The Pickup Guy
By Roger Arsht
November 28, 2020
I became fascinated with Gordon Myring only after a conversation with Jeffrey Zaslow. I had invited Jeffrey to come to Park City High School to share with my students what he had learned from Randy Pausch, the late Carnegie-Mellon Professor. Jeffrey and Randy had co-authored The Last Lecture, the novel about what Randy Pausch believed his students should know before he died. After his presentation and before I took him to the airport, I drove Jeffrey around Park City so that he could see a few of the sights. It was during this tour that Jeffrey ran across the enigmatic Gordon Myring gardening at Temple Har Shalom. I was taken aback when Jeffrey thought the congregants had given Gordon a gardening job.
It’s nice that you and the other synagogue members give that man a way to put a few dollars in his pocket," Jeffrey said, as he watched Gordon, caked in mud with an unshaved face, weeding the beds.
It took me a few moments to process what Jeffrey was saying. “Do you mean Gordon? I didn’t give him a job. No one did. He’s a volunteer – sort of.”
“You’re being polite,” Jeffrey offered. “Why would someone volunteer to weed the beds?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wants the place to look nice,” I said. “Rumor has it that he’s wealthy. He supposedly weeds gardens, paints fences, and picks up trash because he wants to. I don’t really know the man. He’s considered odd and eccentric by most Park City residents.”
Jeffrey couldn’t fathom why someone would spend his free time, especially if he didn’t financially need to, doing what Gordon was doing. For the next few days, I'd see Gordon gardening, cleaning a public bench, or dropping a little grass seed on a bare spot in the park. Almost without fail, someone would ask, ‘Who’s that?’ or ‘Why are they doing that?” That’s how my fascination with Gordon Myring began and how he eventually became a mentor.
A few days after the spring semester ended and the seniors graduated, I caught up with Gordon on Park City’s Main Street. He was using a rag and spray cleaner to wipe the storefront of one of the many showrooms. I’d like to tell you that Gordon was happy for the company. He wasn’t.
“Excuse me,” I broached.
“I’m busy. What’s on your mind young man?”
“I noticed you were cleaning the window. Is this your store? Or have you been asked by the store’s manager to do this work? Are you getting paid?”
“Three questions. I can see it’s going to be difficult to get you to mind your own business,” Gordon replied without looking in my direction.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“You’re not offending me. I just worry about your intentions. Do you want to hire me? Do you have a specific project you want me to do? Are you writing a piece for The Park Record? Regardless, I’m not interested.”
“No. No. None of those,” I blustered. “I want to know why you do what you’re doing.”
While Gordon finished the windows and moved a few feet down Main Street where he cleaned some bubblegum from a park bench, picked up a few cups that didn’t quite make it into a trashcan, and pulled a few dead leaves from a planter, I told him the story of how Jeffrey Zaslow thought he had been hired to weed the garden at the Temple. When I finished, Gordon laughed uproariously.
“I find it amusing that people think of me as enigmatic. That's not my goal.”
“What are you trying to achieve?” I asked.
“To leave things better than I found them.”
“That’s so simple.”
“Most important things are.”
“So you fix things?”
“Wards off my sense of powerlessness.” Seeing that I was confused, he continued with, “I had a stressful job for thirty years. My blood pressure was high. I fought with my spouse and I sometimes missed my kids’ birthdays and sporting events. No matter how much money I made, I never seemed to find time to enjoy it. When I fix things, I get immediate gratification. When I touch up the paint on a curb or I remove some graffiti, I get to see the product of my work. I don’t have to wait months or even years like I did for a business relationship to bear fruit.”
“How did all this start?”
“Do you play golf?”
“Yes, but haven’t played in ten years.”
“Can you meet me tomorrow morning at Park City Municipal at eight?”
“Okay.”
“Good. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
The next morning I met Gordon on the range. As we headed for the first tee, he said, “Take a look around. A golf course is a magnificent invention. It has trees, wildlife, water, and lots of grass. It’s a beautiful landscape. I love the game. I love the environment even more.”
“Me too. But what does this have to do with leaving things better than you found them?”
