Stencil stress reliever

1968 – Vietnam war – the draft – U.S. Navy – boot camp, San Diego.

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/navyjoin/l/blnavybasic.htm

People were yelling at us! A *lot* of scary people were yelling at us. We were running from this building to that, getting our hair shaved, trading our regular clothes for uniforms, getting strange new boots to wear, confronting a new language (most of it not printable), trying and failing, most of us, to understand a foreign culture, struggling to learn how to function in a new world turned upside down.

In the midst of this chaotic movie, we marched to a warehouselike building that offered dark, welcome shade from the intense California sun. Huge fans turned slowly, calmly on the high ceiling above us. As we filed in to the cool cavern of this quiet building we saw a man in blue navy fatigue dress, an older petty officer, standing on a table watching us. Not knowing what to do or what was going to happen, we moved over to the table. The man waited patiently until we were all in before he spoke.

In a wonderfully measured, calm voice he proceeded to demonstrate how to use a stencil to put a name on a shirt with black paint. At the end of this demonstration he asked for questions. There were none. He looked down from the table and asked one of us, “Son, how long did that take me to do?” The answer was “About two minutes.” He looked up, each one of us looking back expectantly. “The stuff is over there on those tables. You have ten minutes. I think you better get to it.”

38 years later, I still regard this as one of the most ‘orienting’ experiences of my life. In my mind it stands like some biblical stone pillar, representing other stressful experiences that had also been magically touched by the grace of some sane person who brought calm and reassuring information, method, and orientation.