Moving from one home to another requires of us to make decisions about what to keep and move, and what to discard. Of course, it helps to move seldom; I had burrowed into my last apartment — a place I called “the loft” — and stayed for six years. When I decided to share my spaces with my tiny grandterrorist and her mother, I packed and moved. The process produced an effect similar to the phenomenon known as “lake turnover,” when weather changes cause warm surface water to cool and sink to the bottom, forcing the previously colder layer on the bottom of the lake to rise to the top. Junk that had spent the winter months on the bottom of my lake of crap, moved to the top, one piece of which was the carbon of a letter that I wrote in March of 1981: “Effective immediately, I hereby resign.”
I was ten years deep in a job that I’d hated for eight years; my bride had patiently listened to my daily gripes about it and quietly suggested that since we were financially secure, I should quit. When my district manager added another in a long string of insults to my daily work routine, I called him and said, “I quit.” As the manager of a small loan office with two people who reported to me, a supervisor needed to audit my office accounts and take my keys. He curtly told me that he would get back to me as soon as he could. I replied, “You missed the part where I quit. I no longer report to you. I’m giving you the courtesy of waiting for you to audit the cash drawer, but if you don’t get here immediately, you can get my keys from the remaining staff: I’m going home.” He was there in 20 minutes.
I’ve had a few jobs in my 46-year work history, and many of them were long-term relationships. When working, I tend to stay at work, a personal adaptation of Newton’s first law of motion. My work history has been as an artist, manager and occasional salesperson, with few spaces in between. I was laid off when the Marble Hill Nuclear Power plant closed and again by Macy’s Department Store when the advertising functions were moved from St. Louis, Missouri to some other state and city. I was fired — for “insubordination” — by the owner of a printing company. I’ve had three brief stints in sales (not counting my childhood paper route): encyclopedias, office supplies and newspaper advertising. I found and built a work ethic early in my life; my first real job was as a page in the closed stacks of the University of Pittsburgh library, which I kept from ages 14 to 18. I bought into the idea that working is the social norm, and I kept doing it. Working was not drudgery to me, but a necessary component of a fulfilling life.
Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, is quoted as saying, “Winners never quit,” but there are times when it is necessary to disconnect ourselves from toxicity, to quit something to find our way to something better. When I quit the tasks of lending money and collecting it back, I set myself on a path to creative fulfillment. Few who have worked with me would say that I was a “quitter,” but in all of the years that I have spent behind desks and on the streets in the conduct of some commerce, there was no better day than that March day when I said, “I quit.”
cjon3acd@att.net