Flowering Herbs

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a Bath & Body Works fragrance in the nineties called Flowering Herbs.

My wife was given a bottle of it in 1994, four years before I met her. She was still wearing it in 1998, the summer we got together — we both turned twenty that year, she’s two and a half months older than me — and every time she came near me that summer she smelled like that.

They discontinued it.

I have spent a substantial part of the last thirty years trying to get more of it.

You can still find bottles on eBay if you’re patient and willing to be unreasonable. I have been both. The last one I bought cost me two hundred dollars.

Sometime in the late 2000s they brought it back as part of a heritage collection. Ten dollars a bottle, sitting on a shelf like it was nothing.

I bought a couple.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. Twenty of them would have covered the rest of her life for two hundred dollars, which is exactly what I later handed a stranger on the internet for one used bottle.

I’ve also just asked.

I’ve stood at the counter in a Bath & Body Works and asked employees how a person goes about ordering custom bottles of a discontinued scent. One woman was genuinely game — said she’d reach out to corporate and see whether they’d sell me some at a reasonable price.

I never heard anything back. I don’t blame them. I imagine that request goes into a system that has no field for it.

I’ll keep checking eBay.

Here’s what I can’t explain properly to anyone who asks why.

It doesn’t smell like a fragrance to me. It smells like being twenty. It smells like a summer where nothing had gone wrong yet and I had just met the most interesting person I’d ever met. It smells like freedom, and like getting away with something, and like my best friend.

Twenty-eight years together and one bottle of it will still put me somewhere no photograph gets me to. I don’t know why smell does that and almost nothing else does.

So if anybody at that company is ever bored and looking for a project.

There’s a man in Oklahoma who would very much like to buy ten bottles of Flowering Herbs at whatever reasonable price you want to name, and he’s been at this a long time, and he isn’t going to stop.

His Hard Hat

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My grandfather went to work for Mobil Oil in 1946, right out of the war, and stayed until he retired around 1988. Forty-some years, southwest Oklahoma, running routes as a pumper.

He was a slender man. Five-eight, five-nine, not big. And he had some of the strongest hands of anyone I’ve ever known — grip strength that never left him, even as an old man, forty years of field work still sitting in them.

His left ring finger was gone. Taken off by machinery out on a lease somewhere. You noticed it right away as a kid, because it was simply not there.

I asked about it once and got the story, and I don’t remember who told me.

I don’t have a single full conversation with him.

He was quiet. Quiet voice, reserved, not a man who filled a room or wanted to. Every so often he’d roughhouse with me a little and that was about the extent of it. Questions and answers. Nothing you’d call a talk.

Then Alzheimer’s took most of the years when I might have been old enough to ask him something worth asking.

He was at a family retreat a few weeks before he died in 2005. He was there and he did not look good and everyone could see where it was going. I wasn’t in the room at the end.

Two years after that I started working in oil and gas.

I’ve been in it ever since, going on twenty years now, doing data. Not out on a lease — in front of screens, in offices, arguing about how information moves.

But I’ve been out in the field a couple of times. Toured rigs, watched the guys work, stood where the actual thing happens.

Both times I thought about him.

He pumped wells. I make sure the data coming off them mean something. Two completely different jobs inside the same industry, seventy years apart, and the same industry has now paid for two households of my family.

The thing that provided for his family provides for mine.

I have his hard hat.

I have one of his measuring tools, and some tie pins and things the company gave him over four decades of showing up.

My mother tells me she’s proud of me, and she tells me her daddy would have been too — the career, the places I’ve gotten to work, the kind of work I’ve gotten to do. She’s the one who’d know.

I’d like to have heard it from him. But he was never going to be the man who said it out loud, and I’m not sure it would have sounded like much if he had.

If I got ten minutes with him in his right mind, I know what I’d use it on.

I’d tell him thank you. That I know none of it was easy, and that he paved a road I’m still driving on. That I ended up in his industry without either of us planning it, and that I’m proud to be his grandson.

Then I’d probably shake his hand, and I know exactly what that would have felt like, because that grip is the clearest thing I have of him.

Nine fingers and all of it still there.

Carrying Grandma

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My wife’s grandmother died in September of 2004, in her bed, at the end of a long stretch of not being able to eat.

There was a tumor that had closed off her ability to swallow. So she starved, slowly, over days, in her early 80s. Her husband had gone a few years before her and I’ve always believed she was ready to go find him.

When it happened her children were in the room — my mother-in-law, her sisters and brothers. My wife and I weren’t. We’d said our goodbye earlier and gotten to tell her we loved her, which is a thing I’m still grateful we did while she could hear it.

I was twenty-six. We’d been married five years.

Then the men came with the stretcher and couldn’t get it into the bedroom.

I don’t remember the exact geometry of it — a door, a hallway, the way the bed sat. What I remember is standing there while everybody looked at everybody else, and it becoming clear that somebody was going to have to carry her out to where the stretcher could reach.

My mother-in-law asked me.

There’s not much I wouldn’t do for that my mother-in-law. I love her. But I want to be honest about the request, because it was a hard thing to ask, and she asked it anyway, of a twenty-six-year-old who’d been in the family five years. I was ok with it. My wife had a much harder time.

One of my wife’s cousins came in to help. He got a foot, more or less. That isn’t a complaint — I understand it completely and I don’t think he could have done more than he did.

So I picked her up off the bed.

She was not light.

I think people expect that part to go the other way. She’d lost a great deal and she weighed far less than she once had, but she had never been a small woman and she was not a feather in my arms. It took something.

I wasn’t worried about dropping her. I just picked her up and carried her out of the bedroom and into the living room and laid her down on the stretcher. Thirty feet, maybe. Ten seconds of work.

