When I was about fifteen, my mother came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. She said that I was a pretty good kid, with a fair-to-middling good head on my shoulders and even if she could give me a free lunch through life, she still wouldn't. I had started to let my grades slip, see, and I was wanting to drop my job as a bowling alley janitor. She told me that I would go only as far in life as my back or my brain would take me.
Like most parental wisdom imparted to most kids, it didn't take immediately. It wasn't until a couple of years later when I found myself making great money working on what they called the bull-gang or labor gang of a paper mill in the deep South. We were the general knock-around, go-fur, step'n'fetch crew with a foreman who wouldn't spend a drop of gasoline to drive from home from work if he had enough of us around to carry the car on our shoulders. We did everything too heavy or nasty for anyone else to want to do. Pouring asphalt in July, breaking concrete, digging out clogged sewage runoffs, getting heavy hot object from over there to over here. I was young enough to not realize at the time how hard it was. My body would let me know about it later on, see. I did realize, though, looking around that I could grow old, mean and broken pretty quickly in this job - or I could soak up all the OT I could and use it to put myself through college. I didn't see much more inherent nobility in raw physical labor. My hardest days professionally were not when I wore a hard hat, dickies, and an emergency respirator on my belt. I haven't looked back, at least not with nostalgia.
I get ya, though. Kids these days. Why, in my day . . . . up hill . . . milking cows barefoot in the snow . . . had to slice our OWN bread. . . get out of my begonias!
