The Tester

In my first five years of elementary school, I can recall two great moments of learning. Both happened in fifth grade, under the tyrannical rule of Sr. Mary Clement. The first incident occurred on what began as a normal, uneventful school day. And then…

For some reason, Sr. Clement assigned us a project: to find something out about some adult’s job and report on it. It’s the only project I ever remember in grade school, in which homework always consisted of memorizing stuff or writing out stuff that was to be memorized. This was different, and I recall being motivated by it, a state no grade school teacher had yet induced in me.

I sought out the coolest adult I knew, my sister’s husband Dick. Dick was the first to enter my family of eight through marriage. He was not Italian, and he was tall. He was unfailingly kind to my little brother Art and me. All these attributes made him a huge, strange hero to me. He had also served a hitch in the Navy, where my older brother then languished, and he sported on his shoulder a tattoo of a sailing vessel, so the man was also incredibly exotic, tattoos being otherwise utterly unknown to me.

So, of course, I consulted Dick about his job. I knew it would be as fascinating, adventurous, and splendid as everything else about him. I was right.

“I’m a Tester,” he informed me.

I knew he worked for GE, but a Tester, whoa. “What do you test?” I asked.

“I test for breaks in electrical wiring,” he said.

“How?” I was enthralled. I didn’t know wires had breaks. I didn’t actually know what he was talking about. Dick sensed my cluelessness and prepared a demo.

He took a D battery out of one end of a flashlight and removed the little bulb from the opposite end. He acquired two small pieces of wire, hooked them up to the battery, and showed me how, by touching them together, the bulb would magically light up. He taped everything onto a piece of cardboard, then he taped the wires with insulating tape to preclude electric shock.

He then explained how one could test a wire with this contraption by simply spreading the two ends along a length of the wire. If the bulb lit up, that section of the wire was fine, and one moved the two testing wires down to the next length of wire. If the bulb failed to light up, the wire was faulty at that precise point. It could then be fixed.

For years after that there existed no more exciting job than Tester.

On the due date, I brought my testing contraption to school. I may have been the only one whose presentation included a demonstration. I remember that, as soon as I stood before the class, I felt outre, weirdly different from everyone else. But I persevered.

I dutifully explained the job of Tester, touching the ends of the wires together to illuminate the bulb, holding the ends apart and pretending to slide them along an imaginary length of wire until the bulb went out, at which time the Tester would know the wire had a break in it.

Sr. Clement looked at me in what seemed an ominous fashion. “Barone,” she said. “Go to Sr. Deshantall’s eighth grade class and tell Sister you’d like to give the class this report.”

I was horrified. Sr. Clement was stern and violent, but I never dreamed she would stoop to such pure cruelty. She meant for me to be mocked and jeered by the eighth graders. What other explanation could there be for such a bizarre instruction?

I arrived at the room of the eighth grade boys, knocked, entered, and tiptoed up to Sr. Deshantall. I told her that I was supposed to tell her class about my project. She said go ahead. I stepped in front of the group of over 40 boys, much bigger and much older than I, and got a few words out before breaking down sobbing. Sr. Clement’s punishment was effective.

Sister Deshantall called me to her desk and hugged me. I remember my tears staining her large white wimple. I remember, in the throes of great angst, worrying that I was messing up her wimple. She was mystified by my weeping. When I somehow explained that I believed this was a punishment for having such a lousy project, she expressed extreme disbelief and assured me that this was a reward for a terrific project.

She took me back to my own classroom, conferred with Sr. Clement, and left. Sr. Clement approached me ominously and chastised me for not knowing that she was rewarding me for an excellent project.

I see now that it was an excellent project, better by far than anything my classmates came up with. Dick wouldn’t let me down and he didn’t. What I did was, I began to learn how to decide for myself what was a bad idea, a good idea, or a great idea. That’s an important event, the moment we construct a useful yardstick to measure the value of the projects we choose to undertake.

Up Straight! Hands Folded!

On May 26, 2012, the fourth of my offspring — and first son — got married. Since I have four kids, that’s probably it. Our family is compulsively monogamous. It was till death do them part for my parents and those of my spouse. Maida has somehow managed to keep her vows to me for 42 or so years, and my three daughters too seem to be in it for the long haul. While this is not nearly as interesting as Kate and Will making it for an entire year or Kim Kardashian not making it to day 73, it does induce me to reflect on a particularly relevant topic: discipline.

