The Wall

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Christmas of 1997 I asked my parents for a guitar, and they got me one.

I was halfway through my sophomore year, home for the break. I opened the box and I was genuinely thrilled — right up until I got my hands on the neck. It was a beginner’s three-quarter model, and my hands are not small hands.

I remember working very hard at not seeming ungrateful. Dad, this is awesome, I said, I just — I can’t get my fingers where they go.

He said, well, how about we take it back and see what we can find.

My uncle ran a music store in Duncan. We drove it over, got the money back, and he put a Jasmine in my hands — Takamine’s beginner line, full size, light face and darker wood on the sides. Pretty guitar.

Next year I’ll have had it thirty years. It hangs on the wall right inside my office door and I tuned it up this week and it still sounds right. I’ve written twenty or twenty-five songs on it.

I never got any good in the way people mean when they say good.

I started a guitar class in college and it didn’t take, mostly because it was aimed at lead playing and I didn’t want to play lead. I wasn’t trying to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. I wanted to play rhythm, sing, and write my own things, and for that you need chords and patterns and a feel for it, which I taught myself over about three decades.

What stuck wasn’t skill. It was the instrument.

We used to run a booth in an antiques mall, which meant a lot of Saturdays at estate sales looking for things to resell. Some of it we sold. Some of it stayed.

I don’t remember whose house it was. I’ve been to too many. But I walked in and there was a guitar sitting in a hard case, and normally I look right past guitars at these things — the classicals with the dead nylon strings, the corroded wire, the wood that’s been dry in a closet for twenty years.

This one was clean. Solid. Still roughly in tune, which tells you something about whoever had it. I picked it up and it was playable right there in a stranger’s house.

Seventy-five dollars. It’s a Ventura — designed in the States, built in Japan, and the name doesn’t exist anymore as far as I can tell. From what I’ve been able to piece together it was made before I was born.

It hangs next to the Jasmine. Those two are the featured wall in my office, and the Ventura is the one I actually reach for. Lightest strings of anything I own, so it doesn’t hurt my fingers, and the tone on it is rich in a way I didn’t pay for.

Somebody kept that guitar in shape for fifty years and then it came to my house.

I collect a few other things.

Six guitars. Thirty-some pipes, including a Gandalf one my wife gave me one Christmas, because I’ve always loved the stories about C.S. Lewis being absent-minded enough to set his own jacket pocket on fire. A couple hundred records — Bob Seger’s on the player right now. Comic books from years ago, up on a shelf. Cast iron, eight pans in the oven and another twenty-five out in the garage I haven’t gotten to since we moved. Cookbooks, for a project I haven’t started.

And books. Enough books that my wife has, over the years, gently suggested some of them could go. I rearranged them until they fit instead, which she let me get away with.

On our twentieth anniversary we were in Fredericksburg, Texas, and found a charity thrift store with a complete set of the Harvard Classics — the five-foot shelf, early 1900s, all of it. Twenty-five dollars. They sit on top of the china cabinet in my office.

Here’s the honest part about the books, and it took me a while to say it out loud. I’ve read maybe half of them. The rest I know about. I’ve read summaries, I could tell you the argument, I keep them where I can see them.

That’s knowledge near me rather than in me, and I know the difference.

There’s one more thing on my walls and I didn’t acquire any of it.

My son paints and draws. I’ve got eight of his pieces hanging in this office — I can see all eight from where I’m sitting. Drawings and oils.

I’ve told him I’m his collector. That’s the word I use for it, and I meant it as a joke the first time, and then I kept saying it.

Everything else in this room I went and found. Estate sales, thrift stores, a music store in Duncan in 1997. All of it was finished before it got here — somebody else built the guitar, somebody else bound the books, somebody else played the Ventura for fifty years, and I’m the one who came along afterward and put it on a wall.

His are the only ones where the collection isn’t done yet.

Thirty Copies

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Around 2013 I was very good at Excel, and Excel was slowly ruining me.

