Mother Se’May Sayer: The ARC of Time
Episode Ten: The Seamstress
Prologue:
(What am I missing? It has served her well. This practice of seeing the obvious in front of her and seizing the answer and acting upon it. Mother Sayer knows she is creating a business that is thriving because she has been careful to oversee every aspect of it. Every employee must offer a reason if he or she wants to become part of the ARC Incorporated. Mother then takes their reasons and see if their efforts can be woven into the fabric or covering that all see when they encounter the ARC.
Every product for instance, should reflect appropriately back upon the creative aspect of the company. If it doesn’t fit, it’s not legit. The mission essentially is not to make money. The mission is to change the way business is done. Thus, as a result, business will be brought more in line with the needs of the employees. When the needs of the employees are met, then the needs of the company will be rewarded.
How can all these various obligations that must be addressed, nurtured, and fed to sustain their growth; tie into the sustainability of a corporation that has so many lives dependent on it? Well, come and see how Mother Sayer solved these problems and many more like them.)
The day begins:
Mother Sayer: (Days like this seem to occur more rapidly lately. The business is twitchy right now. I mean it feels ready to grow, but it somehow lacks the ability to carry the weight of all its’ parts. It wants to grow, but it doesn’t want to be deformed. Somehow all the ‘limbs’ are not getting the right amount of care and nourishment to grow as a part of the whole.). What’s on tap for today Sarah?
Sarah W. Certainty: Many things desire your attention Mother. The one most particular that screams for notification is the two new mechanic shop locations.
Mother Sayer: Did Blinner give you her latest update on where we stood in acquiring the land and zoning authority from the city of Louisville?
Sarah W. Certainty: She stated that the land, both sites altogether would be $1.5 million. The zoning is approved. All that is needed now is the building permits and compliance with all city, state and Federal requirements at both sites. You know, air, water and sanitation concerns. The normal things when adding structures to any city’s skyline.
Mother Sayer: I see. Has she gotten with the lawyers and filed all the necessary papers?
Sarah W. Certainty: Ms. Blinner seems to be acting in a way that shows she knows what she is doing. My read on her is that she had prior permission to do the things she is doing. Am I correct Mother?
Mother Sayer: (Perceptive. Although Sarah certainly comes from let’s say a dangerous family, she is none the less adept at reading people in her own right.). Yes Sarah, you would be correct.
Sarah, I’ve got a few ideas swirling around in my head. My read on you. No. Let me say this. I’ve taken you in as a favor to your Mother, Sparklett Stone. The date I’m beginning to place in the annals of my life as one of my most fortunate days.
My success, I’ve truly believed when all is said and done, will be accredited to the people I chose around me. I didn’t chose you directly, but I thank my lucky stars, per se, that you were given to me.
Sarah W. Certainty: That is what I’ve been waiting to hear from you Mother. I don’t mean to sound expectant or put on an air of inevitability, but I’ve always knew I could make a contribution. Trust me, the bloodline I’m from; we’ve got to know our worth and where we stand because our life would literally depend on it.
I’ve never evaded the truth of my parents’ home. Taking action in that direction would certainly have shorten my born and day-of-rest timeline.
Mother Sayer: Sarah. I am taken with you. (It is about 1000 am and Mother decides to send all calls to her working group one floor beneath and spend the afternoon with Sarah).
Sarah W. Certainty: Sorry, I know I don’t talk as much and people sometimes get the notion that I have gotten through life on my looks.
Mother Sayer: (Yes, Sarah is quite the looker. I’ve known many instances in my life where men decided to analyze, categorize, and rate me according to their infinite rating schema which describes beauty in their minds). No no Sarah. Assumptions only work after an interaction with your subject. Besides, assumptions are insulting after you’ve gotten to know people. I mean through all the body language, mannerisms, speech and coherence of thought. These indicators project the aura of a person beyond the physical realm. It truly is akin to a covering that leaves enough room for family to be warmed by as well.
Sarah W. Certainty: I don’t know what to say. I’ve never heard anyone speak to me that way. I mean my mother always glowingly refers to me as her ‘beauty force’, but it is like energy is being transferred to me as you speak to me. I must say I don’t know what to say.