I learned about discipline in grade school. It meant a couple of things. As a noun, it meant sitting up straight and silent at my desk, hands folded, for several hours. As a verb, it meant the horrible pain that would be inflicted upon me if I did not. I either had discipline or would be disciplined. The word was not among my all time favorites.

In later years, my respect for the term would rise. Discipline, I came to realize, is not the reason people start great things, but it is the reason people finish them. That 99 percent perspiration Edison talked about is the difference between the idea of a light bulb and the little globe that actually illuminates when you hit the switch.

The great tenor Enrico Caruso, who single-handedly popularized another Edison brain child, the phonograph, was asked the secret of his great success as a singer. His formula? “Work, work, and, again, work.”

The Beatles, who also took advantage of the phonograph player, separated themselves from the plethora of Liverpool boy bands of their era when they went to Germany for many months and were forced to hone their craft with endless sessions of practice and performance, 10,000 hours in the happy mantra of author Malcolm Gladwell, who documents the power of disciplined effort in his book, Outliers.

We speak often of a loving relationship but seldom of a disciplined one. I mean, who would rush off to the Cineplex to see “Discipline Is a Many Splendored Thing,” “Discipline Story” or “Discipline, Actually”? Yet marriages full of love but lacking discipline rarely survive. Marriages end for a lot of reasons, of course, and separation can certainly be the best course of action in a given set of circumstances. My only wish here is to explore the role of discipline in happy, long-term marriages.

Ryan and my daughter Marisa married 13 years ago. They have two objectively gorgeous sons, Cai and Landon. I have watched these parents parent, and I have been amazed.

Marisa had a good job as a deaf educator when Cai was born. She took one look at him and quit her good job to become a good mother. She now works part time. Ryan is a hugely successful management consultant, Naval Academy Grad, and just last year an honoree as one of the finest young business leaders in his region of the country. All of this took great discipline.

However, if you asked him about his greatest accomplishment, he would point to his sons. I have seen him arrive home from a hard day’s work (isn’t that a Beatles song?) clearly yearning for an inviting mattress and total silence. Instead, he sits with Cai and Landon for a couple of hours, playing, reviewing their respective days, being with them. He helps with dinner and takes them to bath, bed, and beyond. He does this daily and on weekends. His motto, one he lives and transmits to them daily, is “love and respect.” I love and respect Ryan, a loving and disciplined father to my grandsons.

Glen married daughter Cari two weeks after Ryan and Marisa wed. They have three children. Cari opted to remain a college professor with her husband. At Misericordia University, they built a Speech Language Department literally from the ground up, and it is today a superlative program gaining a deserved international reputation. I have observed the chair, Glen, chauffer his children to and from school every day, then chauffer them to ballet and soccer in the evening and on weekends. Without discipline of a high order, it is doubtful the family would have access to more than one meal every two or three days.

Chris married Tanya a few years ago. He works hard as a senior supervisor for a major pharmaceutical firm, doing double shifts and often going all night. He arrives home, takes his little Enna and Lila from their Mom, and showers them with the love only a father can bestow. Tanya has taken a hiatus from her job as a high school counselor to care for Lila, but she will return full time in September, and she and Chris will succeed because both have the discipline to do so.

Nick is the one getting married. Talk about discipline. He has been repeatedly diagnosed with ADHD and, after receiving a BA from Pitt, he worked for nearly a decade at a number of jobs before deciding, stunningly, to become like his sister a speech pathologist. It took almost four years of dogged determination, enormous sustained effort, and constant battle with his disorder, but he graduated in December.

That was plenty, just not enough for him. With straight A’s, he won the state award as top grad student in his field and a prestigious national award from his professional Association. He will study for his Ph.D. at one of the most renowned programs in the country. He is my son and my hero.

He met Amanda in grad school. They plan to be researchers and professors together. And parents together. To be sure, they will need an excess of love, the inner drive that seeks only the good of the beloved, that binds a couple together in a sublime and exciting life adventure. But they will need more. Love will get them started, but something else will see them through. It is that inner ability to create a goal and not rest until the goal is achieved.

Discipline, actually.