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Village life: I'm grateful for work

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Sunday, August 19, 2012

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Lovely work, something to do, something that matters, a gateway to grown-up life, delicious adulthood. I'm grateful, very grateful, for work.

Even when it has been exasperating, work has always been good for me. September, the month of Labor Day and all the hoopla of back-to-school, counts as a happy time of year.

Recently I was looking at my Social Security earnings record online — that chart that tells you how much you've made every year since you got your lifelong nine-digit number. In my case, it goes back 46 years, which seems like something. I've always worked, so there is an amount every year. I started slow.

In 1966, the first year on record, I earned the grand sum of $36.

Though I've never had a knack for the big bucks, I eventually made a bit more.

That chart got me thinking about how lucky I've been, especially as a kid in my teens and twenties, to have a chance to do interesting work. And it makes me sorry that these days it's so hard for kids — not to mention thousands of adults — to get jobs. Even more sadly, it seems it's gotten increasingly hard for people to enjoy the jobs they do have.

A 2011 Gallup poll, picked up by a host of succeeding articles and commentaries, found that 71 percent of workers are "not engaged" or "actively disengaged" from their work. Some commentators translated that to "they hate their jobs."

It's a sad conundrum when we're spending so much time and political energy trying to get people back to work. It seems our societal problems are, as usual, many layered and confounding.

Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure the misery of not working exceeds the misery of working, unsatisfying as that might be. We especially know that in Flint, even though things have gotten somewhat better. In June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we were at 9 percent unemployment — down from our recent high of 15 percent in December 2009. That's still close to 17,000 of us casting about with nothing to do. There's a lot of human dignity and hope at stake.

Life has treated me better than most. Ever since I was 14, when I got a Saturday job as a page at a little Carnegie library in Coshocton, Ohio, I have really liked working. I love having a job.

My jobs have been escapes, rich sources of material and palliatives for a constitutionally restless spirit. They have given me a gratifying chance to do something — type a letter, serve a drink, teach a class.

That library, for example, was a feast for the senses. There was the irresistible fragrance of books. There was the elegance of the high, domed ceiling, the cast iron spiral stairs to the second floor, the wooden stool I stood on to restack books on high shelves. There was the silence itself, which really wasn't silence since you could always hear the scrape of a chair, a page turning, a slight cough, a librarian quietly answering a question, the mild thunk of the little date-due stamp.

I liked all that — especially the smell.

One of my jobs was to take little pieces of paper on which people wrote the dates of magazines they wanted to read. I would go down to the periodicals stacks in the musty basement and bring back what they wanted. I loved that. After a lifetime of consignment to protected childhood challenges, I got to do something useful.

I'm not sure how the Coshocton library paid me. Maybe I volunteered, because I was only 14 and my Social Security record doesn't start until two years later.

I do remember the year of the $36. That summer I earned a couple of bucks a week at the local newspaper. I helped a circulation assistant count the weekly take brought in by paper boys.

(It was all cash, and, yes, they were all boys.)

My boss was a taciturn, depressed man with one withered leg who usually worked alone. At first we barely spoke as we piled up quarters and dimes.

I found the work calming, especially when we got everything to add up. He was fastidious, exacting. If he ever told me what was wrong with his leg, I don't remember. Maybe because of his "deformity,"or the fact that somebody cruelly placed him in an office at the top of tall stairs that he had to laboriously negotiate every day, or maybe because of his romantically dark disposition that meant he never condescended to me, I was very fond of him.

We only spent three hours together every Saturday, but we forged a friendship. He eventually asked me a question or two about myself and listened to my answers. I wanted to count up everything correctly.

Later in life, at similar moments of accomplishment, as when the counts matched, I would have said, hey, let's have a shot of something. But then, I was only 16 and still two years from having my first drop of alcohol.

When I went back to my All-American high school life with that little bit of money, I missed the orderliness, the challenge of adding things up, and that small upstairs room. I also missed his grown-up melancholy and the aftershave he might have put on just for me.

My jobs have almost always offered escape. As a kid, I chafed at how our preacher's family, a tight-knit unit, was often claustrophobic, my behavior under constant scrutiny. Our cohort of believers were endlessly, predictably quarrelsome about some things and boringly unanimous on others, especially about how a young girl should or shouldn't act. It was liberating to be among strangers who didn't care, as long as I did my job.

In short, right from the start those five decades ago, my jobs have been a fine and healthy release. For adults, of course, what rests in the balance is undeniably grave — survival, a non-negotiable right, and we are tearing away at something essential if grownups are kept away from jobs.

But it's the kids I'm thinking of today. They are really deprived if we can't find them a path to the interesting and complex joys of work.

When I came up, in a world so much more congenial to real prospects for the young, you never knew who you might encounter, who might be unsurprised and unperturbed by your curiosities about life. You never knew what you might learn, or what you might find out you were good at.

Every kid should have that chance.

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Columnist and poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.

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