Mother Sayer: Easy Sarah, I know how you feel right now because I got the same reaction when my Dad spoke to me. He was constantly bringing me with him. Teaching me the things I needed in life because he saw something inside me or something I was giving off and he wanted to make sure I refined it to be under my control.
Sarah W. Certainty: What? What is it? Tell me.
Mother Sayer: Ableman Sayer, my father, called it ‘The Recruiter’s Gift’. This force, it travels in ‘arcs’ around the Earth looking to drop its’ power on deserving souls. It seems to give only a finite group of people deeper understanding about the world around them. The life they are about to embark upon. I know that my father once told me, ‘Your eyes see more than you can comprehend, and the acknowledgement of that gateway by the receiver of ‘the gift’ is a first step on whether the ‘The Recruiter’ allows you to take full possession of that ‘awareness’.
Seeing is not believing. Seeing is your receipt of ‘the testing documents’ and whether you pass or fail is based solely on your understanding of the material (what you saw or thought you saw) that the test is based upon.
Sarah W. Certainty: So, I should not believe what my eyes or for that matter my ears tell me?
Mother Sayer: No, you should not take as truth your initial feedback of the world in front and around you.
Sarah W. Certainty: I know this part. Because the human mind acts on emotions and not reason in traumatic events.
Mother Sayer: Precisely! (Mother smiles internally again because she doesn’t want to short circuit this discussion and transferal of knowledge to Sarah by stroking her ego).
It is not the complete assessment I’m afraid to tell you. It’s a start to know where the phrase came from ‘keeping your head while others around you are losing theirs’. It is the ability to create what happened in an event in your mind before you even arrived on the scene.
This is partially what you see on a good detective drama where the investigators reconstruct the events from start to finish to determine how the incident started.
Sarah W. Certainty: So I need to see the things that happened before I get there?
Mother Sayer: Yes.
Sarah W. Certainty: The wheels are turning in my head, but I want to hear more of what you’re saying. Do you have time to still talk to me now?
Mother Sayer: Yes dear, it’s only about 1030. I will order lunch and we will talk all afternoon if necessary because I’m enjoying your company as well.
Sarah W. Certainty: (This makes Sarah smile and she is now hooked on the meaning of good company from this Black woman). I’m glad you feel that way Mother.
Mother Sayer: (To hear Sarah call her Mother makes her enjoy her company even more). Thank you for calling me Mother. It is a tradition in the Black community that is disappearing. When all the children in the village or neighborhood respected all Mothers, and called them with this name of great honor.
It held great sway and meaning that it wasn’t just the Mother in your home that deserved your respect. All Mothers in the village were deserving of respect and honor. This brought forth a transference of knowledge that stabilized the entire village.
‘Where one didn’t know, the others surely would know.’ In other words, don’t just care about the people inside the walls of your house. Sometimes parents don’t distribute knowledge as freely as they should because of long held beliefs. They are misguided in their thinking which made it critical that children could learn the things they needed to know righteously in their own ‘backyard’.
Sarah W. Certainty: Oh.
Mother Sayer: Let me tell you what I learned from a couple of classmates of mine at the University of Louisville and later at Howard University College of Medicine.
It’s about the right to vote. The disconnect the voter feels his vote had in actual consequences directly resulting from his vote. Lastly the politician receiving the vote is solely to blame after the vote is cast.
Victor was his name. I met him my sophomore year and we hit it off. He became a good friend. A layman advisor whose knowledge about the hardships of life I clung to because honestly, I wasn’t hungry a day in my life.
Sarah W. Certainty: He opened your eyes, per se, to what it felt like to be without?
Mother Sayer: Yes, he did. I remember one statement he made to me as if it was stuck in a constant loop in my mind. He said, “Se’May, when I reached the age where I was aware of my surrounding and could process them to reach a conclusion. I knew I was in trouble.”
I asked him, Victor, “How were you in trouble. You had a home and both your parents were there.”
Victor said to me, “My father told us doing a critical time when resources were scarce that ‘He was the only one working, so he was the only one needed to eat.’
