Leftover Men: On Power, Grace and Seeing Yourself Clearly

I love to be outside in the early morning – waiting for the sun to come up, getting my run in before the heat starts. I’m a “first light” kind of person.¹ When I’m out in the very early morning, it is usually just me and the fishermen setting up their lines and tackle boxes by the edge of the ocean or the banks of the river. But sometimes when you are out that early, you run into what I call the “Leftover Men”—the ones who didn’t quite make it home the night before, who seem to have just gotten up from having collapsed on the beach, or stumbled out of some hotel room

I’m always apprehensive when I run into a “Leftover Man.” Unpredictable and perhaps with nothing to lose. And no one else around. To a person like this, I imagine a runner out early for her health, in bright running clothes and new shoes, might feel like a judgment.

I ran into one of these “Leftover Men” once on a beach in Hilton Head. I was up in the wee hours of the morning; it was a moonless night and I wanted to see the beach transformed from pitch black by that brilliant ball of sun. I saw a young man staggering down the beach. I told myself not to be scared, not to ruin my run; he had done nothing to threaten me. But as I got closer he started calling out: “What are you doing? What are you doing?” No reason to take any chances. I turned and ran, trusting my legs to get me back to where I hoped the fisherman would be setting up by now.

A few years later I had another, very different, encounter with a “Leftover Man” in my neighborhood in the Phoenix suburbs. I was running on the main road. There is a narrow sidewalk and a hill covered in the kind of weeds and sorry plants that crop up when the desert has been cleared but not tended. The young man coming towards me was unable to get his body to walk in a straight line. I believe he saw my eyes flick to the street, wondering if I might have time to cross over the divided four-lanes of the main road. And he saw my eyes flick back. Too many cars, and I’m not fast enough.

Then he did something extraordinary: He stepped off the path, turned sideways to give me room, clasped his hands behind his back and nodded to me, like a gentleman from another time.

I think about that young man often. I had judged him with my eye flick. But he wasn’t a Leftover Man. Or he wasn’t ONLY a Leftover Man. I hope that he got his strong legs back under him, and that he walks steady down the street these days.

We all believe we’re the hero of our own story. But we rarely stop to think about how we appear in someone else’s — especially when we don’t intend to pose a threat. That young man on the beach in Hilton Head probably wasn’t any threat to me. He was probably just curious about what I was doing out so early. But he didn’t have enough self-awareness in that moment to think about how I would perceive him. The young man in Phoenix was similarly situated, but he had enough heart and perception to make it clear to me that he wasn’t a threat.

In my career, I often felt like the staff had all of the power. They could make my copies, or not. They could fix my computer, or not. But from their perspective, I was the one with the power. A young woman from our copy center would seem to flinch every time I talked to her. I realized how she saw me: a hard-talking person who would call and complain when something went wrong. From my side, I was just trying to meet a deadline. But from hers, I was someone who could get her fired. That broke my heart a little.

So I tried to change. Not by lowering standards, but by softening my approach. Did I have to be so hard about it? Would creating a panic help anyone? So I started using humor—clumsy jokes—in these interactions, even when I couldn’t control myself. When a Microsoft product failed to do what I wanted, I would tell the IT team: “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at Bill Gates. He needs to get it together!” No one really thought my stupid jokes were funny, but they eased some tension. In the times when I was successful at this, and there were plenty of times when I wasn’t, I think it made everyone work more effectively. I know it was better for my heart.

And, at the risk of stretching this story a bit too far: I rarely see other women out on the trail in the morning. It is fishermen, or Leftover Men. When I do see a woman– maybe another runner like me, or a shell-seeker, not letting any kind of fear stand in the way of being part of the pure magic you sometimes feel when the world lights up for another day–I always relax a little bit. On the trail, every woman is my sister, whether she knows it, or wants to be.

This kind of thinking about “softening” isn’t necessarily fashionable for women in the law. We are supposed to be tough! And if we aren’t tough yet, we are supposed to pretend to be tough until we are!

But things have always gone better for me when I treated my team more like my sisters, and my brothers. I am not ashamed to say that.

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Footnotes:

¹ Important life advice: If you are looking to really see the sun come up – to have the whole experience where the sky starts to lighten, and then sometimes it turns pink and purple, and then brilliant ball of fire comes up – do not google “what time does the sun come up.” Google “what time is first light.” Otherwise you will be too late and will be left wondering what all the fuss is about.