How to Go to Work
My son M, now 21, has been working as a sales associate at a large popular apparel retailer for several months now. Not long after he started, I asked him how it was going. He said, as only M could: “I was ironing my pants for work, and I felt like I’d look up from the ironing board, and I’d be 60.”
M has always had a flair for the dramatic. But his early experience with work has been so different from my wife’s and from mine. My wife immigrated to the US with her parents and next younger sister and was handed very little apart from some living space in a Lutheran church and bicycles to get around a small Minnesota town. She worked right from the beginning, making sewing kits after school with her family for hotel chains they would never stay in, then as a sales associate at an anchor store in the mall, then waitress and hostess jobs at restaurants in town.
My father believed in industriousness for its own sake as much as for the economics. For me that meant pretty early on mowing the lawns of family friends, then selling kids Funyons and Dr Peppers and Twix bars kept in the freezer at the swimming pool’s concession stand. Then boxes of popcorn and Mike and Ike’s and more Dr Peppers at the concession stand of the Palace movie theater on Main Street. When I could drive, I became a bagger at Denny’s Jack & Jill, arriving every other week in the dark before high school first period to help unload hundred-pound bags of potatoes and pallets of canned corn and parbaked cookies from the SYSCO truck.
M has created most of his own work thus far. He posts music on Soundcloud or Instagram, and someone notices and asks him to put music to their videos. Or he visits his mother at work and brings a copy of the lifestyle magazine he and his friend made in high school, and he ends up getting a summer job with a creative marketing firm. (They loved him, of course.) And he’s been a gigging musician for a couple of years now, dedicating hours to writing, recording, and marketing music, crafting posters for his band’s performances, unwinding balletic guitar solos at those performances. His band continues to play lots of shows, most for ridiculously little pay. Recently Savoia (his band) was on a bill with 3 other bands at a small but popular venue, and the payment for his entire band, all 4 of them, was $45, or around $11 for a 40-minute show. All the practicing, the instruments, the songwriting, and the performing for less than the taxi cost to take them and their gear home. I don’t know if I could have done it when I was his age.
Which is one of the main reasons he’s working retail. This type of job has many lessons, chief of which is how work time can feel utterly divorced from purpose, purely transactional. Not long after he started, he went to dinner and a movie with friends. He came home a little sore: “I can’t believe that Kung Fu Panda 4 and dumplings cost an entire shift.” He has also had to reckon with how a job spills over its edges — how it can lumber in and sit down inside your head before you even clock in, and how it can leave you too empty to pick up your instrument or your keyboard or your notebook when you get home. Welcome to the American economy, my son.
Q, in her fist year of college, also just decided to start picking up a few shifts a week at the coffee shop in the campus center. It was simple work, making milkshakes and coffees that mostly come out mixed at the push a button, and some catering for large events. Still, it kept her busy a few hours a week, and her friends came by while she was on the clock to help pass the time. And she ended up with a little money in her pocket while getting some experience to put down for her next job. And so it goes.
My father used to say, “There isn’t a day that I wake up and don’t want to go to work.” This statement first made me optimistic, since even early on I knew that most of my hours would be swallowed by work and didn’t want to hate it, then pessimistic as I actually entered the world of work. My early jobs — temporary, low-wage, monotonous — refuted my father each morning. When I left most of those jobs to pursue a graduate degree and then a career in academia, the line between work and not-work collapsed. Every moment was an occasion for thinking, writing, grading, doing my best to keep current on the work of others in the field. I always felt like whatever I was doing (grading, reading, eating), I should be doing something else.
M still hasn’t given up the dream of being a professional musician and creative, which is the kind of work, like academia or writing, that becomes a kind of life. I want to say that in these cases the flesh of work is marbled with life and not the other way around. The life of art and creativity (and intellectual devotion) seems more precarious than ever, but then again most lives feel this way these days.
All these years and jobs later, after having to build and keep a house, I think I’ve finally begun to understand what my father meant. We learn first to equate job and work, or even career and work, which left me unable to see his desire to go to work was not driven by the building at which he parked and the office in which he sat. He was born and raised in poverty on a farm, where one’s shoulder was always against one boulder or another, but where the world would give you things if you pushed and pulled them out of it. He went on to become a lawyer and then a judge, but he never lost the sense that any piece of land (field, yard, garden, blank page) could be made better through assiduity, nearly every problem made tractable by putting one’s hands to it, by picking up a tool. There was comfort in the newspaper he read religiously each morning, snipping articles about the mind or books or music to mail me later, but then off to work to change something, perhaps small but perhaps for the better.
Even though I understand him better and have come to appreciate the luscious feel of the gathering of purpose each day, I struggle to remain faithful to it. I still don’t always know how to meet the world — or how to want to meet it. M has just a few more weeks at his retail job before he will leave it for a new college in the fall. He will meet new musicians, write new songs, dazzle from new stages, and, I hope, remember old dreams. Q will soon return to college and continue to devour books. Her thinking and grasp of things will grow and deepen further, and I expect that she will turn her sharp self toward work that calls out to be done. But how do I help them see the world as one that they can change, or even as one that admits of change at all? And my wife and I are nearing the point at which the work in our life will become our life’s work. (I’ll save negotiating this point for another guide.)
These are good questions worthy of attention. For my part, I will continue to plant letters in neat rows, tend the page as a field, look for what sprouts. Not everything will grow, but that’s how it goes.
Alright. Better go. There’s work to do.