Today the best approximations that many of use get to such a heady sense of eventuality come in the performance of our school vacation jobs. Summers are intermissions, and once we hit our teens it is during these breaks in our structured regimen that we initially taste the satisfaction of remuneration that is earned, not merely doled.
Tasks defined as work are not only graded, they are compensated; they have a worth that is unarguable because it's translates into hard currency. Wage labor -- an in the beginning, this generally means a confining, repetitive chore for which we are quickly over-qualified -- paradoxically brings a sense of blooming freedom.
At the outset, the complaint to a peer that business supersedes fun is oddly liberating -- no matter what drudgery requires your attention, it is by its very required nature serious and adult.
At leasts that's how it seemed to me. I come froma line of people hard hit by the Great Depression. My mother and her sisters went to work early in their teens -- my mother operated a kind of calculator known as a comptometer while her sisters spent their daysm respectively, at a peanut factory and at Western Union.
My grandmother did piecework sewing. Their efforts, and the Democratic Party, saw them throught, and to this day they never look back without appreciation for their later solvency. They take nothing for granted. Accomplishments are celebrated, possessions are valuable, in direct proportion to the labor entailed to acquire them; anything easily won, or bought on credit is suspect.
When I was growing up we were far from wealty, but what money we had was correlated to the hours some one of us had logged. My eagerness to contribute to, or at least not diminish, the coffer was countered by the arguments of those whose salaries kept me in school:
My higher education was a sound group investment. The whole family was adamant that I have the opportunities they had missed an, no matter how much I objected, they stinted themselves to provide for me.
Summer jobs wre therefore a relief, an opportunity to pull a share of the load. As soon as the days turned warm I began to peruse the classifieds, and when the spring semester was done, I was ready to punch a clock. It even felt right.
Work in June, July, and August hand an almost Biblical aspect: In the hot, canicular weather your brow sweated, just as God had ordained.
Moreover, summer jobs had the luxury of being temporary. No matter how bizarre, how onerous, how off my supposed track, employment terminated with the falling leaves and I was back on neutral ground. So, during each annual three-month leave from secondary school and later from the university, I complied on eclecti resume:
lawn cutter, hair sweeper in a barber shop, lifegaurd, delivery boy, temporary mail carrier, file clerk, youth program coordinator on my Montana reservation, ballroom dance instructor, theater party promoter, night-shift hospital records keeper, human adding machine in a Paris bank, encyclopedia salesman, newspaper stringer, recreation bus manager, salmon fisherman.
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