How I Learned to Love Work

Hi All (or few as the case may be),

Here��s a sarcastic letter I wrote my dad while we were working on the book together.�� We were going to include it as part of the book, but like a lot of good material we wrote, it didn’t make the final cut.

Hope you enjoy it – I sure did :–)

Wayward Son (Gifford)

Dear Father,

Just today you sent me a letter suggesting I write an essay for the book on ��How I Learned to Love Work,�� and that I should focus on picking apples, my college years and my professional, corporate career �� the implication here being that I was lazy and shiftless before this time.

This came on the heels of you mis-remembering that I was hesitant to come work on your house because I was, ��just hanging around the Methow in the winter smoking dope and not doing much�� when in fact I��d just spent four years working eighty plus hours a week busting my ass at St. Johns and getting straight A��s. (Nor should you imagine that ��hanging around Methow in the winter�� was any picnic �� not when it meant cutting wood to heat my house with an ax, slogging a quarter mile through two feet of snow to get home each night after work, breaking through the ice in the creek to get drinking water, and earning money to buy gas and groceries from working in the apple orchards.)

This odd slip of memory, combined with the suspiciously patronizing tone of the question, ��When Did You Learn to Love Work�� made me wonder if you aren��t, in some unconscious��way, still trying to perpetuate the narrative that as a youth I was lazy and unmanly, weak and malingering, unable to live up to the Eagle Scout creed that you so shiningly exemplified. ��And while I��ve bought into it for years, the more I thought about the question, the more I came to realize that this was never really the case.

Allow me to offer a slightly different narrative: ��So, let me think�� when did I first learn to love work?

Could it have been when I was four years old, and one night when you came home from work, I surprised you by reading ��Green Eggs and Ham�� out loud.�� It had taken me months to learn, and okay so I memorized a good bit of it, but I was reading at least half the words and this at a time when other kids my age were just learning their ABC��s.

Or perhaps it was the summer when I was six and you decided that as punishment for failing at some manly virtue, I was to be denied the dimes I used to get to buy ice cream from the truck that came by each afternoon. (My sister, by the way, was not so afflicted.) So, I scraped together a little money, rode my bike to the convenience store, bought some packets of instant koolaid, and started my own koolaid stand. I sat for hours in the front yard every day for a month with a table and a homemade sign singing out, ��Koolaid, koolaid, ice cold koolaid, five and ten cents a glass, get it while you can,�� and eventually I got enough money to buy my own damn ice cream for the rest of the summer.

Then there was the summer of 1969. While you were dropping acid and exploring the human potential movement, I collected pop bottles. Every day I made the rounds, riding miles on my bike, hitting the trash cans on the main street of town, combing the beaches, cruising the alleyways behind apartment buildings, occasionally even snooping in untended garages.�� By the end of the summer, I had enough pop bottles to fill three shopping carts and when I turned them all in, I got almost a hundred dollars �� real money for a nine year old in those days. It may not have impressed you, but it sure opened some eyes at the grocery store.

The next year I became first chair flute in the school orchestra as well as the honor band �� and this when I was in third grade, two or three years younger than all the other kids. You think I didn��t have to practice my ass off to get there?

A year later �� in Prescott, I wrote over a hundred poems and one of them won a first place prize in the Arizona state poem contest.

I could go on, ad nausiam really, but I think you get the idea.

Despite the fact that you failed to recognize my achievements, I was actually a hell of a worker from a very young age. I just refused do the crappy jobs that you were trying to force me to do. I responded to your bullying, your humiliating rants, your belittling jibes by digging in and fighting you tooth and nail every single inch of the way.

In retrospect, this may have been where I really learned to love work, and in fact may have been one of my most challenging��achievements. It took tremendous effort, determination, commitment, courage, and above all, yes, work to defy you so consistently. I worked my tail off to keep from doing all the jobs you tried to make me do and it would have been a hell of lot easier to just give in and do them �� a fact that, if memory serves, you pointed out to me on numerous occasions.

So the truth is, I learned to love work long before I stared picking apples or went to St. Johns. I learned when I was a very little boy, and you taught me the joy of it �� just not quite in the way you had intended.

Love,

Gifford