My wife was standing in the living room. She watched the whole thing.

So I set Grandma down, and then I went and put my arms around my wife and told her it was okay.

For her it was awful. I’ve always known that. Her grandmother, her family’s house, and her husband walking through it carrying the body.

For me it was one of the great honors of my life, and I’ve never once been able to explain that to anybody without it sounding strange.

I got to be useful in the one moment where being big and twenty-six was worth something. I’ve spent most of my life being read as more intimidating than I actually am, and here was a room full of people who needed exactly what I’m built like — and I got to lift her carefully, and set her down gently, and step back out of the way.

One of the cousins asked me about it not long ago. Did I remember it.

You don’t forget carrying somebody out. But the part that comes back first isn’t the bedroom or the weight of her. It’s standing in that living room afterward with my arms around my wife.

Out Of Stuff To Say

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Some nights I sit down to write and there’s nothing there.

I check the top of my head, find it empty, and conclude I’ve run dry. Forty-seven years of material and the drawer’s bare. Nothing worth anybody’s time.

This has been happening my whole life. What’s different now is that I’ve stopped believing it.

Here’s the thing I finally figured out. The top of my head is not the well. It’s the last four things I thought about, and if none of them were interesting, the whole inventory comes back empty.

But if I sit still — actually still, long enough for the day’s noise to drain off — something always surfaces. A conversation that stuck. A small thing somebody did. A memory that arrived for no reason I can trace.

Nothing has ever failed to come. Not once this year.

The trick isn’t finding material. It’s tolerating five quiet minutes before the panic sets in.

For most of my life my response to a blank night was to not write.

That’s it. No struggle, no discipline problem. I’d sit down, feel nothing, and go do something else. Then I’d do the same thing the next night, and the gap would open, and eventually I’d have not written for two months and would tell myself I’d been busy.

I look back at those stretches and I can see them clearly now. They weren’t dry spells. They were nights I quit early, stacked up.

What I do care about is whether it’s worth opening.

I don’t want to fill a slot. If somebody gives me four minutes of their evening I’d like them to get something for it, and the test I use is simple: did I surprise myself. If I write my way into something and think huh, I hadn’t looked at it that way, there’s a decent chance somebody else will have that reaction too. If I didn’t, I probably shouldn’t have posted it.

Almost fifty years leaves a deep well. But I’m not interested in reminiscing at people. The old material only counts if it connects to something happening now.

I know what my bad posts look like, because I wrote a lot of them a long time ago.

They’re the inspirational ones. Younger me wanted to be Zig Ziglar or Brian Tracy — wanted to say the uplifting thing, get people fired up, be the voice that moved somebody’s Tuesday. And because I didn’t actually have a settled position on any of it, everything I produced was contrived. Motivational-shaped words with nothing underneath.

I misunderstood what those men were doing. I thought the job was inspiration. It wasn’t. They were laying down foundations meant to hold up under a lifetime, and the enthusiasm was just the delivery vehicle. I copied the vehicle.

I’ve written something every day this year. Even on vacation, which I did not expect of myself.

Not because I’ve had something to say every day. Because I’ve stopped mistaking a quiet mind for an empty one.

The Warehouse

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

“Can you summarize that for me?”

I’ve been hearing some version of that my whole career. You write up a problem — the background, the angles you’ve considered, what you think ought to be done about it — and back it comes. Too long. Don’t have time for all that. Give me the high points.

So you summarize. And then, sooner or later, somebody asks you to summarize the summary.

I’m going to be honest about what that used to do to me, because the post is worthless otherwise. It annoyed me. Not because compressing things is hard — it isn’t, and helping people get more done is most of why I like this work. It annoyed me because of the story I’d attached to it, which was that people were choosing not to put in the effort.

That story was wrong, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to trade it in.

There are two versions of that request and they look identical on the screen.

Twenty years ago I was a brand-new analyst who did not know data management from a hole in the ground. I couldn’t write a query. I could open Word and Excel and that was the entire inventory. I needed people to put things on a lower shelf for me and some of them did, and I’m still grateful.

That’s the first version. It’s a novice asking, and anybody who sneers at it has forgotten what it felt like.

The second version comes from people who are nothing like novices. They’re sharp, often better at their own domain than you’ll ever be, and when they ask for the short version it isn’t because they can’t reach the high shelf. It’s because they’re carrying eleven other things and yours is the twelfth. There’s a real fire in front of them, and your carefully constructed context is one more thing asking for attention that’s already spent.

Once I started reading it as load instead of laziness, most of the annoyance went away.

But there’s a trap on the other side of that, and I almost walked into it.

If I compress everything for everybody forever, nobody ever builds the muscle. And that muscle has gotten more valuable, not less, because these tools reward the opposite of brevity. You have to be detailed with them. You have to give enough context that they don’t wander off somewhere you didn’t intend. The people getting real work out of AI are the ones who’ve learned to think out loud and in full — and nobody learns that by being handed conclusions.

So: hand people the high shelf and watch it fall, or hand them the low shelf and watch them never climb.

What I do now is neither.

I stopped summarizing and started sending the whole thing. Full context, all the reasoning, every angle I considered. Then they run it through their own tools and say give me this in a way that makes sense for me — and they get the short version at exactly the height they need it.

The difference is what survives.

When I compress something to three bullets, the detail doesn’t just leave the page. It leaves their world. If a question comes up next week that touches the part I cut, somebody has to go research the whole thing again.

You can’t ask a follow-up question of a summary. There’s nothing behind it.

Hand over the warehouse and let people set their own shelf height. They get the short version, and everything underneath it is still sitting there when they need it.

Which is the part I’d been getting wrong for years. I kept trying to find the right height.