I am waiting for the carpenter to come begin work on the deck. But it is raining steadily and so it goes. This project began months ago and has gotten very confusing. I long for it to be over.

I am thinking about how Vernon Howard told us to stay in our lanes and what he might have meant. One guess is that it is better if we do not have wild aspirations to do anything but what is put in front of us to do.

He emphasized accuracy in all things. At work parties, we had repetitive tasks that were easy to mess up. Checkers looked at everything before the work was okayed. We did things like put postage on envelopes, sort mailings into groups, fold papers to be inserted into the envelopes. And as one wag said, “Everyone takes their stupid pill before they come.”

I got very nervous about doing things right and was often corrected. If you have stamped fifty envelopes correctly, you might make a boo boo on the fifty-first.

There was little talking, as we were also learning how to be silent. It made for a tense evening for me, these work parties. But I was learning how impossibly frightened I was of making mistakes, of being called out.

I wanted to do everything right and being wrong felt devastating. Everything was exaggerated at Vernon’s school. You saw yourself scrambling for approval and not getting it. Visitors were barely acknowledged.

Joan, Vernon’s secretary, looked out for the visitors. She was a no-nonsense sort of woman, for sure. She told me she hated Vernon! Said when he asked her to move from New York to the desert to help him, she broke her toe in hopes of getting out of the whole thing.

She knew how I felt. And knew that the only hope I was to “endure unto the end.” I wanted to cut and run. I still feel that way and I haven’t been to a work party in over 20 years.

Vicki Woodyard