In his poem “Toads,” Philip Larkin wrote:

            Why should I let the toad work

                        Squat on my life?

            Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

                        And drive the brute off?

The toads don’t budge; work still hunkers on our shoulders. Sometimes it hurts them.

Now that I am retired, I have plenty of time to contemplate the nature and meaning of work, time I didn’t have when I was working. Reading Larkin’s poem again last night, a host of reflections blazed like stars skipping across the inky sky of my past.

Coming of age in the Christian Reformed Church had fairly wearied my young mind, at least the small portion not dedicated to baseball, with such topics as “A Reformed View of Work” (we had a “Reformed View” for nearly every possible topic), “Work as Vocation,” “A Sacred Calling,” and others. That made sense to me years later when I entered a profession.  It made little sense to me when I grew up working.  I worked because I wanted something, and it was seldom sacred.

When I was a boy, if you wanted something you had to work for it. At a very young age already I wanted plenty. I had a passion for candy bars that knew no satiety. And I was completely indiscriminate in my passion. The standard Hershey Bars, Milky Ways, Heath Bars, Butterfingers, and the like were regular fare. I also had a hankering for the odd balls: the Zero Bar, the Marathon Bar which did seem to last forever, getting stuck in your teeth in gobs, Milk Duds, Nonpareils, Nestle Crunch, and 5th Avenues.

The list could go on; like the squirrels who daily prowl my yard looking for their lost treasures, I was on the prowl for candy bars.  To buy them I had to work.

Starting around the age of ten or eleven I clinched a deal with Mrs. Flokstra for grass cutting and snow shoveling. It was a long walk at 5:30 on January mornings, from Neland Avenue, past Oakdale Christian School where I would soon be seated, and up Alto. Dr. Flokstra, who golfed with my father, was a perfectionist. He held onto that fifty-cent piece in summer until every blade was clipped to his satisfaction. With really heavy snowfalls in winter, he tipped me 15 cents.

I suppose many attitudes surround people’s work. I can truly say that I enjoyed almost all the jobs I had. Even “humping” freight on the night shift at the truck yard to pay my way through college. Some days, if the freight were heavy, I drove, odoriferous and gulping coffee, straight from the dock to classes at Calvin College on Franklin Street.  If I had a few extra minutes I would stop at Fatboy’s Fish Fry on Division and would eat the fish with my fingers on the way to school. With a few exceptions the classrooms were lively enough to keep me wide awake.

But I was going to say before Calvin College broke in with all her matter of fact that there were few jobs I ever hated. Just two.  My wife and I were at that stage in our courtship when, as was the custom in those days, I wanted to give her a cedar chest for Christmas. I had a very limited understanding of this particular custom, but I dutifully set out to buy a chest. These items were not cheap.

I tried to pick up some shifts at the truck yard, but the regulars wanted all the hours they could get to buy their own Christmas gifts.  I took a job at minimum wage stocking shelves with men’s shirts at Montgomery Ward, a franchise about to stumble into bankruptcy.  It deserved to be. I signed on for some eight-hour shifts through the holidays. The problem was that there were about two hours of work. No matter how slowly or frequently I climbed to the attic of that store to get fresh shirts, there just wasn’t a place to put them on the store shelves. They were always full. Polyester shirts weren’t selling that year.

The manager told me to take a nap in the attic for a couple of hours. Besides new stock, that attic held dingy old wooden shelving, laden with dust. The store’s network of fluorescent lighting, buzzing and flickering like serpents, was embedded in the attic floor, generating unspeakable heat. After a couple of days of sweating and sneezing and plain misery, I walked out for good.

The second most disliked work occurred a couple of years earlier than Montgomery Ward.  This would have been at Earl’s car wash, squeezed into a narrow corner lot at Eastern and Oakdale. Earl would come to the car wash around 8 a.m. to open and hire spot help for the day. Dale and J.B. and I were the Saturday help on frigid winter Saturdays. Already a line of filthy cars, clad in salt dust, waited. Earl drove his maroon Lincoln to the head of the line, emerged sparkling clean, and drove off.  He would return at closing to empty the till and pay off his workers.

