the floor while folks from every part of the community showed off what they were building. Now I was on my way up to Grand Rapids to visit the Performance Place, a space created by the Right Place Program where area firms could gather and learn together about how to work with new technology. Birgit had been encouraging me to visit this place for weeks. I arranged for a tour with Ray, an old economic development friend of mine. Before we went to the Performance Place, Ray took me to lunch with Lynn, another old development buddy. She and I had bumped into each other for the first time in five years at the GrandNet unveiling. I told them about things that had happened over the past three years: about my life spinning apart, about the trip, about Muffy, and about my decision to start looking elsewhere to live, and about how this wonderful musical experience with Roscoe Mitchell had changed my tune on Grand Rapids and caused me to start my search there. Ray wondered where this concert had taken place. I told him that it had happened at the Underground Studio, on North Monroe. They both stared at me for a second. "Jeff, the Performance Place is right upstairs from the Underground Studio." The Performance Place is a wonderful meeting of the old and new. It's an old warehouse building, with old plank floors. When someone in another part of the building gets up and walks across the room, you can hear every step. It felt like my grandparent's old farm house in nearby Cascade. It had it's share of new work environments, too. One example: My boss used to joke that once we got the whole department wired, we'd be able to run it out of a phone booth. During my tour of the Performance Place, Ray took me by his office, which was product of one of the latest designs from West Michigan's many office furniture makers. It was not much bigger than, and was designed very much like, a phone booth. It even had a sliding glass door. For someone who works in economic development and likes to play with technology, that space was like getting a tour of a slice of heaven. Before I left, Ray handed me a few pages that described the Performance Place's mission. I threw it into my bag, not expecting to look at it for a couple weeks. I was off to California in a few days. There would be plenty of time to look at it when I got back. Burbank, California My two week trip to California was to explore whether it was the place I was searching for. With my life embracing the Internet more and more, it was a logical place to look. That industry was converging on San Francisco the way that the automobile industry had converged on Detroit. I wasn't sure that I could bring much to anyone's party out there, so I was going to find out. Heather had moved to Los Angeles. three months prior, so I flew there and the two of us were going to drive to San Francisco two days later. I was pretty emotional when I arrived. I'd never been so excited about a trip in my life. My morning-person orientation and jet lag meant that I was up mighty early the next day. Heather was still asleep, so I thought I'd go to the cafe down the street and write in my journal for a while. I reached inside my bag to get it and accidentally pulled out the four pages on the Performance Place that Ray had given me a few days before. For over a year, I'd been trying to write a personal mission statement for myself without success. This really perplexed me, because writing strategic plans and mission statements was something I was really good at. I didn't need to write it myself. When I looked at what Ray had given me, I couldn't believe it. It was written in the language of midwest manufacturing firms. If you looked beyond what was said and read what it meant, it was a perfect expression of what I wanted to do with my life. Even if no opportunity came my way in West Michigan, I had found what I needed to find there. San Francisco wasn't the place for me. I love it, and part of my heart will certainly always be left there. It felt kind of like a family reunion: you're around all these people who live and think a lot like you,. You feel all this kinsmanship with them, but man-o-man, if you lived near them...watch out! There's not much I would have been able to do out there, either. I had a similar feeling to the one I get around the automotive-geeks in Detroit. I love cars and trucks. I love looking at them, understanding how they work, watching them race, and I especially love driving them. When a I see a Dodge Ram 4x4 drive down the street, my heart beats faster. But I don't know how to engineer and build them. I just want to learn how to use them the best I can, and that can be done anywhere. I feel the same way about computers and the Internet. Those two weeks out west will be with me for the rest of my days. I learned new things every day, right up to the moment I left. I came home. I did some stuff. Something really cool happened. I wrote something. I kept searching. And then some amazing things happened. I met a lot of new friends. Great ones. I started doing some other stuff, and it changed my life forever. The relationship with the greatest soul I had ever known passed on to something else, and the relationship with a group of people who had helped me become what I am today, passed on to something else too. And the very day, almost the very minute that this swirl of births and deaths reached its zenith, a message dropped into my email box:
Heh? I was confused too. I had talked to some folks about how the web site at the College of Engineering might be improved. Lots of folks talked about that. But "heading up a group to oversee the site"? "A place for me in the new plans?" What new plans? Well, there were plans. Within a month of starting his new job, this interesting man had assigned me a new responsibility, which is to help maintain the College's front door on the web, and many things inside it. A month later, I moved into this new place. After spending time planning what to do, I'm beginning to do it. I'm having fun. I'm learning a lot. I'm doing work I love in a place I love. And after searching the world for a place to land, I found something I couldn't have dreamed of only a mile away from where I started, but...
|
