I took nine months off when I retired from teaching. Then I started working again. I’ve held a job for 59 consecutive years.
This is the complete list in chronological order:
Snow shoveler; busboy at 14 at a restaurant where the husband and wife co-owners were both alcoholics and often screamed at each other directly above the main dining room where Sunday lunch was being served; produce boy and bagger — I learned how to bag at speed with both hands; in college, four year custodian of 3 large group science classrooms and 3 bathrooms — Norbert Merkel, my boss, a farmer and cobbler with an 8th grade education was my first really good boss; machine shop metal cutter in a factory on the edge of the Schuylkill River where my friends and I met “Fuck Man,” a kid our age who could effortlessly slide more f-words of every grammatical vintage into paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness brilliance; a highway flag man, where I learned the geography of rural Berks County and perfected my one handed baseball swing cracking stones with the flag into fields and woods all the time I narrated my own glorious at-bats; two summers as a packer and loader of meat orders in trucks; a man on a ham line and pretzel assembly line; the summer I was hired to teach, stock boy and inventory clerk at one of the first everything-under one-roof stores called Two Guys, a forerunner of Wal-Mart — the boredom was physically palpable; then high school teacher, prom organizer, coach, negotiator, grievance chair, union president; on to tutor and dog handler; finally, bookstore clerk, book seller, Children’s Story Time host plus Classic Book club moderator plus Poetry Writer group leader, barista, hauler of boxes, scrubber of floors and toilets and a fountain.
All of those jobs brought me more than pay. They gave me a treasure of experience I am still calling upon to give a more measured judgment about every part of life. Without the thousands and thousands of people I met in those places of work, without their example, beneficial and otherwise, I would not possess the skills I do have to navigate relationships, daily mini crises and the larger, much more serious personal detonations that hit everyone.
Their lessons and teaching will go on as long as I am alive.
For me, working has been all about movement, keeping the body and mind in motion. It has been about meeting and greeting strangers and about the discipline of lists completed, tasks done well, mistakes corrected, disasters averted and recovery from disasters I made.
Most importantly, at 14 I began to learn how to read the faces and body language of strangers, a skill that proved beyond value when I began to teach. Flickers of emotion, subtle changes in posture, barely there shifts in the tone and pitch of a voice — I was given an education in the back-and-forth communication of bodies, silences and the ghostly meanings, always present, beneath words.
In keeping with my Posts on reading and writing, this one on work also contains an anxiety, that with the advent of AI, experiences such as mine will become, are becoming, as obsolete as a land line and rotary dial phone. Where will kids go to begin the civilizing process of labor?
