Exodus Trekkers: AN EXAMINED LIFE OF A RARE MEEK MAN ( part 3 of 4 )

Part three of four parts

By Robert R. Schwarz

And He [ Jesus ] has said to me, " My grace

is sufficient for you, for power is perfected

in weakness. " ….For when I am weak,

then I am strong. ( The Apostle Paul, 2

Corinthians 12: 9,10 )

The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted

with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he

may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and

as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being

fooled about himself. He has accepted God's

estimate of his own life. He knows he is as

weak and helpless as God declared him to be,

but paradoxically, he knows at the same time

that he is in the sight of God of more importance

than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything.

That is his motto. ( A.W. Tozer , 1897-1963 ,

American Christian pastor, author, magazine editor,

and spiritual mentor. )

Bruce with infant and toddler of his
two nieces

During his 44 years at Sears , Bruce sold cameras , furniture and shoes, earning a reputation for unquestionable honesty and company loyalty. The Sears store —I gathered from Bruce, whom I often had to prod for the unpleasant facts—had become home to him more than his apartment . For the first few decades, his days were peacefully predictable and work-satisfying, especially in the camera section . This was true despite the many draconian rules for its approximate 500 employees . Then, top store management began cutting back hours of its full-time employees and , according to Bruce, began firing some for minor infraction of rules. Employees who quit or were fired , Bruce told me , were systematically replaced with part-time help whose hours were changed mercurially from week to week, supposedly to meet to company cash flow demands . Not having to give these particular employees medical benefits also helped Sears' profit line.

Bruce and several others had not received a pay raise for 18 years , or if they had , their net salary after the reduction of hours remained the same. " If we complained, they would find some reason to let us go," Bruce told me. Near the end of 2011, his hours were cut to five on some weeks. My friend began thinking about moving to a lower-rent apartment in Chicago but procrastinated for years because he could not envision living elsewhere. I told my wife, " I think Bruce married two wives, Sears and Park Ridge—for better or worse. "

Bruce opted for a small payout from Sears instead of a pension, which he correctly predicted would eventually be eliminated for all employees . He had an uncompromising distaste for management's new directive that all sales employees do their very best to sell customers credit card applications. Bruce and others were given a daily quota of nine applications. Bruce usually sold no more than five, and then only to customers at whom he had not pitched an application unless they appeared to understand the non-payment penalties of a contract loaded with fine print . Any form of pressurized selling had always been inimical to Bruce's ethics and temperament . "I just couldn't 'pressure people to sign up when I sensed they really didn’t want it," he said.

With his buddy Bob Schwarz in front
of Bruce' s frequented dinner spot in
Park Ridge

At coffee one day, he explained: "Bob, I see more of our customers going into debt they can't live with. Many can't help skipping a payment now and then and then wind up paying 20 per cent interest on it. Some of salesmen don't tell all the facts before the customer signs the credit application, or never do tell them. . They tell them that payments are 'interest free'! And Sears tells us salesmen how great this application is for this store because the customer will spend much more with it than with cash . Can you believe that"?!

Bruce explained that a certain bank pays Sears $12 for each application it sells, with $2 going as a bonus to the salesman . The bank owns the credit t card company and collects the punishing interest payment when the customer defaults, Bruce said. He obviously loathed any bank which got rich off debt-ridden people who had acted out of ignorance or bad judgment . This credit issue continue to vex Bruce for months. ( I learned from two employees that the pressure on Sears employees at Golf Mill to sell a daily quota of credit cards remains today .) Fully aware of what he thought was managements' tacit message of make your quota or else look elsewhere for work, Bruce remained steadfast with his ethic.

Bruce related that when a Sears executive from the home office visited the store one day and learned that he had repeatedly failed to get his quota of applications , the executive told Bruce's section manager to fire him. But the manager liked Bruce and talked the executive into having Bruce transferred to the furniture department , where for at least a year , he unwrapped and carted sofas and armchairs . His health began to gradually wane—he had suffered a heart attack circa 1970 from which he had recovered. Eventually Bruce was assigned to stocking shoe inventory .

Now in his seventies, Bruce's weekly hours had been reduced to 15 , sometimes less. He spent a good part of the day climbing a tall inventory ladder to re-stock or retrieve shoe boxes; it gave him back pain. Was this, Bruce asked himself, Sears' final attempt to force him to leave ? Bruce did want to quit ; his Social Security check was barely enough for his monthly rent of $650 and there was no money left from the company payout he had taken years ago .

" But , Bruce, " I said with a judgmental tone, " You saw this day coming, didn't you ?" He looked at me with a calm and pensive face , which told me my question was dumb and unfair.

He replied: " There was no money to save. "

Over coffee in late 2013, I asked Bruce what challenged him nowadays . He surprised me with: "It's not knowing if I'll be up to again having to adjust to the management style of a new boss. " One of Bruce's co-workers whom I interviewed years later said, "She wasn't the best. " Another described her as "mean, even with me . "

Over the next few weeks, I gleaned the following account from Bruce: Pushing him towards a life finale, I believe , was this new boss . She was young and obviously ambitious and , for reasons unknown to this day, found Bruce disturbing . One day , when Bruce had remained after quitting hours to voluntarily tidy up some inventory, she started inexplicably to shout at him , much like she had twice before.

