O
ne evening, some years ago, in a noisy restaurant, someone I’d met for the first time that day—a woman in the same line of work as my wife—sweetly asked, “So, David. What is it you do? For a living.”
Ah! A question brimming with innuendo! I do (and did) several things for money. I wondered, Should I list them all? Must I name first the activity that most profitably produces pay? Or should I start by saying what occupies the greatest part of a normal day? Would it be all right to declare what I love best to do?
I hadn’t punched a clock in years. My spouse was across the table, cutting meat for one of our young children. Without meaning to be dramatic, I looked around to make certain no one but my new acquaintance would hear what I had to say. Then I leaned close and whispered the most truthful answer I could manage. “For a living,” I said, “I am married to Vivian.”
I discovered later that Viv’s friend found my reply shockingly offensive.
W
hat do I do, what have I done? Oh, the happiness of honest labor! How sweet it was, in 1967, to work in the deafening din of a cannery, running a machine that put syrup into cans of pineapple, and vacuum sealed the lids. How wonderfully terrifying, a dozen years after that, to wear a coat-and-necktie and say in my deepest big-boy voice, “Good morning, Your Honor. David C. Fischer, appearing for the Plaintiff.” Oh, the joy of almost-honest work!
I’ve sold shoes, mopped floors, taken pictures, stocked shelves, scrubbed toilets, swung hammers, answered phones, and brokered the rental of residences. I’ve been paid to produce a page of purple prose.
W
hat do I do, what have I done? What is safe to say during dinner with a woman who is trying to be polite? When I think back over my career of avoiding a career, three days stand out as more remarkable than seven thousand of the others. In each instance I was sore when I woke on the morning after. In each instance I have long forgotten my rate of pay. But I remember perfectly, and with equal satisfaction, both the labor and the lunch hour.
What I’d call my all-time favorite (if I had to choose) was a Saturday in the fall of 1968. I was a college sophomore then, in Oakland, California. Several of my pals and I responded to an ad, a slip of paper thumbtacked to the campus Job board. A professor from another school, and his wife, were working weekends to build a round-walled home in the Berkeley hills. They were constructing it from a retired redwood water tank, twenty-four feet across. We college kids were hired to dig the footings for the foundation. We used picks and spades and buckets. We all took turns with a jackhammer that was joined umbilically, by long lengths of hose, to a diesel-powered air compressor far up a mud-slicked slope. I loved that bone-jolting, arm-numbing, gut-busting tool!
The oily fragrance of eucalyptus filled the air. The whispering leaves of towering trees saved us from the sun. Breezes chilled our sweat-soaked shirts each time we paused to gulp some water from a jug.
Sometime after twelve o’clock we took a break for lunch. Our employers set out a picnic feast. Bakery bread, cold cuts, and several cheeses. And wines! The professor uncorked a few bottles and offered us the luscious stuff in paper cups. We boys were somewhat less industrious in the remaining hours of the day.
O
n another Saturday in that same school year, I did odd jobs at the home of a white-haired widow, a Mrs. Grant on Coolidge Street. Or Mrs. Hoover on Harding, it might have been. I recall some such pairing of presidential names. One worker was all she needed, and normally that would have been my dorm-mate Philip Gruenbaum. But on that particular weekend Phil had gone home to Burlingame. In the cool of the early morning I climbed a ladder to trim a high hedge. When I finished, I painted a pair of wooden lawn chairs. Mrs. Grant served a delicious lunch, I remember, with lemonade and cookies, but no wine.
Her home had been built before the War. It had high ceilings and, in the kitchen, a cheery, checkerboard asbestos tile floor. After lunch, instead of sending me back to work, Mrs. Grant invited me to join her in the darkened living room, to watch the Kentucky Derby on her console color TV. I stayed awake for the entire race, I am proud to say. I sort of hoped Philip would be gone again when the Indy 500 rolled around.
A
nother fine day was on a summer job in 1974. (I was still in school; I had dropped out for a while, and found a bride, but hadn’t yet recognized that marriage could be a job all its own.) On my resumé I later showed my title as “photosynthetic processes controller,” but what that meant, of course, was I cut grass. I mowed the lawns at a state mental hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Some miles away, the hospital had a summer camp, on a little lake. But the camp was idle and empty—closed by reason of lack of funds. The grass there grew all summer, untended and undisturbed.
One day in late August, however, our entire grounds crew—six or eight men, as I recall, and mostly older guys at that—rolled our riding mowers up wooden ramps and onto pickup trucks. We packed sickles, scythes, and such, and set forth for the camp. When we arrived, our shop foreman pointed out what needed to be accomplished, and he announced that when we were finished we’d be done. That is, we could fish or nap for whatever was left of the day. Then we would drive back to Fort Wayne to have our timecards punched at quitting time. Some guys had brought poles and tackle boxes. Upturned boats with peeling paint rested on racks along the lake. There was a rickety pier to fish from, too.
We worked more efficiently that day than on any other of the summer. We trimmed the grass, and whacked the weeds, we sawed and stacked some deadwood. By noon the place looked great. We put away our tools. We ate brown-bag lunches packed by the hospital kitchen staff and drank cold canned sodas. The fishermen began to fish.
The day was hot, the lake was wet, if not exactly chilly. No one else was interested in a swim, but I found some oars and a boat that looked as though it wouldn’t leak. When I’d rowed far enough so that without my glasses I felt alone, I stripped down to the outfit I was born in and dived into the somewhat weedy water.
In another week, I would be back inside a classroom. I had one semester left to go. I should have been thinking then about what I would someday do. For a living, as they say. But, as I floated naked in that embryonic soup beneath the summer sun, I could not imagine a coming day when I would ever feel more alive. ♦
|
I would welcome your thoughts on this page (or any of my
others). Write to me at the following address. Please
be sure to spell Grossmann with two n’s and
mention what page you are writing about.
Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
|
Top of this page
|
