In the Same Boat With a Lot of Your Friends, Waitin' for the Day Your Ship'll Come In

Oh, kids. I've been fantasizing about being able to afford to retire for the last couple of years now. I get that I am lucky to have a job, and that since I've worked at this same institution for 26 years, that I get paid well for what I do, and what with my latest health problems, I am EXTREMELY lucky to have the health insurance I do, but I'm worked out. Of course, I probably have at least ten years before I can even entertain the idea of retiring, but a girl can dream, can't she?

People tell me that I'll be bored when I retire, or that I will lose my social outlet, but I beg to differ. First of all, the only time I'm ever really bored is when I'm at work. My job basically consists of me inputting classes and grades from other colleges into a computer and answering the same questions via phone and email for the last 21 years. Also, it is true that I have made many great friends in my past jobs. My friend Ed G. used to say, "It's a good thing that Churly is poor and had to work so much, or she wouldn't have any friends." But I don't have tons in common with most of my current co-workers. They are all perfectly nice and all that, it's just that they aren't like people in my past jobs, that weren't in offices, who I still see and hang out with over 30 years later. If I didn't have to work the majority of my waking hours, I would have time to go hang out with people I DO have things in common with.

Most importantly, I have so many things I could be doing with my days that I just don't have time for now. So, right now I fantasize about it.One of these decades, I hope I can afford to retire for real. While I'm thinking (obsessing) about all of this, I thought I'd look back on all of the many, many jobs I've had in the past. I think after reading about them, you'll see that I have earned the right to be tired of the grind.

1.) My first "job". I think I should have stopped after my very first job, because it probably wasn't going to get any better than that. When I was 9 or 10, our next door neighbors in Mesa, Arizona asked me if I could take care of their dachshund, and her six newborn puppies while they were on vacation for two weeks. It was by far the best job I've ever had.

2.) The second job I had was when I was eleven. I took over my brother's old paper route, delivering the Chicago Sun Times and the Tribune in Alsip, Illinois. This was in the late 1970's. After they caught John Wayne Gacy, I was never so glad to be a paper GIRL.

3.) My third job was as a neighborhood babysitter when I was in junior high. The few things I remember about this job was trying to spread the cookies out in their packages to make it look like I didn't eat as many as I really had, watching Saturday Night Live after the kids had gone to bed, and reading the naughtiest parts of  the parent's copies of "Forever" by Judy Blume. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every single family I babysat for had a copy of "Forever" on their book shelf in the late 70's.

4.) In high school I wasn't really allowed to work outside of my legal guardian's house. I did PLENTY of work inside it, though. I was allowed to sort boxes at the company that one of my legal guardians managed from time to time, and I was allowed to detassel corn every Summer. For those of you NOT from Iowa, detasseling is where a bunch of people who are desperate for money go out in corn fields and pull the tassel of certain rows of plants to make hybrid seed corn. It usually takes place for a few weeks in July, so it is hot as hell, you get really bad corn rash walking through the aisles of corn, there are bugs everywhere, and if you're really lucky, you'll grab a tassel that has this goopy disgusting mold on it. I did this particular job all four years of high school, and one Summer right after I graduated college.

5.) When I first moved to Iowa City it was really hard to even find shit jobs. You know, Reaganomics and all that. I did have a stint trying to sell magazines over the phone, but that lasted about a week. I hate to bother people in general, and I hate to try and sell people things they don't want or need specifically. So, it was about the worst situation for me.

6.) My sixth job was at a pizza delivery place called Pizza Wheels. It was one of those shit jobs where most of the people you worked with were great, so it was fine in general, except when the big boss came to town, crapped all over everything, and left again. I quit this job without giving notice because the band Husker Du was playing in this guy named Robot's art studio on a Sunday night in December of 1984 (Bob Mould still had long hair back then), and my boss wouldn't give me the night off. The show was worth it.

8.) My eighth job was working at Amelia Earhart's Deli, mostly as a dishwasher, but I would cocktail waitress on occasion when there were bands. Like most restaurants in the 1980's the owner appeared to have a little cocaine problem, so she would have me try the soups, since she didn't have much of a sense of smell or taste. If I could actually make money tasting soup for people right now, I would never want to retire.

9.) My ninth job was working in the Salmon Restoration Project in the California Conservation Corps in 1985. This was the most physically demanding job I've ever had. There were about 20 of us, all 18 to 22 years old, living in trailers right on the banks of the Eel River in Leggett, California, a town of about 150 marijuana growers (back in the 1980's weed was illegal. The growers booby trapped all of the areas where they had crops, so you couldn't hike around there unless  you really wanted to tempt fate.).

We were all trained to fight wild land fires, and floods, and could be pulled to help with those situations whenever we were needed. We were called fish heads because our job was to enhance the salmon population in that area. Back in the day, logging companies would just clear-cut whole forests, take the trees they wanted, and bulldoze the rest into rivers so they could then drive their trucks over the log jams they created. Because they didn't care about anything but money, they didn't realize they were killing off the salmon and steel head trout populations by doing that. Derrrrrr. Salmon will only spawn where they were spawned, and if they can't get there because there are fifty foot high log jams in their way, they don't reproduce. Our job was to use chainsaws to cut up these log jams and then recreate the creek habitat after the jams were busted up. As hard as it was in so many ways, I loved this job. 

I met my first real boyfriend there, I saw a bobcat and a mountain lion out in the wild for the first time at this job, I made tons of mistakes, and learned so much, and woke up every day, walked out into my backyard of  Redwood trees and thought, "Damn! I can't believe I live here."

My 7th and 14th jobs respectively were both working at the Mill Restaurant. Remember when I said I still have friends from jobs that I worked thirty years ago? A lot of those friends I met at the Mill. I met a friend and roommate who helped me get to California the first time. I met my first husband working there. He turned out not to be the nicest person in the world, but I have two amazing daughters from that marriage, so I have to look at that as a good thing. 

I think for me, the reason that the Mill was so important, was that I had just turned 19 the week before I started working there the first time, and I was 23 when I finally quit the second time I worked there, and I grew up there in a lot of ways. I met the kinds of people who I wanted to emulate (and plenty of people I wanted to make sure and NOT emulate). Musicians, artists, writers, and just good, complicated, interesting, hilariously funny friends who helped me figure out how to be an adult...Not a mature adult, mind you. More like they showed me I could be an adult without having to be mature. 

I worked as a line cook there and there were some insanely busy nights, and really bad folk music, but also some nights there was really GOOD folk music, and a lot of people drank too much, and I was experimenting and trying out all different kinds of ways to be, and for me, the Mill was the best place to do that. I honestly don't think I would be the same person I am today (for good or bad) if my brother hadn't helped me get a job at the Mill when I was 19.

Okay, this is way too long already, and I have tons more jobs to talk about, so I'm calling this Part One, and I'll start Part Two in the next day or two