Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business. I’d quickly pour a travel mug of hot determination, leave my quarters on the counter, and speed off to face the classrooms and quizzes and organized chaos of a school day. I miss it.
I make my coffee at school now, sharing it with a few of my teaching buddies, and I do it well before most of my co-workers get to work, the parking lot quiet and growing darker as these weeks pass into fall. I like to be there early in the morning, like to get after my jobs right away and in solitude. It’s just the way I am.
But I do miss running into town for my coffee, perhaps stopping for a moment’s conversation with Wendell Jenkins, who often beat me there to get his day under way with a plate of biscuits and gravy. I also noticed that nearly every morning a pair of men, sometimes in heavy winter overalls, shuffled into the bakery to eat breakfast and gab and smoke before their workday started. I knew they’d be working a lot harder than I would that day — physically, anyway — and I would often quietly mutter a simple thanks for having a job in which I wouldn’t freeze in a bitter wind or suffer under a brutal sun or test a creaky back that had by then betrayed me.
I believe I work hard, harder than most folks who don’t teach probably think I do; certainly harder than some of the folks at our state’s Department of Education believe. I recall a day even more years back than my coffee story when a teacher-farmer buddy of mine needed help with his hay. I told him I’d come down after school to help him throw a few loads into the loft before supper, and I met him, gloves stuffed into the back pocket of my blue jeans, just like they were when I was 16 and in need of gas money.
As we stood in the August heat summing up the courage to either be the one who tossed the bales on an ancient rusting hiker or the poor chump who’d arrange them lengthwise in the sauna of the barn, my friend’s dad, a grizzled tiller of soil and chewer of tobacco, who had worked hard his whole life, walked up to us. He offered his help, but as was most often the case, he offered his opinion, too: Neither of us, he said, should be tired at all. We’d spent all day inside; that wasn’t “real work,” he added.
My friend nearly came out of his boots. “You don’t have a clue, Dad,” he said in a tone of voice that was as harsh as I’d ever heard him speak to his father. “I am more tired right now than if I had put up hay all day,” he said, and he bit his lip and turned to throw a bale onto the hiker with deeper attention than was needed, I suppose so he wouldn’t say anything else.
I think that is the case for most of us; no one, unless he’s walked a mile or two in our boots or wingtips or heels or orthotics, understands what our job is truly about. Some of the hardest work I have ever faced was done behind a fast-food counter, in a grocery store aisle, or on a maintenance crew detail as a teenager or young, young man. I don’t think anyone saw the “unskilled” tasks I handled as being “hard,” but they were, and I was determined to do them well, whether it be cooking a hamburger or sweeping a floor or digging a post hole.
I have said it before in this space, and I’ll say it again: We don’t appreciate the work the average American laborer does anymore. We often want our children to grow up to wear white collars and striped ties and carry briefcases and make the big bucks, and that is admirable, but we have almost reduced getting dirty to being dirty, and I think that’s too bad. Many of my heroes, my dad and my grandfathers, my mother and grandmother, and a few of my good friends, too, never got college educations; some never finished high school. It was a different world in which they grew up, that is for sure, but one thing about them made me love and respect them all the more: They were never afraid to work for what they had, and they expected me to do the same.
This day, today, is for anyone who has ever waited tables, taken on the task of caring for ailing and elderly neighbors or parents, cleaned a house, or kept our electrical power on. It’s for those who patch and plow our roads, trim our trees, dig our ditches, and watch our children. It’s for those who take our blood pressure and stock our store shelves and deliver packages to our doors. It’s for carpenters and teachers and store clerks and janitors, and it is for those who sit behind desks and clack on keyboards and man the phones. Labor Day is for those who work at their jobs and value their labor for more than a paycheck.
To me, Labor Day is a celebration of generations of hard work, not a recognition of my own life of earning a living. Like my family did years ago, I will stay home today to work at chores I can’t usually get done during a regular work week. I won’t be heading to a union rally or cheer on a speech, but I’ll work a little, and I’ll sweat a lot, and hopefully, I’ll remember those folks who put me in a position to sit down when I want to.
Mike Lunsford can be reached by email at hickory913@aol.com or by writing to him c/o The Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Read more of Mike’s stories at http://tribstar.com/mike_lunsford, and visit his website at www.mikelunsford.com. His third collection of stories, “A Place Near Home,” is due to be released in October.
Mike Lunsford
Related Photos
-
Tribune-Star columnist Mike Lunsford
Discussion
MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
- Mike Lunsford
-
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Taking a road less traveled in this illogical life
If you can still recall reading the poetry of Robert Frost in your high school English class years ago, I imagine that you can conjure up a line or two from his “The Road Not Taken.”
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
-
SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
-
THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
-
Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
-
The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
-
The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
-
Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
-
The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
-
THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
-
MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
Man Falls Off Crane, Dies After Police Standoff
Witness Describes Fla. Face-chewing Attack
Raw Video: Cop Shoots Man Eating Another's Face
Man in Crane at Texas College Says He's Armed
Unexpected Smog in Pristine National Parks
Obama Honors Fallen Troops at Arlington Cemetery
Raw Video: Deadly Explosion at Minn. Paper Mill
Dairy Farm Uses Chiropractor to Help Cows
Romney Promises World's Strongest Military
Russia Condemns Ally Syria Over Massacre of 108
Air Canada Plane Makes Emergency Landing
Raw Video: Earthquake Shakes Evacuees in Italy
Obama Pays Tribute to Vietnam Veterans
Beryl Knocks Out Power in Florida
Raw Video: 19 Dead in Qatar Shopping Mall Fire
15 Dead in Northern Italy's 5.8-magnitude Quake
Service Dogs Help Wash. Soldiers Battling PTSD
Raw Video: Memorial Day Aboard Intrepid
New Ticks Spread Across Southeast, Diseases Rise
Beryl Makes Landfall on Florida Coast
Los Angeles Bar Bans Bachelorettes
Hamster Plays Dead
Beyonce Shows Off 60 Pound Weight Loss at Concert
Drunk Women Breaking Into Houses: A New Trend?
LeAnn Rimes Rocks Short Shorts
Gordon Ramsay Carried Off Field
Man Dies Getting Lap Dance
Kim Kardashian Claims Items Stolen from Her Luggage
Bear cools off in Calif. family's pool
Ep. 3: Chopped Desserts
Air Force dad surprises family at baseball game
Justin Bieber Wanted for Questioning for L.A. Scuffle
J.Lo and Marc's Friendly Reunion
Jet makes emergency landing after debris falls off
Cynthia Nixon Ties the Knot
Woman, 80, Falls Out of Skydive Harness Mid-Jump
Keira Reveals Engagement Ring