In its ideal function the car wash worked like this.  A car owner would relinquish his car to a car wash driver at the entrance. The driver positioned the car at the line where a tow hook would be fastened to the front bumper. This would then drag the car through all the stages of the wash.  The driver stayed inside until the end, swabbing down the surfaces and cleaning inside windows with a handful of towels. At the end a worker kicked the tow chain loose and the driver wheeled off to the concrete apron in front of the wash.

Once Earl drove off, the car wash was in the hands of a madcap and disorganized crew. When arriving at work, most regular workers stowed a bottle of liquor behind the tower of towels—quarts of wine, pints of whiskey, sometimes a gallon of Ripple wine. Dale and I got the job of washing and drying towels. We manned a couple of wash tubs and a wringer by the open front door, slowly freezing in the wind. J.B. lucked out as a driver. He would stay warm all day in the cars.

As the line workers came to get fresh towels, they also hit the liquor to get recharged and warmed up. By midmorning they were feeling very mellow.  By noon an elderly man named Clancy, trying to break loose the tow chain, mistimed his kick and plummeted full length into several inches of water.  A poetic rush of profanity rose above the general din. “Breaking the chain” was tricky work, not for someone having trouble remembering where he was.  Clancy leaned against the wall and slid into the office to recover his balance. He did this by napping for a few hours in Earl’s office chair.  

J.B., who was strong as an ox even then, was taken off driving duties and placed on breaking the chain.  The trick to it, first of all, was to stay upright on the slippery, soapy concrete; second, to kick the tow chain right ahead of the bumper hook; and finally to grab the slack chain and unhook the car before it tightened again. The driver had about two seconds to get the car in gear and wheel it out to the driveway apron.

Canisters were placed at strategic spots throughout the wash for tips, but any good driver could get more when he greeted the owner on the apron. A tall man named Gillium had the task of collecting the tip money throughout the day and emptying it into a large Lay’s Potato Chip can under the towel table.  At the end of the day regulars divided the tip money. Spot workers got a straight dollar an hour—cash, no tips.

If it was a particularly bitter winter day, Earl would look at our red, swollen hands and give each of us a ten-dollar bill.

The auto wash was a madhouse of noise, a cacophony of cursing, a screeching racket of machinery, and, about once an hour, the groaning collision of autos.  They always seemed to happen in slow motion.  As the driver wheeled the stricken car off to the edge of the apron, the cashier ducked out and started the insurance paperwork.

Few jobs that I have had approached the sheer futility of the car wash. It was winter; owners drove off into a snowstorm and a salt-laden Eastern Avenue. Even through the gentle rue of nostalgia, that father of lies, I can find nothing redemptive about it.  The tragedy was that we didn’t even have cars, much less driver’s licenses, to get a free wash. Gillium, the nominal manager when Earl was gone, had a car.  So did the cashier and one or two others. After closing, most wove their unsteady way up and down Eastern Avenue into the early winter night.

Some jobs etch the soul. They leave a stain upon our memory. Others linger in memory with a deep gladness. Such a one for me was with Sierd and Jan Gardeners.

Sierd and Jan were Dutch immigrants, brothers-in-law, who began their search for the American dream in the mid-1950s, maintaining lawns and gardens and removing snow primarily in the wealthier areas of town. I was one of the very first part-timers they hired. I was 13.

On my first day at work, Sierd drove me about 10 miles out of town in his big Mercury with a five-gallon tank of gas in the trunk. The day before the former part-timer drove the company jeep, laden with mowers, edgers, and such, on a little joy ride on the highway. By his own admission he wanted to see how fast the jeep would go. Then he ran out of gas, hitchhiked back to Sierd’s house, and handed over the keys. The jeep, he said, had topped out at 47.

