Connect Your Dots

I’d like to tell you about my mentor. Eleanor Ross grew up in Maine and for many years operated a 17-room guest house on a beach somewhere in New England. She was a hard working, no nonsense single mother of three girls when I met her. She was the official reporter to a United States District Court Judge in Maryland.

At that time Eleanor lived in Baltimore City and her daughters attended schools in the city. After school, the girls reported to Eleanor’s office where they did their homework and then helped Eleanor by binding transcripts and packaging them for delivery.

At one point her judge was assigned a series of criminal cases involving members of an organized crime family based in New England. For whatever reason, I guess because of the New England connection, the mobsters felt comfortable making themselves home in Eleanor’s office while they waited for her to complete the daily copy transcripts they always ordered of their trials.

Eleanor didn’t like the fact that the mobsters gathered in her office, especially when her children were around, but she tolerated it because every evening when the transcripts were completed the defendants paid her in cash, usually in crisp hundred dollar bills.

Eleanor’s patience reached the end, and her Irish temper boiled over, one evening when she discovered that one of the men in her office was the target of a mob hit man. That was it – cash customers or not, no one was going to put her girls in that kind of jeopardy. She threw them out of her office.

There always seemed to be lots of drama in Eleanor’s life. Her first husband drank his way out of the family. Later, she met a man whom she was serious about, and he died suddenly. Her love for and knowledge of horses couldn’t keep her from a terrible fall in which she broke her back.

So it wasn’t surprising that she loved the drama of opera. She talked about opera often, trying to educate me about it. And she actually invited me to a concerto written by the great composer Antonio Vivaldi. It was a great experience for me to watch her passion for opera unfold. Eleanor reminded me of the rodeo star of the late 1800s, Annie Oakley – tough as nails, family-oriented, and quietly sophisticated.

In a commencement speech a few years ago Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, spoke about connecting the dots of life. He said that you can’t connect them until later in your life. You don’t know why things happen to you or how your life will be affected by things that you do but it is important that you follow your passions and take advantage of the opportunities that flow from them.

Eleanor Ross spent the last few years of her career as an official reporter of debates in the United States Senate. When she began her employment there, Eleanor felt that some of her colleagues questioned her substance. One afternoon she was in the Chamber reporting the proceedings when a Senator quoted from an opera in French. As a connoisseur of opera, Eleanor knew it well.

The office crew heard the Senator’s remark on the intercom and were valiantly searching for the term in order to help Eleanor. They were unable to find it, and were amazed when Eleanor returned to the office and spelled it for them. “I rose several degrees in their estimation on that day,” she told me.

You see, for Eleanor her love of opera – something I’m sure never entered her work environment before, and she never expected it to – surfaced at the most opportune time for her. At the end of her career she was able to connect the dots of her life under the most challenging high profile pressure.

Eleanor proves the point that everything in life happens for a reason.