…All the way to heaven is heaven…
All the way to heaven is heaven…
All the way to heaven is heaven!
I work in a holy place, a place of healing, and I’m lucky enough to know it. My dad worked in a holy place. He was a clerk in a pre-supermarket food store. He tended the produce. He made sure that his customers had fruits and vegetables no less than he would bring home to his own family. In fact, when my mother shopped at The Hartford Market, the place where he worked from the 1930’s through the ’40’s into the ’50’s when it was sold to the chain that destroyed it, she would never buy from him. His co-workers, she was well aware, would “take better care of her” when it came to watermelon and corn and fresh spinach and red onions and peaches and, yes, even iceberg lettuce. 
My dad didn’t want me to work in a grocery store. One day in maybe my freshman year at Hartford Public High School I stopped by to hang out with him. Even then–before our run-in at the Wooster, Hartford’s great and ancient poolroom–it was cool to hang out with my dad. He was down in the room off the big refrigerator. The shelves weren’t cooled back then, so his day would begin with carrying his stock up from the basement refrigerator and end with bringing whatever leftovers back to their cooling place. Today he was making up fancy baskets of fruits for hospital shut-ins and folks leaving on fancy ocean cruises. Each basket received equal attention.
Most unusually Dad worked without words. My every attempt at conversation–we both talked eagerly of sports and politics–met with silence. I sensed nonetheless he was telling me something, but I didn’t know what. After perhaps an hour I said some dumb thing about how hard he worked. He put down his cutting tool and looked over at me. There was no expression on his face.
“I work hard so you won’t have to.”
He went back to silent work.
There were so many messages in what he did and said, but the ones I carried away and continue to carry may well not have been what he had in mind: first, the importance and beauty of what he did. For all I know my love of art and willingness to even make some of it may well have begun by seeing how he placed fruit together on a display rack or in a basket. My love of work may have originated in watching this man who meant so much to me at his work. He never spoke of the importance of what he did. Perhaps he didn’t see it that way. I however did. Just as now I see the importance of what I do. Secondly, I felt–perhaps for the only time in our life together–his love for me. Third, the sheer nobility of work done fullheartedly.
So here are my questions to you: What’s your work? After salaries and health benefits and vacation time and job titles are put aside, once you get past those labels of “special” and “good” and “prestigious” and “important” and, yes, “meaningful” what is your work really about for you? Who benefits from your efforts? Do you build buildings? Do you make them clean and safe? Do you teach others or provide them with their clothing or tools? Do you contribute to the wealth of information which increasingly dominates our world? Do you contribute to justice being done or hours otherwise spent in boredom being made entertaining?
Write something! If you have a website showing what you do, send a link. Whatever, put it in the Comments box.
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