“I’ll show you.” Gordon walked around the first tee box, bending frequently. Within a minute he had a paper cup full of broken tees, candy wrappers, and a few cigarette butts. “We have this beautiful setting and it’s trashed. It’s a metaphor for our world. We take something wonderful and we leave it a mess. It starts with a cigarette butt and ends with piles of refuse. Walk with me.”
We both hit our drives and headed down the fairway. Gordon created a divot with his second shot. He reached for a sand and grass mixture container on the side of the golf cart. Instead of just filling the hole he created, he filled six others. When we got to the green, Gordon fixed his pitch mark and eleven others. We finished putting and, instead of walking to the next tee box, Gordon picked up a rake and smoothed out the sand that had been left unattended by golfers who had teed off before us.
“You weren’t in the sand,” I couldn’t help saying.
“I didn’t leave the broken tees and I didn’t make all of those divots on the fairway.” Gordon paused and then turned to me. “I’m simply leaving the course the way I would want to find it.” Gordon finished raking and turned to me with a question. “You said you haven’t played golf in ten years. Why?”
“It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Most good stories are. Jeffrey Zaslow and Randy Pausch wrote in The Last Lecture. ‘experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted’”.
“You memorized that?”
“I did. I read the book last night after you told me that story about Jeffrey visiting Park City. But what I want to know is what happened that made you quit golf. What happened when you didn’t get what you wanted?”
“I was in a tournament. I was an eleven-handicap playing a match against a man who said he had a twenty-four handicap.”
“So you had to give him ten or eleven strokes.”
“Exactly.”
“What happened?”
“I shot an eighty-four which is consistent with my handicap. My opponent shot a gross score of eighty-six. He missed only one fairway with his drives and he never two putted. It’s impossible for someone with a twenty-four handicap to shoot that well. After calculating his net score, I lost the match by a lot.”
“So what?”
“I wanted to win.”
“Because?”
“Because I’m competitive. I took golf seriously back then and I wanted to win my flight.”
“So you think he cheated?”
“He did cheat.”
“What happened after the match?”
“I lost it. I started screaming profanities at the pros for allowing someone to falsify their handicap. I threw clubs. The whole meltdown. I went home and put my clubs in the garage, and I haven’t played since.”
“It’s a shame. You have a good game. You’re up. Tee off.”
I had felt good about my play on the first hole. On the second, I pushed my drive out-of-bounds and then my disposition changed. I dug at the ground with my shoe and tapped the head of my driver on the ground. I teed up my second ball and hit an identical shot. Now I was pissed.
“What are you doing?” Gordon asked.
“I popped two out-of-bounds. The best I can score on this hole is maybe an eight.”
Gordon reached in his pocket and dropped a ball on the tee box. Then he dropped another and then another.
“What are you doing?”
“Hit another one. Hit two more. Or three.”
I was kind of flabbergasted. “Why would I do that?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“It’s against the rules.”
“So is having twenty-seven clubs in my bag like I do.” Gordon laughed like he had when I told him the Zaslow story. “Who makes these rules? Those rules are made for people who are planning to make a living playing golf. You’re never going to be a pro. So what’s your problem?”
I paused a minute, then said, “I don’t know how to leave things better than I left them. Like enjoying a round of golf with a friend and not worrying about the score or how many balls I hit out of bounds?”
“Sounds about right. Randy wrote that ‘when you see yourself doing something badly and no one is telling you anymore, that's a bad place to be.’ Your temper has chased the people away who should have told you to relax and enjoy the game.”
For the next four hours, I played one of the most enjoyable rounds ever. Without the burden of trying to score like a pro, I actually shot a good score even though I was rusty. “I haven’t had this good a day on the course for a long time. I forgot how much fun it can be,” I said to Gordon.
“I’m glad.” Gordon reached into his golf bag and removed a tote bag.
“Is that what I think it is?” It was like the bag he carried around when he was cleaning up the city.
“You’ve graduated. You’ll find a putty knife for scraping. Some Windex for cleaning, a few rags, and a small hoe for gardening.”
“Where am I meeting you?”
“Tomorrow morning at Har Shalom. Seems like a fitting place to start.”
“What do you think Jeffrey Zaslow and Randy Pausch would say?”
“I don’t know, but I think you’re going to hear a lot of people asking who you are and why you’re doing that. At this stage of my life, it’s the best compliment I can receive.”