The choice of work available.
Here in Fairwater, you could work at either of the two feedmills, the lumberyard, or the car dealership. You could tend bar, work at the bank or at the convenience store, or possibly, in the post office. You could work at the canning factory. Outside of Fairwater, there's the gravel pit, or you could farm - dairy, cash crops, or some combination of the two. Once in a while around here you smell the stink of the pig farm, too. In autumn, sometimes, the smell of apples.
In Ripon there are the usual retail stores, banks, investment services, restaurants, insurance companies, car dealers, auto parts depots, groceries, gas stations, and bars. There's the public library, the public schools, Ripon College, the police department. There's the cookie factory, the wafer factory, the plastics factory, specialty jams, specialty meats, Speed Queen Washers and Dryers, the printing plant, the newspaper. A painting contractor, a construction company. The churches.
If you grow up in this area, these are your choices. If you want to stay here, find something among this list that you like. Otherwise, you'll have to move on, find another place, another set of people, other ground rules.
Let me rephrase what I am saying. These are all ways to make a living that I've listed. None of them, in itself, brings fulfillment. If you want happiness and achievement and greatness, you choose that one day at a time, moment by moment, whatever it is you do for money. Often we make the mistake of using money as the yardstick to measure greatness. What of Mother Teresa? What of Thomas Wolfe? What of Crick and Watson who unraveled DNA?
Heavy dew this morning. Three mourning doves in the driveway. Cool, blue sky. Long shadows. The sun is wandering south in this season, a few more degrees off due east as I head up Washington Street.
To the northwest, a long, low, dark smear that looks almost like smoke. Ominous. At Five Corners several trucks from Michel's Pipeline are queued up, waiting for something.
On the south side of Ripon, as I turn onto Watson Street, I look into the rearview mirror. I am startled to see the very sour face of James Carvelle. What would he do if he could not be disagreeable? He is driving a pick-up. Suit and tie, a thin tie. He looks all the world as if he's just bit into a big lemon. Say it isn't so, say it's not James Carvelle, say we have not been contaminated by his sourness.
"What of Crick and Watson who unraveled DNA?" Not sure this is the best example, considering that, by all accounts, they are highly competitive and egocentric types whose self-promotional campaigns have succeeded in erasing from the public memory the fact that DNA had four, not two, co-discoverers. See http://www.chemheritage.org/EducationalServices/chemach/ppb/cwwf.html
I love the last paragraph!
Posted by: dave | September 28, 2004 at 03:04 PM
You're right - perhaps Crick and Watson are not the best example. My original notion was that they were working for discovery, rather than primarily for money, though I don't know that for a fact.
Posted by: Tom Montag | October 02, 2004 at 05:36 PM