Friday, June 17, 2011

The Wages of Summer

Dial your memory back to your first summer job, and summon the soundtrack –it won’t be hard.  Here’s mine: [play “Tainted Love”] “Tainted Love” on the Top 40 wore a groove into my 16-year-old brain during the dry-roasted Colorado summer of 1982, when I stopped babysitting and started clocking in at a music store.  The job was a coup – not fast food, and located in our town’s first indoor shopping center, named “Villa Italia” for its unlikely Roman-themed décor, the Orange Julius stand flanked by armless cement statuary meant to bring classical elegance to our brand-new suburb plonked on the dusty foothills of the Rockies.  Each time “Tainted Love” filtered through the store’s speakers, the middle-school band director who ran the instrument-repair counter across from my perch in the sheet music section would make droll eye-contact with me and poke his index fingers in the air, disco-style, to punctuate the “dun-dun” downbeats before the sneering phrase, “Tainted Love,” and we’d both dissolve in giggles until the manager glared at us.

The fact that a grown-up man – balding and bearded and a teacher in his other life, no less – would crack me up like a peer was the mind-blower of that summer, as I learned, along with how to slam the cash register drawer, the plastic potential of human nature. That summer, we all punched the same clock – the smattering of grown-ups making extra money, the teenage music geeks and freaks and nerdy me – suspended in an egalitarian space made possible by our low investment in the work and our shared loathing of the officious store manager.  Outside the fluorescently lighted store I would have been invisible to the other employees, but inside?  I was the affectionately tolerated dork who didn’t realize that the scraggly guy I sold drumsticks to one afternoon was actually famous—a member of the band .38 Special, scheduled to play Red Rocks Amphitheater that night, and apparently running low on supplies.  What did I know?  So, when my starry-eyed fellow workers rushed me after the purchase to find that I didn’t get his autograph, I was ribbed, but not ridiculed.  That summer, I learned that people could decide to be equals … that differences could be breached.  And if we could reimagine ourselves so easily, maybe our identities were imagined in the first place.

For most of us, though, once clock-punching becomes a career it’s hard not to get invested in work’s self-defining qualities.  The jostling hierarchies of many workplaces affect more than our paychecks; they shape who we imagine we are. So, it’s been fun to revisit the goofy freedom of summer work during my shifts volunteering for the upcoming Old2Gold event, the gargantuan sale of Notre Dame student stuff that raises money for local non-profits.  Just as in the days of summer jobs, all the workers wear equally unflattering outfits – fluorescent orange t-shirts that seem to hit all of us in all the wrong places – and at every shift we start from scratch, none of us quite knowing what to do, and none of us any better than anyone else at folding t-shirts or sorting Halloween decorations.  We pretty much manage to follow directions, chatting while we work.  In our other lives, we discover, we’re teachers, bankers, retired business-owners, grandparents.  But there?  As in my summer jobs of old, there’s no posturing, just the goodwill of strangers who are thrown together to do a task, sharing in the monkey work of being alive.

The summer before I left for college, I made sandwiches at a deli, where once again I worked with people who never would have said hello in a high school hallway.  Thrown together in the deli’s pickle-scented air, though, I became the equal of our dazzling class vice-president, Suzanne, famous for her Cheryl Tiegs smile and bouncy red curls. We spent the summer singing to The Police on the tinny, flour-dusted radio in the deli kitchen— “I’ll send an SOS to the world!” – with heads tossed back and eyes closed … which may explain why I severed my finger to the bone while sending turkey through the huge, humming slicer. It was my new compatriot, the sparkling Suzanne, who dialed the phone to my parents and fetched ice and clean towels while I, partially in shock, explored the strange marionette quality of a finger joint loosened by a severed tendon.  Suzanne died just a few summers later, hit by lightening while mountain-biking, her SOS for me an act I couldn’t return.  The onset of summer, though, always reminds me what I learned from those jobs—that we can reimagine ourselves, grabbing chances to practice being kindly, imperfectly, vulnerably, equally human.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on June 17, 2011 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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