Norbert Merkle, long dead, younger than I am now when I knew him, taught me how to clean a classroom, wash chalkboards, make porcelain toilets and urinals gleam, leave no floor undone.
And more.
For four years he was my boss in the Science building at college. He was its maintenance man and I was a callow boy who lucked into a job as a part-time custodian, work that kept me in books and cigarettes and bad food.
High School had been a weird melding of much laughter with a freak-misery show that seemed to have weekly, sometimes daily performances. Freshman year was lonely and disorienting. I was trying to figure out who I was supposed to be after the rituals and confinements of a small graduating class. I needed to work, and as has often been the case, work gave me a preserve in which to move about and catch my breath. Norbert’s tiny office became a harbor for me who felt ill-prepared, always uneasy and diffident.
For reasons I do not quite understand, I have been thinking lately of all the men and women who taught me to work hard, work honestly, stay the course no matter the difficulty and mess — how to pack a truck for deliveries of meat, how to wrap and stack produce, how to clear tables and wash dishes, how to work with dogs, how to maneuver around and nimbly sort and assemble on a mechanized line, how to scrape flour off the inside of a bin thirty feet up in a bosun’s chair, how to pack groceries, how to operate machines that bent and cut steel sheets, how to lift and carry heavy loads, how to make coffee’s, sell books and complete four tasks in three minutes, how to conduct myself in a classroom, listen to kids, and teach, that most multifarious of occupations and the labor of my life. Those who taught me to do all these tasks gave me the gifts of honor and confidence. They taught me how to take pride in any kind of work. There were no menial tasks. Work was not only the means to an end but an end in itself. Each minute doing something well was a minute rescued from banality and meaninglessness.
For me, work has been the continual creation of value. More than anyone else, that I learned from my father, that meticulous, careful man, who in his years of patient, unhurried methods showed me how to make my path through challenges large and small.
Something else, an obscure formulation, one not quite clear in my mind, but the men and women who had been my instructors in work were also creating spaces where I could escape loneliness, an affliction I now can see is the universal plague. Those who showed me how to do things spoke to me, listened to me, called me by my name, made me welcome to their little worlds. I wish I could remember all their names. I wish I had thanked them when they stood before me.
