people

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An Education Second to None


My birth family what is referred to as land poor. We had a big house surrounded by a number of acres of both open fields and wooded areas. My family ancestry shows we were the second family to settle Andover, Massachusetts, which today is call North Andover after an 1855 split. For the most part we were farmers, sometimes minutemen, then factory owner and by the 20th century men who commuted to Boston to work.

 

My mother and father met by an arrangement between friends and it was probably love at first sight for both of them. Unfortunately, I never asked that question, but I know my mother adored my father and my father deeply loved her. I thought I had the most perfect parents any kid could want. It never occurred to me that relative to everyone else who lived in our neighborhood, we were quite poor. Each of my parents worked hard and my sister, brother and I were well taken care of. That gave us the illusion that all was well. And in general, it was, but I now know that my parents struggled mightily to keep things together.
I found out when I asked my parents for my first bicycle that the ability to afford things was rather restrictive. The bike they found cost $10, a large sum in the later 1950s. It was well-used, but I managed to get many many miles out of it before it literally fell apart.
I believe I was about six years old when a neighbor kid asked me if I wanted to make 25 cents shoveling snow. Now in those days, in my mind, 25 cents translated into 5 candy bars. My parents could not afford to give any of us an allowance, so I was introduced to getting what I wanted via work. Much of this early work was what I was already doing around my house, taking out the trash, shoveling snow, mowing the lawn, and raking leaves. In those days we could burn a pile of leaves alongside the road. In the country-side one of the harbingers of fall was the smell of burning leaves in the air. It was everywhere and something I miss.
The lady for whom I shoveled snow I offered my services of mowing her lawn which she accepted along with taking care of her flowers. My business spread to other people in the neighborhood and I always had money in my pocket at lease briefly. My weakness for chocolate what as great then as it is now and I saw no reason to resist. But I bought other things with my money, a wallet, a pair of boots, a speedometer for my bike and other things.
When I turned 12 I was old enough to work a paper route for the Lawrence Eagle Tribune. My first route was rather lengthy, but I learned a lot. When it came time, each Thursday, to collect from each person the tidy sum of 42 cents for a week’s worth of newspapers. They were 7 cent a day, six days a week. The blue-collar and middle-class people would always give me 50 cents, an 8-cent tip, which I always appreciated. But the wealthy people always waited for their change with the exception of one man, Sam Rockwell, who was a wealthy Boston banker and as kind a person a you could know.
At age 14 and 15 I work on a vegetable farm about a mile from my house. For my 8 hours labor in the hot fields, I received the tidy sum of 3 dollars a day or 15 dollars a week that first summer. The next summer I got a raise to 5 dollars a day. Farms were then, and I expect now, exempt from paying minimum wage which at the time was $1.25 an hour. The farm was run by two Italian brothers and the fields were always filled with their parents and grandparents. I know at least one woman was in her 80s, and because she was widowed, she dressed completely in black every day regardless of how hot it got, and you never heard a single complaint. There were a number of these older women who were dressed in black. It was very hard labor, very demanding, and I got another lesson in work that I feel proud about.
When I turned 16 I knew I could find a job that paid better than the farm. As good fortune had it, there was a man who lived a very short distance from my house. This man I knew owned a mill in Lawrence. I had no idea what was made in the mill, but I went to his house and rang his bell. He answered the door and I introduced myself and told him what I was looking for. A 16-year-old does not recognize when he is properly impressing someone with his industry. Mr. Segal did not even give it a moment’s thought. He simply told me to show up at the mill office and there would be a job waiting for me. I had no idea that this job, though it lacked excitement, would give me a life lesson that I carry in my heart to this day. Mr. Segal’s mill was named Service Heel Company. His factor produced women’s shoe heels which when finished were shipped off to another company, actually several of them, who would use the heels we made to finish their shoes.
The mill was what used to be referred to as a sweat shop. That simply meant, people worked in a place that was hot and un-airconditioned in the summer and cold and poorly heated in the winter. The mill building itself, originally the George Kunhardt Mill, was built around 1890 and was part of the giant woolen industry in Lawrence. I would like to say that the people who I worked with ran the entire spectrum of a community but in truth it had one small sliver. Most of the people employed their had an 8th grade education, if that, and had worked the same job, in exactly the same location for 30 years or more. I know that for fact because I asked that question of several people there.
The thing with these people, almost without exception, is they were what was called “the salt of the earth.” If you worked there you were one of them and no one person was any better than another person.
