Mrs. Furr's Pond

 This is a story about a very long walk around a really small lake—but one of tremendous personal value to me.

The year was 1990, and I was a used car salesman. I was 27 years old, married, with two dogs and a small ranch house. My then-wife was already a career person and on her way up in her company. I thought I would probably sell cars for the rest of my life. The car business, however, is where the term “feast or famine” must have originated.

Still being trained by some of the more seasoned salespeople, I found myself at a tiny dealership on Austell Powder Springs Road, between Austell and Powder Springs. Across the street lived Mrs. Furr. She had a nice little house under some massive oaks, and behind it, a small lake—maybe two or three acres of water. It was a pretty lake; very serene and private.

Mrs. Furr would hire people to do various tasks around her little oasis, and on Saturdays, some of the workers would show up to fish as one of the perks.

I’ll never forget one such Saturday. I was already hard at work—making calls and trying to get a couple of deals closed—when a jalopy of an old station wagon pulled into Mrs. Furr’s driveway. All four doors opened at once, and four young men got out. They went to the back of the car, reached in through the open tailgate, and pulled out a cooler, several fishing poles, and a few small tackle boxes. Two grabbed the cooler, the other two grabbed the poles, and they headed down to the lake.

And I watched them—from a window across the street.

Staring out the window and doing absolutely nothing else, I caught the attention of my boss and trainer at the time.
“Look at them fools,” he said, breaking my focus. “There they are, on a nice Saturday, driving that hundred-dollar car and fishing, when they could be out making money so they could drive a nice car.”

I nodded, but I couldn’t pull myself away from the scene.

In fact, that moment was life-changing for me. I’ve never forgotten it, and I’ve written about it often. That moment was like being offered the red pill or the blue pill, and I chose the red pill. I completely understood the appeal of living in the blissful simulation, but I wanted to know what was real. And I believed those fishermen knew something I didn’t.

Thirty-four years later, I found myself wrapping up a career filled with retail sales. I had good years and bad years, but I always kept that lesson in mind—and I tried to “go fishing” often.

Even within the past two years, I found myself in another retail position. In that time, I was called to the office three different times and offered three new positions—all with higher pay. But in the last of those roles, I found myself completely sold out to the job again, and Mrs. Furr’s pond felt further and further away.

That’s when Joey walked into the store. Ironically, I was also writing a book about joy, but found myself blocked—struggling to maintain it.

After several conversations over a few days, Joey said,
“You should apply at Jim R. Miller Park.”

I did.

That’s another story—but I got the job.

Yesterday, several people in various maintenance roles were working to get Miller Park back in order. We’d had our International Festival over the weekend, and the fair was coming soon, so it was all hands on deck—including me.

One of the jobs was to take down a big prop in the front lobby. We’d had a world map on a massive box and invited visitors to stick a pin wherever they’d been in life. The canvas came down first, then I disassembled the big box, leaving us with eight large panels to store for another day and another project.

I helped someone load the panels onto a trailer, and he said,
“Thanks for helping me load them, but I don’t know how I’ll unload them.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

We jumped into the big county truck and headed out. Left on Powder Springs Road, then another left onto Austell Powder Springs Road—I knew every mile. But I didn’t know where we were going.

Finally, we turned right on Oglesby Road. And just a few feet in, on the left, was a little paved path with a locked gate. We pulled in, unlocked the gate, and the next thing I knew—we were parking beside Mrs. Furr’s pond.

There was a metal building there, and Zack opened the doors.

I just stood there for a moment. I was there—by the pond—after all these years. That’s when it hit me: I had never even been there before. I had only seen it from across the street.

Now, standing beside the water, I looked up at the very window I had looked out of 34 years ago. The tiny car lot is still there.

And that’s when I realized—it was a homecoming.

The recent choices I’ve made in my career have brought me more in line with the dynamic I witnessed that Saturday, when four young men got out of a “hundred-dollar car” and fished.

What joy.