I don't work hard, I think, but I do work long hours. Since I can remember, people have commented on my "work ethic" occasionally piling on with the epithet "workaholic." I have written around this topic before (Balance Schmalance), alluding to the odd and curious relationship we have with work and leisure. Evidently we admire people who work hard, but maybe not too hard. But as I have said, I don't work hard.
I have seen work all my life. I have seen refugees toil for next to nothing (and it isn't a very nice metaphor btw) and I have sat and worked with billionaires. In between, I have worked with everyone else I suppose, and there isn't much to the construct I don't understand. I have gone to bed physically and mentally beat from my endeavors, filthy and pristine, well compensated and broke. I started working early, and have had very few gaps in employment these past forty years. I suppose I have had more than fifty jobs, and I excelled at all but a handful. I cannot remember the last time I dreaded the job I woke up to each morning, but I have disliked some of the people that inhabited the environments I worked in. Work is, has been, and will be the primary activity in my life.
My typical work week now has me at the office from 8:30am until 9pm Monday through Thursday, 8am until 5 or 6pm Friday, and eight or ten hours over the weekend. I should emphasize that I am not stooped over a drill press during that time, standing at a cash register, waiting tables, digging ditches, nor am I engaged in a thousand other more demanding occupations. My days are remarkably diverse and efficacious, and most importantly, I direct most of the activities (the assignment and deportment of) I am involved in. I work long hours, I do not work hard.
I think of Mr. Vassel when people comment on my working regime and I smile. I think of hundreds of merchants and laborers in Dar es Salaam, Montego Bay, Sanaa, London, Kampala, Kigali, Irbid, Hebron, and here in Palos Hills, Illinois. People toiling away for equivalent hours for far less, with half the hope or reward I take for granted each and every day. I smile when I invoke Mr. Vassel, and any notions of self-righteousness or industry indignity evaporate instantly in a small cloud of irony and self-deprecation.
Mr. Vassel ran a small family grocery store across from my rented house in Jamaica, on the edge of the worst slum in Montego Bay. It was a very small building that held an impossibly diverse range of products on old wooden shelves. He was a large, gentle man who was in his seventies when I met him. He and his wife had run the store for more than fifty years, and it was a local institution that held the fragile sinews of the community together when the world around it was deteriorating. He was the mayor of the "pen", the slum that slid down into a long and dirty gully. The store stood up on the apex of that horizon, at the end of the sardonically named Lovers Lane. Fittingly, Mr. Vassel and his wife looked after it all with kindness and love.
Sam Vassel married his bride young and shortly thereafter went off to Panama for seven years to work on the recently completed Panama Canal. He toiled there under terrible conditions in order to come back and purchase the store and eventually, his family's legacy. He and his wife were in that store more than 12 hours a day six days a week for half a century or more, providing credit, settling arguments, passing on good news and dampening bad, and educating those of us who would listen. I loved climbing the stars up to the store, and often invented errands or tastes to do so. He gave me advice about my chickens, she gave me her grandmother's recipes, and I often just sat around for ten or twenty minutes listening to the congenial patois as other customers drifted through for salt cod, tomato paste, and a patient and wise ear.
Jamaicans, who know a few things about labor and leisure, never brought up a balance criticism about the Vassels, they never even conceived it. And those two lovely people didn't have to work those hours for all those decades for financial reasons. They did so because that was their job, to hold up an overlooked community with their collective hands. There are no hands on these peoples clocks btw, no 5pm whistles or overtime pay. Maybe there are just too many other people who don't understand what work can be, and that is a bit saddening.
I work a lot simply because the tasks I have adopted cannot be done in any sort of minimalistic contract with my employer or myself. I work a lot because my brain doesn't shut down, and it is better to keep it employed in challenging and productive ventures (this is why retirement scares the heck out of me - me and my thoughts alone all day!). I work a lot because I find myself in the the intriguing company of people who need me and who inspire and who help me. There is no other habitat like this in my universe. I work a lot in the slim hope that I too will make a legacy in my "store" like those two wonderful people who sold me groceries for two years at the edge of the world in a place where hopes and dreams had no business being bartered in.