I was a “floor boy” which meant I dragged boxes of unfinished heels to various stations where work was done on them. It being a union shop, I could work there for only 90 days without joining the union which was more than enough for me because it was only a summer job. Also, I was getting my $1.25 hourly wage which grossed me $50 a week, the most money I had ever earn. Those were the days that you had a time card which you had to punch in and out as you went. If you were one minute late you were docked 5 minutes of pay. That happened to me but a single time but that was enough for me to appreciate the idea of being somewhere on time.
The floor supervisor was a big man named Tony who had now problem rolling out his prejudices. Probably during my first week he took me to the rear of the shop and point out the window to the mill next to us. He said, “that’s where the spics work” and told me I had better not associate with them. In the early 1960s Lawrence already had a sizeable Puerto Rican community which some people like Tony could not tolerate for reason that make no sense. Ironically, I found none of that with the people who worked the stations in the shop. They were kind and very helpful. I got absolutely no training upon my arrival there and of course was quite lost with how to find what was needs and how to tell where I should be taking these boxes. It was the people who needed the boxes who train me of where to find things and how to get them to where they needed to be. They also made me aware that occasionally time sensitive heels would come through and I needed to be on the look out for them and drag the as soon as I saw them to the proper station. By the way, I actually had a metal rod with a hook on the end to drag these boxes around.
One of the stations was in a second building separated by a hallway and a large steel door. This was the paint shop where certain heels were spray painted. OSHA did not exist at that time and the man who worked the shop, alone, only had a face mask to protect him from the paint fumes. He did not have the oxygen mask that would be used today. I don’t know what, if anything, ever happened to him but considering the noxious fumes he inhaled, it is difficult to believe he was not damaged in some manner. But such were the mills back then.
I really do not remember the names of the people who worked there, some were but a few years older than me and others were easily old enough to be my grandparents. But to a person they were not but kind and considerate of me. I never heard them complain about anything. There was a level of respect between employees that was exemplary. I learned the life lesson of not judging people by their station in life. Rather look at the character of the person and you will know who you are dealing with. These people were of the best character.
The next summer I got a job at Raytheon Company in Shawsheen, MA, a part of Andover MA. I believe my basic title was clerk. I worked on the 9th floor of a 10-story building where there built radar systems to the US Army. I did not have a security clearance which occasionally got in the way of my job. The floor I worked on was concerned with completed radar components being properly finished and tested. It was the quality assurance section.
The job site, as opposed to the previous one, did employ a large spectrum of people. But there was something amiss with this group. There was lots of prejudice and angst between the various groups. People who worked in the metal shops and fabrication shops were looked down upon by those in the engineering department of which I was a part. Worse, this shop was also a union shop which had recently gone on strike. A number of men crossed the lines and of course became “scabs.” I had the bad manners to sit down and each lunch with one of the scabs and was told if I did that again I would be treated as he was, poorly. I hated that because I have never thought ostracizing anyone served any useful purpose.
I encounter one other type of prejudice quite unexpectedly. There was a young lady who I worked with, we both worked out of the same office but had different jobs but were otherwise equals. I found I that I was making 5-cents more than she because of my gender. I knew even than that that was wrong. I remember thinking that she had told me things about herself the left me believing that if anyone should be make more money it was her. It had to do with her background, but I do not remember exactly what.
I was glad to leave that job at the end of the summer. They offered me a full-time position with the added incentive of paying for my college education which I was starting that September. I turned down their offer, it was not a place I wanted to work.
And so there you have the first 18 years of my life and the informal, though extremely useful, education I received along the way. If you consider that I started work at the age of 6, I worked continuously for 52 years before I retired. I learned new things each of those 52 years but the best education I received were those years for age 6 to 18. They served me well and I am grateful for every person along the way who took a moment to show me something that was useful. God bless them all.

 

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It is God’s Will! Really?


I really and truly hate the expression, “it was God’s will.” Really? How do you know? To be fair, the overwhelming majority of people living in the United States were brought up on one of three basic belief systems: Jewish, Christian, and Islam. Each of those general religions loves to use the expression in question. But my question to any of them is, “how do you know?” If you nail any of them down they will probably refer to some ancient religious text which supposedly gives weight to their contention.