The job needed SQL. I had built SQL up in my head into a wall — I’m a business person, I’d say, not a technical person, and they’ve got me doing technical things. It’ll take too long. It’s too hard. I’m not getting enough help.

So I stayed in the spreadsheet, where I was fast and looked competent.

Here’s the embarrassing part. I was using Excel as a WHERE clause. Dumping data in and filtering it. I was doing SQL’s job, with SQL’s logic, in a tool that made it ten times slower, and calling that expertise.

When I finally sat down and wrote actual queries, the surprise wasn’t that it was worth the effort. The surprise was that it was easier. All that time, the entire barrier had been something I made up.

I wasn’t avoiding SQL because queries were difficult. I was avoiding it because learning it meant putting down the thing I was already good at and being a beginner in front of people.

That’s usually what stuck is. Not missing information — I knew exactly what to do. It was that doing it required becoming a slightly different person than the one I’d already built and gotten some credit for.

The proof is what happened afterward. The guy who insisted he wasn’t an IT person now thinks technically before anything else, has administered systems, and reads through thousands of lines of code to find where a record went missing.

But the belief came after. It always came after. I never once believed I could do the thing until I’d already been doing it for a while, and I have never gotten that order to run the other direction no matter how badly I wanted it to.

Which brings me to the part I’d rather not write.

I have published three books. I’m in the middle of a fourth and a fifth is finished, waiting on illustrations. I’ve sold about thirty copies of everything, combined, in total, ever.

And I have been treating “having my own business” like something mystical sitting out at the edge of my vision. Like it’s a thing other people know how to do and I don’t.

Here’s the problem with that. I sell every single day. It’s most of my job. I walk into offices and persuade people to do things differently, I sell ideas and standards and solutions to problems they didn’t know they had, and I’m good at it — good enough that it’s what they pay me for.

I just can’t do it for my own work.

I know what this is. I recognize every symptom of it, because I spent three years in a spreadsheet running the identical program.

It isn’t a knowledge problem. I don’t need somebody to explain marketing to me. I need to be a man who asks people to buy his book, and I am currently a man who writes another book instead.

Writing another book is the small step. It’s the productive-looking one. It’s the Excel of this whole situation — the thing I’m already good at, done faster and better, in service of not doing the thing.

I don’t have the ending for this one.

A year from now I’ll either have asked somebody to buy something or I’ll have four more books and the same thirty copies. I know which one I’d like to report. I also know that the guy in 2013 knew exactly what SQL was for, and could have told you at length why he should learn it, and sat in that spreadsheet for three more years.

A Grown Man On The Phone

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My voice dropped when I was thirteen and it dropped all the way.

There was a girl named Misty I’d met at camp. Louisiana, thick bayou accent, and we were friends — not dating, nothing like that, just a long-distance friend I thought was about the coolest person I knew. I called her house one night and her father picked up.

Hello sir, may I speak to Misty please.

She got on the line and the first thing she said was, you just freaked my daddy out. I asked why. She said, my daddy wants to know why there’s a grown man on the phone for me.

I was thirteen. I weighed about a buck fifty. And there was no version of me that could have gotten on that phone and convinced that man otherwise, because everything he needed to know had already happened in seven words.

The size came later.

I was six foot and a hundred and ninety pounds when I graduated high school. Slim, decent shape. Then I went to a summer arts institute that year, caught poison ivy, and got put on prednisone at the clinic.

Prednisone at a camp with three meals a day and all you care to eat. I gained twenty pounds in two weeks. By the end of that summer I was two-twenty, some of it water, some of it a late growth spurt, and some of it just the thing my family does.

Because we are not small people. I had a cousin, gone now, who was a mountain of a man — my dad watched him pick a car engine up off the ground with the headers still on it and set it in a truck bed by himself. His little brother is built the same way. My dad is thick through the chest and shoulders and always has been.