Sarah W. Certainty: Wait, before you go on. His father told him he didn’t give a crap if he ate or not. In essence there were limited resources and as long as the father ate; he didn’t give a shit if the children ate?
Mother Sayer: That’s right Sarah, Victor grew up in a home where his father was the biggest guy in the house and him and his brothers and sisters looked like they were from South Africa.
Sarah W. Certainty: Okay, wow that is hard for me to believe.
Mother Sayer: Yeah, it sort of lends a certain perspective to the phrase, ‘my kids come first’ huh?
Sarah W. Certainty: So what happened, how did he manage to get to college? How did he pay for it?
Mother Sayer: Victor told me that that is when he laid into the books. He dove so deep that he was able through his efforts to land scholarships that paid for all his education. He worked of course at the college, but he told me that he knew he wasn’t going to get any help from his parents.
Sarah W. Certainty: What did he study? I mean what did he choose to study to find a job?
Mother Sayer: He majored in nursing with a minor in philosophy. Let me tell you, I’ve never met a more focused and determined man in my life after hearing what he came through to get to college. Most young Black men focus below the waist and not above the neck, I’m afraid.
Sarah W. Certainty: Okay, what did he tell you about voting?
Mother Sayer: Well he always spoke in analogies and philosophical metaphors. Anyway, this is what he told me.
Okay, so your vote is private and the impact of your vote doesn’t make any noise. So, you subscribe to the philosophy that “Just because I threw the rock that broke the glass, it doesn’t mean it’s my fault for the glass breaking. The glass was just too weak to handle the rock crashing against it.” The two solid objects reacting together is meaningless. My vote and the politician to which I rendered it; we both have no obligation to it not being a destructive combination.
In other words, the citizenry has been taught quite well to be desensitized to the consequences of voting. ‘Voting has been attacked and is always under attack’ Victor would say. Voting is permission I’m afraid. Just because people don’t like the fact that their elected officials don’t do everything they said doesn’t relieve them of the responsibility for voting for that person.
‘Voting is force.’ When we vote, we are using force to push for the change we want to see in the world around us. Casting your vote in the booth doesn’t absolve you of the ballot you’ve just cast. It makes you responsible for it.
This is the kicker. Victor would go ballistic on those people who would say that their vote is ‘private’. He would respond to that statement with this. “Your vote is private huh. So how do you explain the reasoning that you only expected good things from your candidate when clearly your candidate promoted the opposite.”
He would get in their crap about these voters now trying to escape the consequences of their actions by now being ‘fed up’, ‘disgusted’. Oh, this is a good one. ‘Unaware’ that my candidate harbored those policies. ‘I didn’t know he would push that agenda’.
Victor would say these were all ‘cop outs’. Now that the force of your vote is disabling hard fought civil rights and human decency; it’s suddenly real. ‘It’s no more funny when a child curses the second, third, or fourth time is it?’
Sarah W. Certainty: I must admit I’ve never thought of voting as force.
Mother Sayer: Well your reaction and understanding mirrors my limits in that time of my life. I didn’t fully grasp what he was talking about either.
I fully understand what he means now. It is human nature to stand or support something you believe in because you got a little snippet of information. It is still your responsibility to fully understand the action you are about to take and the ramifications it holds in the lives of us all.
Voting is not a private matter. If you are ashamed to tell us who you voted for, you shouldn’t be allowed to speak on behalf of anybody you feel has now been harmed by your candidate. That’s like saying, ‘I bought a gun for protection at home, but I leave it lying around so if my kids find it and shoot themselves; it wouldn’t be my fault.’
Sarah W. Certainty: That’s what I’ve heard many times. ‘Voting is a private thing.’
Mother Sayer: How can something be private if the combination of many ‘private’ things affect more than just yourself? Private is something like whether or not you shave your ‘butt hairs’.
(Mother knew she would get a grin out of Sarah, but she presses on with her thought anyway).
Private is whether or not you and your partner engage in kinky sex. Private is telling your partner a lie about the number of partners you’ve had in your life.
