Working Hard For the Money

           I always dreamed of being a famous author. Perhaps it was the diligence needed to sit and write every day or the fear that I was not as creative as I thought that stopped me from penning the great American novel. Instead, once I graduated with my English degree and my masters in writing, I, instead kept my “talent” as a card to play in the various professions I’ve found myself in over the years. Editing letters for executives, writing ad copy or just helping people compose their correspondence better, writing has never frightened me. Granted, it wasn’t something I could show my father when I was younger in hopes of getting praise. It wasn’t tangible like my grandfather’s profession or even my father’s postal career. That was something the whole family could see - a good and steady job, one that held the promise of a pension and a great retirement. What could you say about something so different and what was unexpected in an expected world? For years, I’ve felt as if I was just never good enough, or I chose a path so unfathomable to my dad that he could never understand what it was like to be me. But perhaps my writing didn’t just come from out of left field after all.

     

            Because of the times, like a lot of people, Ma never finished school. She had a certificate for good writing (the Palmer Method) of which she was very proud. She had her talents and among them was cooking, cleaning, and being an excellent seamstress. For years she worked in Everett on the second or third floor of a building that had a large advertisement for Charleston Chew candy. Over the years, the company had many contracts and one of the last was making dress jackets. She brought me up to the floor once and I bought one in a light gray and a light tan. Yes, I still have them.

     

            Where my grandfather worked seemed so far away to me back then. Years later, when I moved to the South End of Boston, I discovered that the tailor shop he went to every day was closer than ever. A small world? A coincidence? Or just a way of connecting to a past that I couldn’t really remember?

     

            I felt bad for Pa because it was a very long walk from Dudley Station to Tremont Street. Some of his friends were even accosted along the way. At first, he worked at the Jordan Marsh department store and he got paid for each job he did there. He had to retire at 65 and it was their friend Mary who got him the job at Cals.

     

            Now, for an untold amount of years, I thought Mary’s name was Mary DePortuge. She was a large woman, always dressed in black and always stopping by the house unannounced. One time, she was trying to enter the house through the side door, which was not an entrance at all, but led to the cellar. I directed her to the front, knowing that my grandmother was not pleased at her surprise visit. It was only when I was in college that I learned that Mary was by nationality, Portuguese. All those years, my grandparents had called her, “Mary, the Portage.” After my grandmother’s passing, I can never recall seeing her again.

     

When I applied to college, I never really had a career in mind. English was the one subject I enjoyed throughout high school, so it was really a simple choice to elect it as my major. Did I have any plans when I left higher education? Did I know what path I wanted to take in life? I held onto my summer job at Mrs. Fields Cookies when I started school in the fall. It was familiar, easy and I was comfortable there. I didn’t want the hassle of looking for something new. Besides, despite the recipes being formulated, I over indulged them and made the best chocolate chocolate chip brownies Charles Street had ever tasted.

     

            The turnpike is one of those jobs where you don’t apply; you have to know a politician. The head of the Mass Pike was buying suits in Cal’s, where Pa worked and he must have told him I was between jobs. I went into town to see him, I think it was the Prudential and his office was the entire 37^th floor. He hired me and I worked on the Weston-Newton Line. They didn’t pay well, no insurance for three months and there were 15 or 20 tolls across the highway. One Sunday night, I was the only booth open and I got a call from the state police that a prisoner had escaped from a nearby facility and to be on the lookout. In less than two months, the post office called. I gave them two weeks’ notice and wrote a nice thank you to the politician.

     

            Growing up, as much time as I spent downstairs and though my grandfather outlived his wife by over ten years, the memories of my grandmother are far greater than those I spent with him. I often ask myself how that could be? How I could go all the way to high school and not feel that closeness. Did I emotionally detach from him after losing my grandmother? Or did I just not understand how the men in my family expressed emotion and love? I think it could be a mixture of that – for I never really understood the bond that existed between him and my father. It’s funny, how simple things really are so much more complex.  

     

            I never worked Christmas night, even though the post office paid double. I was there to film you boys waking up every Christmas morning and those are some of my best memories.

     

            Looking back, those holiday mornings remain firmly etched in my mind. The anticipation of what Santa would bring was sometimes too much too handle some years. My brother and I would run the short distance from our beds to the living room to find a tree over flowing with presents underneath its plastic branches. I’ll never forget the hot wheels track set up in the middle of the living room with the loop de loop. I must have played with it for hours, all the while, my father filming with his state of the art 8mm camera.



     

            I think it was about 1940, I was seven years old and in those days, we never expected much. It was Christmas Eve and from my bed upstairs, I could hear a deep hammering. I paid it no attention until on Christmas morning when I woke; alongside the Christmas tree was a wooden platform cut in about a three foot circle. Bolted to it were train tracks on which stood an engine and several trains that ran off a transformer that I controlled with a lever.

     

            My dad worked at the post office for years, and in all that time, I never really knew what he did. “I fix the machines,” he’d say.

            “What happens if they don’t break?”

                       
“They always break.”

My brother and me at one of my dad's work sponsored Chistmas parties. I remember this like it were yesterday.

He was always working it seemed, joining us for dinner before going back to bed for some rest before starting the night shift. There was never any down time, it seemed, no vacations that I can recall except in 1976 when we all went to Walt Disney World. Work, to me, meant spending time away from home. I wanted to have fun, to spend money and go places and see new things, but I had no clue that those things could only be achieved because of the work.  Over the years, what I’ve discovered is that I work to live. I’ve never had a “career,” a path I felt destined to be on. Growing up, I saw how hard my father worked and I wanted to distance myself from that as fast and as often as I could. Perhaps I knew the same was true of my grandparents.

     

            I don’t know if Ma went to work because she thought she had to or because she wanted to. She was a product of the depression and with little education and the early passing of her parents, times must have been hard. As the oldest, she was mother to her three sisters and brother, but I never heard her complain that she had to work. She was a good woman and a good mother. I wish God had given her a few more years to enjoy the retirement she so richly deserved.

My grandmother in her finest - I never knew the jewels were imitation.