I’m six foot and built like a barrel. Forty pounds down would put me in the best shape of my life, and I would still not look like a man you’d want to startle in a parking lot.

Add a resting face that reads as annoyed when I’m thinking about nothing at all.

So this is the arrangement.

Nobody messes with me. That’s not nothing — I’ve walked through my whole adult life without ever once having to worry about a situation getting physical, and I know exactly what that’s worth and that not everybody gets it.

The cost is that the friendly part of me has a longer trip to make than it does for most people. I have to work to get it out where somebody can see it. There’s a distance to close before anyone finds out I’m not what the packaging says, and it’s on me to close it, every time, with everyone.

The stupid part is that I am the friendly one. That’s not a strategy or a thing I put on. It’s who I actually am, and I have to prove it for a living.

In 2022 I played Maurice in Beauty and the Beast.

The director told me later why he cast me. The young man playing the Beast was six-two and around three-fifty, and he wanted Belle to have been raised by a large, strong father — so that standing up to something enormous would be the most natural thing in the world for her. My size wasn’t incidental to the part. It was the reason for the part.

Somewhere in the run, one of the dancers rolled her ankle badly. She ended up sitting on the stairs outside the stage door with a half circle of people around her, everybody looking at everybody else, nobody moving.

I said hang on. Then I picked her up and carried her down two flights of stairs to where somebody could look at her.

That’s the other half of the arrangement, and it doesn’t come up nearly as often as the parking lot version.

I’ve thought about what I did with all that.

I sang bass. I joined Toastmasters and stayed thirteen years. I’ve spent most of my adult life in front of rooms, and the thing I’ve cared most about the whole time is communicating well.

A guy could look at that and call it compensation, and maybe some of it is. But I think it’s simpler. I got handed an instrument that arrives before I do and says something about me that isn’t true. So I learned to use it on purpose.

My son and I lift together, three nights a week.

Forty-seven years old and I am stronger right now than I have ever been in my life. That’s part of why I’m as thick as I am, and I’ve made peace with the trade.

He’s eighteen and he’s catching me. That’s the whole point of it.

Actually he is 6’2”. He already passed me.

Running On Fumes

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My wife and I met at a church where the preaching was worth showing up for.

It was a place where scripture was treated as something you could work through — where God was rational and supernatural at the same time and nobody made you choose. The community was real. We were known there. That’s where we found each other.

I took a music minister job two weeks before our wedding, in December of 1998, at a church across town.

We left all of it behind on the same day.

I had no business doing that job.

I was a junior. Music performance had been my major, not music education, which meant I had never taken a conducting class in my life. I knew how to sing. I knew how to be respectful of people. I knew roughly how to move my arms in front of a congregation and look like I meant it.

I did not know how to build a choir. I did not know how to teach people to sing in parts. I made almost all of it up as I went, and I was so certain I was where God wanted me that I put my head down and kept plowing.

I aggravated people. I wouldn’t put someone in front of the church who couldn’t sing. There was a couple who insisted on hauling in their own sound system and setting it up for their numbers, two weeks after the church had spent real money rehanging speakers to fix the acoustics, and I did not handle that with anything like grace.

Some of the people there loved us well. We made friends we still have. I want that on the record before I say the next part.

The sermons were the same sermon.

It didn’t matter what passage he opened to. I could look at my watch and tell you almost to the minute when he’d arrive at the reason you needed to get saved. Every week. Any text.

We had come from a place where the Bible was alive, and now I sat in a room where it went flat in front of me for two years.

And I stopped. Not dramatically — I didn’t decide anything. I just stopped praying, and I stopped opening my Bible for any reason except to have something ready for Wednesday night.

I was running the machinery of a spiritual life with nothing moving through it.

Then a bigger church offered me a youth ministry job, and I interviewed extremely well.

Here’s the part I’ve never said out loud. I had every skill that job required. I could speak in front of a room. I knew the Bible cold — I’d grown up in it. I genuinely wanted to be good to those kids and I still do. Anyone assessing me on paper would have hired me, and they did.

