Ten Years

This weekend's concerts marked my ten year anniversary with my orchestra. At the final concert of the year, every member who has an anniversary of note is asked to stand and receive acknowledgment for their commitment to the orchestra. We wear a boutonniere, or corsage, depending on gender, and that's that. Ten years goes by, and that's about it. You could have played much longer than that, and a flower on your lapel is the extent of the recognition you will receive. This weekend, we recognized some members of our orchestra who have played with us for as long as 30 years. They received no gift or other recognition beyond the flower and standing at the end of concert. Remarkably, we are asked to remove our flower on Friday night so we can wear it again on Saturday. They don't even want us to take it home. I guess that shows the state of funding for the arts, but I think it's incredibly tacky.

Our management doesn't really do much at all to recognize the time we've served in our orchestra. It's something of a sore spot, and there's always a joke or two about how cheap they are. It's a blatant sign of how foolish they are when dealing with us. It's remarkable what $50 in the form of a gift certificate to a great restaurant would do for morale, but they're incredibly short sighted. In the big scheme of things, $50 once a year for the handful of anniversary holders is a drop in the bucket compared to the benefit it would bring them in good will.

We had a colleague this year who retired from the orchestra after 25 years. He's a remarkable musician, and a savvy thinker who has been our leader through seven negotiations. He's served on every committee under the sun, and honestly, our lives are better because of his hard work on our behalf. People feel that he can be difficult sometimes, however, and there are some who aren't disappointed to see him leave. Regardless, since I'm chair of the orchestra committee, I wanted to make sure we treated him right.

We solicited funds from the musicians and I came up with about $150. We also have access to funds from our players association, and so I went on a mission to find something that would be meaningful to him.

He's a guy who likes the finer things in life, and I traipsed all across the city trying to find just the right thing. I ultimately decided to try and find a nice humidor and buy him a box of cigars, which seemed to be the perfect gift for someone like him. It felt right, though we've never given anything quite like that (and I have to think that part of the reason is that usually a woman's doing the shopping!). He's moving into another job where he's become the head of another orchestra, so I wanted to also get him a nice plaque of appreciation that he could hang in his office.

Tonight, as we sat in our final concert of the season, I reflected on the fact that this was the final concert of his career. It didn't seem like quite enough, considering all he has done for us over the years. I decided, in my position as chair of the committee, that we would also buy him a bottle of his favorite Scotch. Sometimes, it's nice to be the leader and have the ability to make executive decisions. That's a cool $100 right there, but so be it. It took it to the right level, and it was a major home run.

I left the party tonight feeling an immense sense of pride in the fact that we treated him right. It simply felt like the right thing to do. All told, we spent $325 on his retirement gift, and I'm sure some others would have thought that was too much. But he deserved it, and I'm glad we did it.

People need to be appreciated, and shown how valuable they are to us. As friends and colleagues, we owed it to him to do it, and next week, we're going to be giving a gift to someone who's actually been forced out of his job for musical reasons. We're still going to be treating him right, with the dignity he deserves.

I hear his passion is working with model trains. I have two thoughts: a paid trip on a railway in Canada that does day trips through a beautiful gorge filled wilderness, or a gift certificate to a model train store. Not my cup of tea, but I think he'd be ecstatic.

I've got to do some more digging about him though--no one seems to know anything about him at all, which is sad, since he's been in the orchestra for over 25 years.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw some of my family today, including a couple of Jim's daughters. Katherine was leaning against me, and suddenly she said to me, "I'm sad for you Uncle Dan."

I asked her why.

She answered and said, "because you loved a woman, but she didn't want to have any babies, and now you're alone again. That makes me sad for you."

Kinda makes me sad too.