But don’t each of these religions refer to God as a “father” meaning, of course, a family member.   And each contends that God is also the epitome of love, kindness and understanding. Great! Then how can you call it God’s will when an earthquake strikes a region and kills thousands of people? Are you telling me that either God wanted those people dead? As a father I believe it a part of my job to protect my children from any sort of harm. This actually makes God sound like some sort of sadistic being rather than the all loving purported.

Another of my favorites is when a person comes down with a deadly form of cancer and that somehow is God’s will. Again, really? God favors kind and loving people with deadly diseases as some sort of test of their love for Him? It makes it sound like He lacks love for the person involved. Which, as a side note, brings up another of my annoyances: unfairness. People love to say how unfair it is when someone is visited by some life altering, or worse, life ending disease while they are young. No! It is entirely fair! Diseases and disasters do not go around picking out individuals if affect. Fairness exists entirely in human interaction, that is, how one human treats another human. Diseases and disasters simply do not have the capacity to care.

If the basic claims about God of these three religions are to be believed then God could only want for our happiness, good health, and long lives. God does not punish nor reward any living being but saves such things for the afterlife. God does not take the side of one nation over another in a time of war, or for that matter, in any sort of human contest, conquest or endeavor. If God so favored any group of people does it not make sense that He would have protected people against the likes of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Adolph Hitler or any of a long list of evil persons? But He did not which means His is an entirely hands off position. What happens to us here on earth is always the result of our own actions, or lack of action, or of natural phenomena. And that is my universe. If tomorrow I am told I have some sort of stage 4 incurable cancer I will not look upon it as God’s will or even bad luck. It will simple be the end result of a long string of natural events, and sometimes, many times, we humans are incapable of putting together all of those events or even explaining them. I accept my situation as it is. I promise myself to be as kind, courteous and thoughtful as possible. In the end, after all, is that not what each of us is evaluated on, by those who know us and God?

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A Few Words of Advice to Gen Y From a Baby Boomer


One thing having lived a lot of years does for you, it gives you a ton of perspective.  Here are a few things I have learned along the way, only too often the hard way.

1.  Marry your best friend — That’s right!  The guy or woman you want is your best friend.  Marriages generally end over three things, money, trust, and communication.  Consider, that person you consider your best friend is a person you would hate to lie to, would trust with your life, and will tell pretty much everything.  And that is exactly the type of person, if not the person you want to marry.

(January 4, 2013 amendment)  A response I received to this section of this post, though maybe given a bit tongue-in-cheek, did none-the-less give me pause to think I had been less than clear, and that there is more to say.

From experience I known people say “we are just friends” and by extension say “why would I want to ruin a good friendship.”  The backdrop to such statements is the consideration of dating such a person, and that dating a friend might ruin a good friendship that you value.  I am asserting that such a belief is absolutely wrong.

If you are a woman and have some really good friends who are male, one of them may well be your best match as a partner in life, as a spouse.  The same is true for guys who might consider one of their best female friends.  My wife is also my best friend, and because of that I believe that it is the best combination possible.  Dating a friend cannot ruin a good friendship because real friends stay with you regardless of events.  If you truly are friends, dating such a person and then finding out the romantic feelings you need just are there should in no way hinder you from going back to being really good friends.  If anything, such an experience should only strengthen such a friendship.

2.  Make a career out of what thrills you — Our society sadly places a lot of emphasis on how much a person earns.  The thing is, what most of us want the most is happiness.  And that leads to the question of how happy can you be when you are making a ton of money in a job you hate?  At some point you burn out and start asking yourself why it was you got into that profession in the first place.  You ask yourself if it was really worth it.  When the time comes you can consider retirement, you should find it almost unthinkable as continuing in your chosen profession still thrills you.

