On Work

 

My grandparents never had a planned retirement but worked until they couldn’t any longer in jobs that were demanding and did not pay very much.  I can’t say I know what their stresses were, but I never heard them complain about not having enough time the way so many of us do now. I wonder if they just didn’t expect to ever be done with work, didn’t see it so much as the measure of their value but the reality of life.

 

My grandmother Phillipa worked until she no longer could, when the pain of diabetes and the confusion of the dementia forced her off her feet.  I can still see her with the pink plastic bucket filled with warm water making her way up the back steps as she scrubbed each one by hand, anticipating the meal that needed to be made, the clothes that needed to be washed, the bills that needed to be paid.  She cared for her family, and she care for other families with her cooking and cleaning.  The holiness of her work done with bent fingers, sore knees, big heart.

 

My grandfather Nunzio worked as a hairdresser in his own shop near Harvard yard where he made the professors wives glamourous. He charmed them with his French and Italian while putting in rollers, hair dyes, and spray.  He worked six days a week taking Sunday off for church and the big family dinner than Philly made.  He tended a garden filled with tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplants and made wine from the grapes he planted behind the garage.  He invented a first of its kind hair curler made from paper that heated up when wet. He closed his shop well into his 70s only when the snow blower took off the two fingers he needed to use the scissors.  Then he took up oil painting. 

 

My other grandfather Louie worked as a barber in a shop around the corner from his house. When he “retired” from the shop, he worked for another 20 years as a guard at the Gardener Museum in Boston.  I think he loved his job at the museum more than the barbershop, standing for his shift in the Titian room watching the tourists, artist students, visitors stream through to see the paintings he knew as old friends.  

 

I think I expected more out of work then they did in status, respect, a place to make a difference.  But even with so much more education than my grandparents ever had, it has mostly been hard work to earn a living, the successes few and far between, the failures many, the paycheck less than expected.  The work remaining undone at the end of each day nips at my heels. For some reason, there is a holiness I sense in my grandparents work that I have not always see in mine.  Hands kneading dough, combing hair, making sauce, washing clothes.  Perhaps, it was the work that made me feel loved and cared for that made it feel holy.  Lately, though, I have had more of a sense of the holiness in my own work.  There is the incompleteness at the end of each day teaching me surrender, humility in all that I do not control, the folly of measuring my life as a commodity.  The caring for others as we work together.  The givenness of work an alchemy of earth and spirit coming together to pull the food out of the ground.