I taught him years ago. Years later, Jim opened the door and walked into my life again.
The oval, green mat lies at the garage entrance of our kitchen door. It is just a regular cotton mat placed there for folks to wipe their feet if necessary before entering our home.
James Marlin Taylor, Jr., a student of mine years ago, showed me that it is more than a doormat.
During the late 1970s, Jim was a student in one of my 7th-grade English classes in what was the Lower School, grades 3-8. Jim was a small boy who, like his classmates, usually followed directions, always wore his tie as loose as possible, diligently did his homework/assigned reading, and couldn’t wait for athletics at the end of his demanding academic day.
Sometime in the late spring of 1984, Jim re-entered my life, and I remember his return to the same classroom where he had been a student. Grading papers, I heard the door open, and in walked Jim. Standing at the door, he greeted me, looked around the room, and asked, “Has the room always been this small?”
He was graduating from St. Stephen’s and Saint Agnes School (SSSAS) that June and had been accepted to the University of Virginia. Needing a summer job, he had heard that I owned a small painting company and asked if I needed any painter’s helpers.
Jim was one of the best hires I ever made, and each summer as an undergraduate, he worked as a helper, a good painter, a gardener at my home, a driver of paint vans, and managed everything when I was away. When I would return from a trip, customers or contractors we painted for would say, “Go away! Jim does a great job.”
During one of his earliest fall years in Charlottesville, Jim borrowed a van to move items. He and a roommate were building bunk beds for their room, and he wanted to take items back to campus and carry the lumber needed for the beds.
Weeks later, when he returned the van, he explained that the windshield had been replaced. It seems that a 2×4 had slid forward, leaving a small crack in the original windshield. He paid for a replacement. I told him that my insurance would have covered that accident, but Jim said, “Yeah, but I broke it.”
At UVQ, Jim and Alice met, and after graduation, they asked me to read 1 Corinthians 13, St. Paul’s great description of love, at their wedding. I read from a KJV Bible that had belonged to Rev. Emmett Hoy, the deceased and beloved headmaster of SSS when Jim was a student there. After the ceremony, I gave Alice and Jim the Bible.
Jim and I always stayed in touch while he and Alice lived their shared lives in Richmond. When I worked at NCS, there was a wrought-iron landing outside my office with stairs leading to a flagstone patio. It was, I think, a fire escape for the original school building.
On pleasant days, I kept the door open that led to it, and as he had in the late 70s, Jim, one fine spring day, just walked through the door to visit. I never asked him, a resident in Richmond, how he knew where to find me; I simply enjoyed his presence.
Years later, Jim sent me a video of him standing on a long extension ladder as he placed Christmas lights on their Eastern Shore home. It was a happy reminder of where/how he had learned to safely use a tall ladder.
A year ago, he called me to plan for Alice and him to stop in Woodstock for lunch on their way home. By then, he had been the CEO of an NYC firm for several years, had spoken at an SSSAS commencement, had commuted to NYC from their home in Alexandria, and had stayed in touch all the time.
I had often asked Jim about his work managing a large company that owned open-air shopping malls, and he was always patient and used exact examples to illustrate his methods.
Photo courtesy Everly-Wheatley Funeral Home and Crematory
In my view, success came from his attention to detail, his compassion, and a bit of developed raw talent, but more than anything, his work ethic. For instance, on our brief ride from the Woodstock Café to our house, he shared that if he were visiting one of the company malls to see how it was functioning and noticed a dropped receipt in the parking lot, he would always pick it up. “Why, for goodness sake?” I asked. “To check its date and determine if the folks you’re paying to clean the lot are doing it right,” he explained. A CEO, it seems, is not too proud to pick up trash, at least not Jim.
When we arrived home, Jim and I went through the garage to the kitchen door. He was in front of me, and as he began to open the door, he glanced down at the green mat. He stopped, looked at the mat, deciding that something about it was wrong, and bent over to correct it.
Jim then opened the door and walked once again into my life. The difference was… it would be the last time.