3. Resolve all family issues — I have this saying, “all families are crazy, it’s just a matter of degree.”  I really believe that.  We only get one set of parents and they are gone too often too early.  My father died right before my 21st birthday, and I had so much left to say to him and talk to him about.  When my mother died, she was 89, I felt there was nothing I had left unsaid, and that felt really good.  You can pick your friends but you cannot pick your relatives.  That is not to say you have to be on good terms with all your relatives, but it is good to remember that the ones you would rather not see probably have no knowledge of your feeling that way. With such people politeness and kindness goes a long way, and requires nearly nothing from you.  And for those in your immediate family that you feel have done you some sort of egregious wrong, come to terms with the issue by either resolving it with the person involved, or, accepting that this person’s failure in your eyes needs to have minimal effect upon you as you go forth.  Do whatever it takes to make that statement true.  But at the end of the day, know in your heart that you have done your level best with your parents and siblings, and that nothing that needs saying, particularly “I love you,” is left unsaid.

5.  Make self-care a priority — This is the sort of selfishness that is in keeping with a healthy mind, body, and spirit.  It is natural for most people to think of other people first and themselves 2nd or 3rd or even lower.  That is always the wrong approach.  A healthy body is paramount to how a person feels about himself.  Eat properly, exercise moderately, and see a doctor and a dentist on a regular, scheduled, basis.  Being in your 20s is not a free pass for good health.  Women can develop breast cancer and cervical cancer in their 20s.  Men can get heart disease and diabetes in their 20s.  Worse, since during our 20s we feel the best about our general state of health, these diseases can go undiagnosed until they present a far greater health risk than would have happened with a regular checkup.  Also, pretty much everyone gets gum disease and cavities regardless of age.  People with the healthiest minds are those who realise the need to talk out their problems, regardless of the nature of the problem, with either an expert or someone they trust, a best friend.  Getting feedback on our problems requires us to consider what we are doing and that we might find a better way of doing things.  Or it might reassure us that we are doing the right thing or are okay.  And lastly, but maybe most importantly, we need to find a healthy outlet for our anxieties.  We need a healthy distraction that takes our attention away from weighty things and towards something that makes us feel good in a healthy way.  This needs to be practiced daily if possible, but be something we know we can turn to as needed.  Having taken care of ourselves in this manner, we find ourselves more appealing, more available, and more attentive to others, particularly those we love and care about.  It is difficult for anyone who is not healthy in any of these three respects, physically, mentally, and spiritually, to be at our best for those who need us.

6.  Never loan anyone money — This might seem a bit rash but it is not.  I remember years ago a guy who asked to borrow $5 from me with the promise he would pay me back.  He never has paid me back and I have never forgotten that.  He is also dead now.  What I knew, even before that incident, was that I should give the person the money requested with the understanding that they would not pay me back.  The only requirement I put on them is that the time will come that someone needs to borrow some money from them and when they give that person the money, I will have been paid back.  I also tell them I do not want to hear about how that happens for them.  Remember, it is impossible to cop a resentment over money you give away while it is far to easy to get resentful over money loaned and not repaid.

7.  Don’t worry over what people think about you — Everyone wants to be thought well of but that, of course, is an impossibility.  Regardless of where we are, there will be people who do not care for us.  Maybe they would even say they hate us.  The amount of weight that has is entirely dependent upon how we view it.  I know there are people who I do not want to be around and people who do not want to be around me.  I accept that.  Getting caught up in the reasons one person hates me, or whatever, is a fool’s task.  Short of asking them, I can never be certain.  I do need to ask myself why it is important for me to know and what I intend to do with the information if I were to get it.  I am most likely wasting time that could be better used in another direction entirely.  Being grateful for the friends I do have and being grateful for them is usually all I have to remember to make the fact that someone does not like me unimportant.

8.  Always have a Plan B — I actually learned this from my years on active duty in the army.  We used to like to say, “anything that can go wrong probably will, and at the worst possible moment.”  Keeping that in mind has told me that my initial plan, “Plan A,” may fail and that I will be well served to have a “Plan B” in the ready.  It doesn’t hurt to have a “Plan C” and a “Plan D” as well, depending upon how important success is.  Life loves to throw us curve balls which means we are going to be needing a “Plan B” a lot!

9.  Life is messy — This is the natural follow-on to the previous mention, having a Plan B.  Said Robert Burns in his famous poem “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough,” said,

“But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!”

We make the perfect plan and still things go wrong, people do not react as we would hope, the weather does not cooperate, and our family drives us nuts.  But think how boring life would be were it predictable.  That challenge comes from meeting life’s messiness with the belief that we can persevere if only we do not allow things to get to us.