* In my ongoing love/hate relationship with the internet, I just did a quick search for Mr. Vassel and found this. I cannot tell you how broad my smile is, or how light my heart seems as I think about my friend!
http://www.governorgeneralsawardsjamaica.com/st_james.php?subaction=showfull&id=1182287197&archive=&start_from=&ucat=15&
I have seen work all my life. I have seen refugees toil for next to nothing (and it isn't a very nice metaphor btw) and I have sat and worked with billionaires. In between, I have worked with everyone else I suppose, and there isn't much to the construct I don't understand. I have gone to bed physically and mentally beat from my endeavors, filthy and pristine, well compensated and broke. I started working early, and have had very few gaps in employment these past forty years. I suppose I have had more than fifty jobs, and I excelled at all but a handful. I cannot remember the last time I dreaded the job I woke up to each morning, but I have disliked some of the people that inhabited the environments I worked in. Work is, has been, and will be the primary activity in my life.
My typical work week now has me at the office from 8:30am until 9pm Monday through Thursday, 8am until 5 or 6pm Friday, and eight or ten hours over the weekend. I should emphasize that I am not stooped over a drill press during that time, standing at a cash register, waiting tables, digging ditches, nor am I engaged in a thousand other more demanding occupations. My days are remarkably diverse and efficacious, and most importantly, I direct most of the activities (the assignment and deportment of) I am involved in. I work long hours, I do not work hard.
I think of Mr. Vassel when people comment on my working regime and I smile. I think of hundreds of merchants and laborers in Dar es Salaam, Montego Bay, Sanaa, London, Kampala, Kigali, Irbid, Hebron, and here in Palos Hills, Illinois. People toiling away for equivalent hours for far less, with half the hope or reward I take for granted each and every day. I smile when I invoke Mr. Vassel, and any notions of self-righteousness or industry indignity evaporate instantly in a small cloud of irony and self-deprecation.
Mr. Vassel ran a small family grocery store across from my rented house in Jamaica, on the edge of the worst slum in Montego Bay. It was a very small building that held an impossibly diverse range of products on old wooden shelves. He was a large, gentle man who was in his seventies when I met him. He and his wife had run the store for more than fifty years, and it was a local institution that held the fragile sinews of the community together when the world around it was deteriorating. He was the mayor of the "pen", the slum that slid down into a long and dirty gully. The store stood up on the apex of that horizon, at the end of the sardonically named Lovers Lane. Fittingly, Mr. Vassel and his wife looked after it all with kindness and love.
Sam Vassel married his bride young and shortly thereafter went off to Panama for seven years to work on the recently completed Panama Canal. He toiled there under terrible conditions in order to come back and purchase the store and eventually, his family's legacy. He and his wife were in that store more than 12 hours a day six days a week for half a century or more, providing credit, settling arguments, passing on good news and dampening bad, and educating those of us who would listen. I loved climbing the stars up to the store, and often invented errands or tastes to do so. He gave me advice about my chickens, she gave me her grandmother's recipes, and I often just sat around for ten or twenty minutes listening to the congenial patois as other customers drifted through for salt cod, tomato paste, and a patient and wise ear.
Jamaicans, who know a few things about labor and leisure, never brought up a balance criticism about the Vassels, they never even conceived it. And those two lovely people didn't have to work those hours for all those decades for financial reasons. They did so because that was their job, to hold up an overlooked community with their collective hands. There are no hands on these peoples clocks btw, no 5pm whistles or overtime pay. Maybe there are just too many other people who don't understand what work can be, and that is a bit saddening.
I work a lot simply because the tasks I have adopted cannot be done in any sort of minimalistic contract with my employer or myself. I work a lot because my brain doesn't shut down, and it is better to keep it employed in challenging and productive ventures (this is why retirement scares the heck out of me - me and my thoughts alone all day!). I work a lot because I find myself in the the intriguing company of people who need me and who inspire and who help me. There is no other habitat like this in my universe. I work a lot in the slim hope that I too will make a legacy in my "store" like those two wonderful people who sold me groceries for two years at the edge of the world in a place where hopes and dreams had no business being bartered in.
* In my ongoing love/hate relationship with the internet, I just did a quick search for Mr. Vassel and found this. I cannot tell you how broad my smile is, or how light my heart seems as I think about my friend!
http://www.governorgeneralsawardsjamaica.com/st_james.php?subaction=showfull&id=1182287197&archive=&start_from=&ucat=15&
legacy, accomplished
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