Sierd gave me a five-minute lesson in using the stick shift and clutch and drove off. Bucking and grinding the life out of that Jeep, I made it back to work. I had earned my first hour of work at 85 cents an hour.

In this partnership, Sierd was in charge of mowing and landscaping; Jan mowed a few small lawns and did odd jobs but was mostly in charge of shmoozing the well-to-do housewives.  I could never figure it out. Sierd was a handsome, muscular sort; Jan was circular, a long plump barrel of a body propped atop two painfully thin legs.  He pronounced his name like “Yun,” which I discovered later was short for “Johannes.” He smoked a pipe of foul-smelling tobacco incessantly, holding it clenched straight out between his front teeth, and never really did learn much English. With the housewives Jan nodded knowingly, smiled occasionally, and kept his mouth shut. For one thing, the pipe caused so much whistling and sputtering and flying saliva that it was hard to tell just what he was trying to say. One day he roared at a friend of mine, who had become one more in a growing band of part-timers, “Brin drot clot!” My friend, who was still relatively new on the job and entirely new to Jan, stood bewildered in the yard. Finally he shouted, “What?” Jan took his pipe out and roared “Brin drot clot!”

Not until I called, “Bring the drop cloth for your weeding,” did my friend double over laughing.  Jan stoked his pipe back up to a full gale of smoke and started humming to himself as he clipped a privet hedge. All was well with the world. Throughout the day my friend muttered to me, “Drot clot.”

Jan’s job was to do the dirty personal jobs for customers, mostly the wealthy ones. He shined windows with his chamois cloths (“sammy clots”), trimmed bushes until there was little left of them, and generally cleaned things—light posts, garages, gardens, and such. I didn’t work for him much. I dreaded the times I had to. Several customers on our route had major-sized dogs. These things were Boxers, Saint Bernards, Newfoundlands, that sort of animal. On the first warm Saturday in spring, Jan would pick me up at my house, and we would spend the day raking up the dog’s deposits from the preceding winter.  We didn’t use drot clots, but shoveled the oozing piles into large garbage cans. Jan never told me where he dumped them.

But Sierd had hired me and I only worked for Jan with Sierd’s permission.  When I was older, about 16-18, Sierd asked me to help plowing snow.  I had a picture of myself wheeling the Jeep through drifts and cleaning those drives to within an inch of their life. Instead, it amounted to this.  At midnight Sierd dropped me off at the start of an enormous run of mansions surrounding Reeds Lake, a rather exclusive district in our city. He went on with the Jeep plowing the driveways, I walked through the snowstorm in the dark of night shoveling walkways and sidewalks. At 3:30 a.m. Sierd drove up and let me warm up in the Jeep. I downed a few cups of sugar-laden coffee from my thermos, then back to my solitary way.

But mostly working for the Dutch gardeners was striding across wide green lawns behind a three-unit Locke mower under Michigan’s stunning blue skies and warm sun, the scent of fresh-cut grass the stuff of dreams, and long breaks with the crew while I downed a lunch of creamed herring and a quart bottle of chocolate milk.  I could afford it, even though my 1950 Ford convertible needed some gas and a car wash.

***

Those few of us who have read Voltaire’s Candide may have a mark in the margin by the following comment: “Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.”  I’m inclined to think work keeps one from many lesser evils also. Work is not just protection from; it is for something. In my own profession of teaching, work was often for my own sense of self-worth and simultaneously for the self-worth of my students. But more than that, it was about justice (a deserving grade, the good worth of an idea), about fairness and standards and discipline. It was, frankly, also about providing for myself and my family. It was about being able to give to others in need, about being able to open our home and take others in for days, or weeks, or months. It was about being able to write, to have room for a desk and a lamp and a cup of coffee. Without sugar.

Those of us who have read the book of Hebrews may have a mark in the margin by the following verse: “Keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’” (13.5). That, I remind myself, is God’s work toward us. It frees us to do work with a heavenly note, even if it is hard to hear those notes in the rattle and clang of a car wash.