10.  Don’t take your self so damn seriously! — A couple of things that can quickly get us into trouble is our thinking how important our belief is or, worse, how important it is for us to be right, or worst of all, how important we are.  Throughout the history of man, all of the most important people who have ever lived have all died, sooner or later, and yet the world has not only gone on without them, but has done quite well.  Most of us have certain very strong beliefs that we are willing to fight for.  The thing with beliefs is, they are each and every one quite personal and unique to one person, ourself.  That is, it is difficult to find anyone who agrees 100% with any one of our beliefs 100% of the time.  While it is good to have strong beliefs, convictions, it is also good to remember that belief which differ from our own are equally important to their owner and deserving of respect.  A person who laughs at himself easily, is one other people will listen to respectfully.  And a person with strong convictions who respects another person of equally strong convictions, though they may be in direct opposition to his own, is a person whose convictions will gain consideration by those of other beliefs.

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Advice to People in Their Twenties


When my generation was in its twenties it was concerned with things like birth control, the Vietnam War, and equal rights.  We were headed up by the likes of Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman, and Bill Baird.  We also had Bill Gates, Jim Henson, and George Lucas.  These people, and many more like them, contributed greatly to the quality of life we enjoy today.  You might find Abbie Hoffman as a strange choice for the list as he was regularly identified at a villain at the time.  He was extremely outspoken against “the establishment” of the day.  But some years later he joined “the establishment” as a part of the Wall Street financiers.

It’s not difficult to find out what we stood for.  My generation was known for its protest songs, student sit-ins and strikes, burning the bra, and fighting the war in Vietnam.  I fit into that last category as I spent the entire 70s in the US Army.  But that did not keep me from experiencing much of what was going on.  My eldest daughter spent many an hour watching Sesame Street and getting the beginnings of a fine education from it, thank you very much Jim Henson.  We watched east coast cities burning during the race riots of the 70s, and the stream of war protestors who headed to Canada to avoid the draft.  I did not then, nor do I now, bear them the least bit of animosity.

For those of you who are in your 20s now this is the time to take copious notes, become of causes that mean something to you, do not shy away from political controversy, and take a stand for those things you feel passionate about.  It is extremely important, however, that you keep an open mind, be flexible, be willing to alter your position, and be prepared for a long fight.  You will find that most of the things you believe to be in the greatest need of changing are going to take the longest to get changed.  Keep that in mind and do not quit no matter what.

I absolutely believe that among you exists a mind that will find the cure for AIDS, certain cancers, and will revolutionize prosthetic devices.  Some will become President of the United States, senators, and supreme court justices.  You will have Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer Prize winners.  You will win gold medals in the Olympics and championships in professional sports.

Most of you, however, will lead quiet lives and you can make some of the biggest changes of all.  At your finger tips is more information you can use to your advantage than any generation prior to you has had.  Use it to make your children’s lives better, you life better, and to keep yourself informed about what is going around you.  Abbie Hoffman told us to challenge authority.  What he meant was, when someone holds themselves up to be an authority on any subject make them prove themself, and be judicious in believing what you are told.

The best predictor of your future is the past.  Look closely at the history of everything when you consider anything.  People have a natural tendency to resist change so if you want to know how people are going to react to some future event, see how they responded to the same or similar events in the past, and plan accordingly.

Do not sit quietly by when something wrong is happening.  Become involved, it is the only way to make a difference.  Change is inevitable.  Your choices are two: be a part of it or be run over by it.

Make a promise to yourself now that when you look back on your life, 30 or 40 years from now, you will be able to smile knowing you we an agent of positive change and that your generation can hold it head proudly for be at the forefront of that change.

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Resentments: A Recipe For Disaster


I think a lot of people have resentments and call them something else.  I mention that because I used to be one of those people.  When came to feeling evil towards someone, I was a master.  It never occurred to me, however, to ask myself what good it did me.

By and large, I had a really good childhood but even so, some really horrible things happened to me.  It would be easy to dismiss whatever resentments I formed because of those bad things except that I carried them around for half of my life.  My mother was the prime recipient of a number of those resentments.  She had earned some of the anger I felt but once I had vented that anger, which I did, she was no longer responsible.  You would never have known that from my actions however.  Most times resentments only hurt the person carrying them but in this case it hurt two people.  My mother deserved better than that and I did make amends to her for my actions before she died,   well before fortunately.