"She'd start yelling at me angrily , " Bruce related, still feeling the wound. " ' What are you hanging around here for ?! ' All I could do , Bob, was stand there and look at her. I don’t know why she was angry. I had been working hard and wanted to please her. "

Bruce had been stung hard and wanted to be free of her but didn't know how.

I thought deeply about Bruce's boss and asked myself, was she one of those humans who are repelled by what they perceive as inexcusable and intolerable weaknesses in people . Or had observing Bruce's character for the past three months sent her a subliminal message that something vital in her character was missing ? Or did the thought of ever becoming in the least like a Bruce actually threaten her enough to hate him , to lash out at him , to be rid of him ? I thought of the fear and hatred the Pharisees had for Jesus when His constant and obvious goodness had become so obnoxious to them, that when merely to look at Him was a hardship demanding He be tested to the limit.

Bruce quite Sears on Jan. 26, 2012. His "mean" boss quit a month later. The head store manager and a few co-workers arranged a retirement event for Bruce in the store cafeteria. There was no wrist watch or severance pay . But there were a few "goodbye-it's-been-good-to-know-you " comments from the manager . There also was coffee and two strawberry cakes.

" Why didn't you fight back ? " I asked Bruce with heated frustration. " I mean , I never heard of a large company like Sears not giving an employee a raise for, what, 18 years ? "

" Anything like mention of a union or a simple protest to your boss would have gotten me fired , " he said. " It happened to others. Besides I had no place to go. I had started to look for another place to work l5 years ago. But I guess I was too old even then. "

Vaguely I sensed there was something important I was learning from Bruce, but was apprehensive about where it was leading me.

Age 22 and home on leave from Army

X With the help of his niece Connie , Bruce moved into Asbury Court , a large low-cost retirement community in nearby Des Plaines . If driving, it was easy to miss ; Asbury was only a few years beyond its parking lot entrance and a traffic-laden highway that immediately ascended over a toll way bridge.

It was a long walk to Bruce's room, down long narrow corridors , past dozens of doors on which many of the aged residents had placed a few artificial flowers . His room was perhaps 10 feet wide and 25 feet long; it had a narrow bed, microwave oven and a small television set . Connie had tacked on the wall several old and faded black and white family photos ; others were in frames on a small desk. A black and white framed etching of Jesus was on a bedside table--his open display of faith surprised me. Bruce's Social Security check, less $100 for discretionary expenses, was surrendered each month to Asbury.

A few months after Bruce had moved into his new " home " he was walking out to his parked old Chevy when he began losing his breath. Asbury called a doctor , and Bruce was admitted to an intensive care unit at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. The heart which 43 years ago had required an angioplasty was now pumping blood with only 15 per cent efficiency. Doctors implanted a pacemaker and a defibrillator , and Bruce was taken to the Avanti rehab center in Niles for a few weeks .

He returned to Asbury after a month of fighting off depression at Avanti and barely tolerating my sophomoric words of encouragement, like " Bruce, you have to summon up the gumption to fight this depression as you did to get through your Army basic training. " Several times he accepted my invitation for us to pray together. He listened to me read an article about depression , but only to respond—with justifiable irritation— "reading makes me nervous". When he added, "All I want is friendly conversation ", I recognized my ignorance about depression. Bruce was still eating his pureed food and taking medication to rid his stomach of excessive bile which prevented him eating the solid food that he missed terribly . I tried to get him a private room but his Social Security benefit was inadequate. Connie had begun to manage most of her nephew's affairs and continued her weekly visits and to having Bruce to her Chicago home for family holiday dinners.

Within a month , I was picking up my friend for our weekly coffee. Bruce was now using a walker and his right arm trembled when he lifted a cup. Before driving off, I'd ask where he wanted to go . "You name it, " I said. Invariably , he would respond , " Wherever you want . " This time his typical acquiescence irked me. Just once, I wanted him hear him assert himself, show a bit of self-centeredness. I turned to Bruce my friend and demanded, " I want to take you where YOU want to go ! Okay ? " My thought was : Bruce don't be so damn nice ! Don’t remind me of what I might need more of.

Heeding doctor's advice, Bruce stopped driving, and for five months his car remained with four flat tires in the Asbury parking lot until a mechanic bought it for $500 . Other than the death of his parents and sister , I don't believe Mr. Kuss was ever more saddened than when surrendering what he considered was his last vestige of independence.

Sowing Lester's ashes across the Rock River--with a prayer

In the spring of 2013 , my brother Lester died of complications from emphysema . Connie drove her Uncle Bruce to my brother's memorial luncheon at Sam's Restaurant in Arlington Heights, where he chatted amiably with 20 guests sitting at a long table. A week later I invited Bruce and two other friends , Rob Dobe and Torki Khamissi, to a private ceremony for Lester at the Rock River near Oregon, Illinois .