There’s no privacy in the public realm. These decisions have reality attached and that is how ‘voting’ has been perverted into a simple act of marking a ballot, or pulling a level. Then without involvement or association with the implication of who would use that vote. Simply just walk out of the voting place detached from the act and go home.
Sarah W. Certainty: Yes, I’ve seen a lot of poor people and even I’ve wondered how or what put them there. It does make me now wonder why they stay there?
Mother Sayer: Good question Sarah. I believe the cause is suspended motion. A definition I believe applies to the scourge of poverty. ‘Association brings about assimilation.’
If you stay in the company of people who don’t want to change their station in life, you will certainty share their fate. If you are the engine of change and the people in your life do not wish to follow your lead, I would advise separating yourself from them or share their fate.
Poverty also can falsely cause someone to believe that love makes a person choose what’s best for them. This is a destructive lie!
Sarah W. Certainty: I thought love holds it all together?
Mother Sayer: Like a seamstress attaching two or more parts to make a cherished garment?
Sarah W. Certainty: Yes, something like that.
Mother Sayer: Many factors come into play when you try to put anything together. Whether the materials and colors blend, for example, when you refer to a garment. Whether a husband or wife can make it work if they are thinking of marriage.
One or both pieces must feel right or by reason be the only pieces that will fit. It takes perspective as well to combine two separate lives. I’ve often wondered what makes it possible?
Sarah W. Certainty: So, you believe it is a presence or force that turns our minds to following a path together?
Mother Sayer: Yes, I believe it takes a person able to see beyond his or her eyesight. The eyes do not tell the whole story. It takes the mind, the brain interpreting the feedback.
Sarah W. Certainty: So, you want somebody capable of holding all your divisions, products or endeavors together. Someone able to process changes, both new and old, and see how they would fit into the vision of The ARC?
Mother Sayer: Exactly! It is difficult to be the only one knowing what you want, or the only one knowing where you want to take your company. I need more help. Victor showed me the power of the philosophical disciplines. I know their value. I want their value working for me at The ARC.
Sarah W. Certainty: Okay, where do we find them? How many do you want?
Mother Sayer: Through contacts and remember I’m a graduate of UofL. I could use as many as I can get.
Sarah W. Certainty: I don’t think the males would like to be called a seamstress.
Mother Sayer: (Laughing a little). I know. We’ll call the male candidates tailors. So, these positions will be held by a Seamstress or a Tailor.
Sarah W. Certainty: It makes sense. Before you ask. My answer is yes. It makes sense when you’re looking at sustainability. How are you going to pick from the many applicants you’re going to get?
Mother Sayer: Good question. I will put to paper my thoughts on what I believe The ARC should stand for. Then I’ll put to paper the probing questions to ask all the fine applicants I’ll receive.
Sarah W. Certainty: Oh, you’re not gonna stop now. Tell me how you’re going to do this?
Mother Sayer: Huh, first I need to select the men and women who can understand that memorizing and reciting a set of principles reveals to me you may not believe them. ‘Principles and morals aren’t written on a note pad or flash card for quick reference.’
‘You can’t recall them in the heat of the moment from memory either. The display of principles must be instantaneous and without shadow of turning’. Something I learned from the U.S. Army.
Sarah W. Certainty: Wow! That’s deep Mother.
Mother Sayer: I have to have people that believe in the cause and know which action to take when challenged with questionable situations. I don’t need people that need time to think about it. They either know what’s right and what’s wrong, or they don’t.
It’s as simple as that.
Sarah W. Certainty: The food is here Mother; let’s eat.
Epilogue:
(It is a cherished practice. One I’ve learned from Mr. Ableman Sayer quite well. ‘You also need someone you trust. Someone capable of sticking with you mentally to bounce ideas and hash out your thoughts.’
He was right. Also, Sarah came to me through a dumb act of mine, her Father, Don Se’Stone and her mother, Sparklett Stone, decided she could use a fresh viewpoint. I’m glad they made that decision.
Sarah, growing up in that house, she had to see and hear things that probably would frighten the impressionable senses out of a child. She came through that we an inner toughness I want in my many positions to held by a seamstress or a tailor. The best I will take to serve as my own trinity.
My very own three-person ARC Council).