There is an old joke that politicians enjoy using against
opponents from the other party: “He was born on third base but he thinks he hit
a triple.”
I don’t know exactly where on the base paths I was born, but
I know my parents worked hard to make sure my siblings and I were born further
along than they were.
My parents started their now 59 years of marriage with
virtually nothing financially. My father was expected to contribute all his earnings
to his family until age 21 so he had nothing to start his own family with. He
worked evenings and weekends while attending college while my mother typed term
papers for other students for 10 cents a page on a manual typewriter while
watching their two young children, my older sister and brother.
They transferred the importance of work along to us as well.
We were expected to help with chores around the house. While I may have
grumbled at the time, I now have fond memories of Saturdays spent cutting
firewood with my father and brother and of shelling peas in the evening while
watching Monday Night Baseball. When I was a child, both of my parents worked
full-time away from home so we had a dish-washing schedule through the week so
my mother didn’t have to do that as well after a day at work and then making
dinner. Those times often turned into a lot of fun as I dried dishes while my
father or one of my older siblings washed them. I especially enjoyed when I found
something that wasn’t clean enough and handed it back to be re-washed.
As I grew older, my father would sometimes take me to help
with jobs on the weekend – reroofing a house, putting up some siding, etc. And
I eventually worked for him in the summers. I still get a little surge of pride
driving by projects I helped on 30 or 35 years ago. Conversations in our car
often go something like this:
Me: “I put that roof on one summer.”
Backseat: “Yes Dad, we know.”
Me: “I helped Grandpa dig the footers for that
house.”
Backseat: “Yes Dad, we know.”My first summer job was when I was thirteen. For 50 cents an hour, I worked in a lawn and garden, scraped and painted a long board fence, and did odd jobs around a farm. A week or so into my tenure there, my boss called me in to speak to him. I wasn’t sure why he wanted to talk to me but I was a little nervous. He said, “Kurtis, when you need something from the shed, you don’t need to run to the shed to get it and then run back to where you are working.” I just thought that is how one worked because that is what my father did. Who knew? At the end of the summer, he gave me a $50 bonus.
These lessons growing up have served me well. I have messed up in a variety of ways through the years but I don’t recall ever being accused of a lack of effort.
I haven’t always done a good job modelling this for my own children. In retrospect, when a soccer game on the screened-in porch left the screens torn and dangling, I should have tried to fix it with them helping. It would have been a good lesson in how it is easier to destroy things than it is to repair them. I think that lesson extends well beyond porches to relationships, people, institutions, and a host of other things. Instead, I just got angry and made other arrangements to have it fixed.
When you are tired and overwhelmed, it is often
easier to just do things yourself than to get help from an eight-year-old who
will make cleaning out the garage take twice as long. I am sure there are times
my “help” slowed my parents down. But helping them is how I learned to work.
And that is one of the many ways my parents got me off to a good start running
the bases.