I was also empty, and had been for two years, and nobody asks about that in an interview. There’s no line on an application for is anything actually running.

So I performed. For a while performing works, because I was good at the visible parts and there are a lot of visible parts. Then it stopped working, the way it always does, and I was standing up there with nothing behind it.

You know what happens when a performer can’t perform anymore. You get booed off the stage.

I got booed off the stage. For a guy who’d spent his whole life being the one who was good at this, that was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

What I understand now is that God had not gone anywhere. I’d quit doing the things that took me to Him, and then I was surprised when the distance showed up.

The fix, when it finally came, was not dramatic either.

We found another church and sat in the back of it. On purpose. We didn’t volunteer for anything, didn’t sign up, didn’t put our names down. We went and we listened, week after week, for a long time.

Eventually I got into a discipleship class. And somewhere in there I started praying again, badly at first, the way you do when you’re out of practice at something you used to be able to do without thinking.

That’s all it was. Show up, listen, start again.

Nobody had to come alongside me for that part. It was available the whole time.

Left Click Or Right Click

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

This week I spent fifteen minutes finding a bug.

Records were dropping out of a data pipeline somewhere between where they started and where they were supposed to land, and nobody could say where. Finding it meant tracing the path through somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lines of code.

I could do that by hand. It would take days. Instead I put an AI tool on it, worked through it with the thing, and had the answer before my coffee got cold.

In 2003 I did not know what SQL stood for. I could not have told you what a data pipeline was, because the phrase wasn’t in general use. Artificial intelligence was something from The Matrix — machines that were coming to take over, not something that would help you find a dropped record on a Tuesday.

My title has the word “data” in it. The job is mostly defining the rules for how a system is supposed to work and then governing it by building consensus with people — running the state of the data about the way you’d run the state of a country. It is not a glamorous line of work. I’d have to look up when a job like it first existed anywhere.

I’ve spent a lot of this year saying nobody ever laid the path out for me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not in the wilderness stretch after.

But I don’t think anybody could have laid this one out.

There was no one in 2003 who could have looked at a twenty-five-year-old with a sociology degree and pointed him at a job that didn’t exist, using tools nobody had built, in a role that wouldn’t exist for another decade. The people around me then couldn’t have gotten here either. It wasn’t a place yet.

A map to a known destination is geography. A map to an unknown one is prognostication, and nobody owed me that.

Except I keep thinking about Randy.

Randy was an adjuster at a place I worked in my twenties. He’s the reason I got that job — he knew they needed somebody and he put my name in.

I was the most computer-literate person in that building, which tells you more about the building than about me. So Randy would come to me with questions. Do I left click or right click? I’d tell him. Next time, same question.

I was still answering that question ten years later.

I loved that old man. He was good people, and I mean that. But somewhere in there I remember thinking, buddy, at some point you have to learn how to click your mouse.

He had the thing I say I never got. Somebody right there, patient, glad to help, for ten years. He just never asked a question big enough to take him anywhere.

So it’s two things at once, and I’ve been saying one of them.

Nobody could have mapped me to this job. That part is true and I’m going to stop treating it as a grievance.

But the terrain under my feet was always well understood by somebody. Why a gallery calls the people who already bought from it. What the volunteers at that church were actually offering me. What an editor does. None of that required foresight. It was ordinary knowledge, sitting in the room, that I either wasn’t given or didn’t know how to ask for.

I don’t know how to tell which of those it was, from here.

The twenty-five-year-old wanted to write songs for a living.

He’d be disappointed by the office. Not by the problem-solving — he’d have liked that part, he always liked figuring out what was broken. But the fact of an office, every day, doing something with a title he couldn’t have parsed.

He’d have been wrong about the songs, though. I’ve got an album out. Eleven tracks, written and recorded and released, in a year when the day job was going fine.

Nobody mapped that either.