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You can fall into a million bucks, or you can take the cobbler's way
By David Gerard, Muskogee Daily Phoenix
WINNING Column-August 2002
My youngest son told me several days ago he wanted to be a millionaire.
I did not object.
I've often thought myself about being a millionaire. About every couple weeks when I get my paycheck, the thought crosses my mind "Why don't you be a millionaire?"
But all I've known in my life is shoe repair, furniture making, house painting, cowboying – I worked on a 64,000-acre ranch in West Texas for a year in my younger days – and reporting.
Sadly, I did not aspire to millionair-ing.
My mother and father always associated hard work with character and poverty with honesty.
Millionaire-ing, on the other hand, they associated with graft and corruption.
Given the recent developments in the corporate world – the collapses of Enron and WorldCom and some bad bookkeeping by the accounting company Arthur Anderson – it appears my parents were right.
Work is what keeps a person young, is what my dad, the shoe cobbler philosopher, once told me.
"Millionaires don't live long," he said. "All the carousing puts them in an early grave. You don't want t lot of money."
Still, every now and then, I get tired of working day in and day out. I did the other day.
I was at a grocery store in Coweta, thinking about "Easy Street," an old term which means coming into a bunch of money. I was thinking I wish I could find that address.
I came around the canned vegetable aisle into produce, and a woman was picking herself up off the floor. She had one of her hands at the small of her back. Leaning against the counter holding 10-pound bags of potatoes, she made awful faces and moaned and groaned.
Another lady was behind me, and she went to the moaning woman and asked her what happened.
She had slipped on something on the floor and fallen.
Two tore employees came then. The fallen lady pointed to the floor and said, "I don't know what that is, but you shouldn't have whatever this is on your floor."
She was talking lawsuit.
If I had been about two minutes quicker, I could have slipped and fallen and been threatening lawsuit. I was thinking since I've been at the newspaper, I've seen lawsuits filed against several stores in Muskogee from people who have slipped on water or something else on the floor.
Of course, my parents frowned on behavior like that as well. My younger brother got hit in the head with a ball bat at school when he was a teenager and almost died. My parents paid the deductible and the bills the insurance didn't cover for two brain surgeries and never complained one time.
I've always thought that was commendable – maybe silly – but commendable.
So I live to work and work to live, and only occasionally wish it wasn't this way. That's when I remember the poem by Philip Larkin, a 20th century English poet.
"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?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison- –
Just for paying a few bills?
That's out of proportion."
That's only the beginning of the poem. Larkin later says – |