There is a saying about resentments, “It’s like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”  I drank from that poison many times always expecting the other person to feel something bad but the only one who ever felt badly was me.

It’s ironic.   figured out a long time ago the foolishness of jealousy, another of my shortcoming although I overcame that one early on in my adulthood.  I call it the most foolish emotion a person can have and only shows that person’s insecurities.  It would have been nice to have carried over that logic to my resentments, but I did not.

Mind you, I still get resentments but now I treat them like a minor injury.  I figure out what the source of the pain is and deal with it.  Almost without exception the source of the pain is from something within me.  What is happening is I am seeing something inside someone else that I hate within myself and that is how a resentment begins.  This is not to say that the person had not wronged me or done something to allow me to feel poorly towards them, but the resentment is a level of anger that is always uncalled for.  The resentment is self-flagellation at its worst.  The resentment is what takes up space in my head and eats at me in its desire to get out.  The resentment is what has pushed me into making too many bad decisions.

I still feel the resentment come over me but when I do an alarm goes off in my head and I tell myself it is time to take action.  As I said before the first thing I do is find the source of the resentment.   Then once I have identified the other person’s part in it, I forgive them in the sense that I tell myself that whatever they are doing has nothing to do with, or that they are fighting some demon within themself and it is presenting itself in this unflattering manner.  Most of the time I eliminate the resentment by simply telling myself that they have a problem and I’m not it.

So here is the thing; it is okay to be angry, as angry as you need.  But get over it as quickly as you can because anger is like milk left out too long.  After a while it curdles and smells bad and turns into something else, something ugly.

 

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Life is Messy


Every now and then someone relates some of their family history and the crazy things that happen within their family. They present the story as a sort of “see how crazy my family is!”  My response is always the same, “all families are crazy, it’s just a matter of degree.”  By extension, that means all normal families are crazy.  It is just a matter of the details peculiar to that family. But in general, they are just simply crazy.

A few years ago a friend of mine was telling me about a part of her life she was not too proud of.  She had spent a week in jail once.  To say I was shocked is an understatement.  You see, she is someone everyone sees as the all American mom sort.  She is happily married, has two young children, and an MBA degree which helps her to a very substantial income.  When I asked her what she went to jail for, she very nonchalantly said it was for larceny over $200.  It turns out it was actually her boyfriend who had done the theft but she was present when it happened.  She pleaded out and got time served plus two years of probation.  If I were to show you a picture of her today with her husband and kids you would probably say, “no way!”

I had another friend who died about six years ago from lung cancer.   It turns out that his cancer was quite curable but a lack of early treatment, doctor’s fault, caused it to move to other organs.  He sued and won, of course.  I remember saying to him that he must really be angry.  The doctor had served a death sentence upon him.  He told me he was at first and then he came to terms with it.  When I asked him how you come to terms with having your life ended prematurely he said, “life is messy.”  I didn’t get it at first but after a lot of reflection I did.  He had arrived at a point where staying angry served no useful purpose and he wanted to enjoy the time he had left.  He enjoyed it, richly.

I thought about that for a long time, years.  I have come to the conclusion that life, external of human manipulation, is always and ultimately fair.  I hear people say how unfair something is.  A person dies in his 40s from cancer and they say how unfair that is.  But it is fair.  It is not like cancer decides to pick on a particular individual while sparing another.  It doesn’t.  It is not different from the flu.  Some get it, some don’t.  These things can be very sad, but they are always fair.

Most people are good.  They follow the rules, are usually polite, and give when they can.  We all, at one time or another, cross paths with someone who is not good.  They cause us grief and pain.  Sometimes it costs us money, other times health, and other times peace of mind.  These people can cause a serious mess in our lives but if we allow it to be anything more than the messiness of life, then we allow it to have more power over us than is right.

You hear people say “shit happens.”  That is way to negative for me.  I prefer “life happens.”  Some of it is not much fun though.  But I have found that by seeing life as a never-ending series of events, many of which are messy, then it is difficult for life to pitch me a curve ball I can’t handle.