The smells of formaldehyde and anaerobic bacteria stir near the air vents.
Against the steel machinery and hard stools of Jackson Memorial Hospital’s second floor microbiology lab in downtown Miami, six women have been knitted together by time and love and sorrow like a sweater.
Black counter tops and grass-green cabinets rise up from square patches of gray linoleum flooring, frequently hidden beneath roaming white lab coats. Windows that once opened to street and sky now only reveal a concrete building two feet away.
“Microbiology, Martha speaking,” has been the secretary’s greeting for 30 years.
Circumstance has interrupted once naturally auburn and blond hair with strands of white and smooth skin with folds. Hair is shorter, pant waists tighter. But the relationship between my mother and her Hispanic co-workers, whom I know simply as Lynn, Ana, Carmen, Susana and Maria Elena, is unchanged.
Inside jokes extend back three decades. Even Lynn, the only American among them, is Cuban by affiliation. They taught her Spanish.
“She even thinks in Cuban,” my mother says.
For 20-somethings entering a lean job market with fear, even paranoia of unemployment, we may never know what it’s like to open up to co-workers beyond a post-work martini. But my mother’s bond gives me hope that one day a co-worker will know to finish my sentences and be witness to my worst moments in all their honesty.
In the newspaper industry, one- and two-year programs at top papers allow young journalists to experience different types of reporting. The system rotates us through varied papers, bureaus, departments, and while it promotes our careers, it moves us along just when we start to love a boss or co-worker.
Places–and people–get only a monthslong glimpse of who we are.
After a year of writing at The Los Angeles Times, I developed a friendship with two co-workers that grew beyond talk of story ideas and editors’ gripes.
Our dialogue moved into an arena where only the most exclusive of memberships extend.
Then I moved to Chicago.
With relocation a key to ascending the success ladder, I wonder how many of us will one day measure time by the balding heads and sagging skins of those in cubicles that surround us?
Not many, says William Sonnenstuhl, a Cornell University professor of industrial and labor relations who breaks it to me softly.
In the last 20 years, he adds, there has been a move away from promoting intimate relationships in the workplace. He says I probably won’t feel anything similar to that of my mother and her co-workers for another 20 years, when the cycle turns and employers recognize the emotional layers in offices.
Corporations realized during the dot-com era that even progressively open loft office spaces and “team” projects couldn’t foster friendship, and in fact, less privacy meant more competition, Sonnenstuhl goes on to say.
Exceptions exist in industries such as law enforcement and construction–dangerous occupations where loyalties like those between mother and her co-workers prevail and thicken with time.
Every workplace is capable of a friendship network, but “whether it’s allowed to continue is a serious question,” Sonnenstuhl says, referring to the increasing amount of temporary work that has replaced permanent employment.
At perhaps one of the least touchy-feely jobs in Miami where samples are tested for tuberculosis and AIDS, six women break for two times a day for 90 minutes a day to reveal their dimensions.
Ana is fiercely loyal and pours mountains of sugar into her coffee. My mother gives Lynn advice on her two young sons who won’t stay in their beds at night.
Carmen refinishes old furniture and waits for love.
Susana knew my mother at 98 pounds when they studied chemistry 101 in college. Maria Elena’s husband has been my family dentist for as long as I can remember. My mother is teaching her how to let her teenage daughter go.
Most of the time they know without asking.
Routine has paced time. Break at 9 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m.
They wait for each other. They find out why someone is late.
Conversations that I have only been privy to once range from vacation stories and birthdays to menopause and God. Somehow during three decades of espresso and turkey sandwiches, they became a symbiotic mix of family and therapy.
But it will end.
In Sonnenstuhl’s research of retirees, he found many hesitate to leave the workplace because of the “friendship networks–the things they grieve the most when they do retire,” he said.
For my mother, retirement is not a goal but a necessity. It approaches and will inevitably destroy her circle’s harmony.
To me she’s an example, proof that real relationships can exist in a cold laboratory or police car, atop a mound of construction dirt, and even amid computers and the fluorescent lighting of a newsroom.
If we seek it.