Bruce had known Lester since their childhood days when our families celebrated holidays together and our fathers shared a rowboat to fish the spring-time white bass river run at Winneconne, Wisconsin. When Bruce and Lester lived in Park Ridge and my medicated brother was coping wretchedly with paranoid schizophrenia, the two would exchange a brief salutation a local lunch counter . Later, when Lester was confined to a nursing home bed and kept alive by a web of tubes , Bruce once visited him . A dozen or more visitors also saw my brother and prayed for him at bedside —a few praying in "public" for the first time. I surmised . Among them were Rob , a middle-aged unemployed men's' clothing salesman , who was challenged with so many serious health issues ( several inherited ) that I often wondered how he stayed alive . He daily used a bicycle for transportation, sometimes hitching it onto a public bus or placing it in the back of a passenger train car. The bike, due to an occasional spill or collision , need repair as much as Rob's body did. Like Bruce , he was a confirmed bachelor, and worked with a church pastor at a sheltered home for adults afflicted with a variety of life challenges. Rob seemed to love everybody he passed on the street, often voicing a vigorous greet in passing. I knew for a fact—and remain amazed by it— that his affection for people was quite human, neither triggered by any drug nor incited by a mental disorder .

Torki was a 35-year-old Iranian immigrant who cleaned pots and pans all night at a White Kitchen franchise. At the nursing home, he would stand over my brother with outstretched arms and pray in Farsi. He was married to an Iranian woman , Ahlam , who had returned to her native Iran upon hearing from a friend there that a man named Torki , a man with a fourth-grade education and of a family recently made poor by the Iran-Iraqi war, would make a good husband. Ahlam often had me over ( once with Bruce ) to her modest apartment for a sumptuous Iranian meal . Torki would forever struggle to learn English . I taught him enough English, however, to pass his citizenship exam .

Outside Asbury, I blew the horn for Bruce to exit. He was wearing the plaid shirt my wife had given him a long time ago. His long convalescence had left him thin and weathered .

We drove to Rob's s subsidized apartment unit and tapped the horn every five minutes for twenty minutes before our friend came out. It was always that way with Rob. Before I opened the car door, I quickly turned to Bruce to say , " I know he's been gargling with Listerine all this time. " Rob did not want anyone to smell his nicotine breath , and because of my late brother's Lester's lethal cigarette addiction, Rob never smoked in front of me. As usual, Rob was carrying a backpack—its contents always unknown—and wearing a black cowboy hat with a silver braid and an Irish fisherman's sweater I had give him years ago. From the backseat, Rob reached over and hugged Bruce and me with his customary and genuine greeting, " Love you guys ! " We drove 20 minutes to Torki's condo. He greeted us with "Hello, my brudders . "

While heading towards Oregon, I strained my hearing to hear how Torki was handling his English . He apparently had given up trying to understand any of what the incessantly-speaking Rob had been telling him about the scenic countryside we were driving through. Rob began to frown from never getting a single word of reaction from Torki. To shield himself from Rob's verbal barrage , Torki turned his attention to Bruce up front and tried to engage him in a conversation about the national economy .

The scene brought me joy : in a metaphysical sense, I was seeing the four of us, disparate in personality and backgrounds yet part of one body very much alive. I had to ask myself: were we living out in this hour a reality of a certain frustratingly elusive Christian concept ? Were the four of us alive as four organs , each with a unique function within the Body of Christ as our heart and mind , all of us fused to an infinite number of faith-filled humans—dead and alive ?

We drove a few miles beyond the farming town of Oregon to the Rock River, until we saw it bend and disappear into a forest. I drove the car off the road and parked it about a hundred yards from a river bank. We saw no one, which was good and well-timed , as was the surrounding stillness. The river, now high and brown , was carrying small branches southward towards the end of its long tributary to the Mississippi and that to ocean waters.

I grabbed my brother's urn from the trunk , and we walked to the river , remaining silent as we sloshed across ankle-deep muck left recent by spring rains. Another urn containing my brother's ashes I had buried in the All Saints cemetery after his funeral blessing in my church's chapel. I reminded my friends each was to take a handful of ashes, walk to the river's edge, and , while saying a prayer for Lester, cast them outward.

I handed Torki the urn. We all watched in reverence as he tossed ashes, allowing gentle breezes and a slow current to carry them downstream. Then Torki thrust his arms skyward, and for a good ten minutes, prayed in Farsi. I wondered how Bruce would express his piety with three people standing behind him. He took the urn, set it down and pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and read a prayer composed by the Rev. Dietrich Bonheoffer, a German Lutheran hanged by the Nazis when implicated in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Bruce then tossed ashes, moving his lips in prayer.

Lastly, I prayed, but never to remember the words spoken to Lester and to God. I do remember, however, a thought shared later with Bruce. It brought a faint smile to his face when I told him that surely my brother was pleased with what the four of us had offered up to Lester for eternity at the Rock River that day . Those moments were sacred, I told Bruce , and that I hoped our Father in Heaven had responded to our prayers and now was making Lester perfectly complete.