Tines Up

My brother-in-law Martin once observed that I had a penchant for doing the hardest work for the lowest wage. I chalk this defect of character up to an unwillingness on my part to take my work life seriously. As a result of not planning, not marketing myself, and not achieving very much, I have been relegated to menial work and an interesting hike along the path of downward mobility.

For example, when I moved to Arizona, all I could find was temporary work that no one else wanted to do, work that paid a third of what my fellow "regular" laborers made. I did a stint culling curled boards under the June sun at Lumber Country, cleaned up construction sites for bosses that were petty tyrants with the IQ of fire hydrants, and I re-surfaced tennis courts. 

The tennis court re-surfacing  gig was instructive for a couple of reasons. The first of which was that the workday ran from 5:00 AM (on the courts) to 2:00 PM, which left lots of time for drinks in the afternoon. The second was that I often worked next to the tennis club’s pools, where lovely, pampered, neglected daughters of privilege pouted at having such a rough life as they sipped margaritas while lounging on their chaise rollers. The third, the one which has to do with this blog, was using a jack hammer.

I had never used one before and wasted a whole day trying to jack hammer out a footing for a tennis net post by hammering from the middle out. 

Not good.

Jack hammering, life many other skills in life, is best done from the perimeter, or close enough to an edge which makes it possible for material to cleave off, or "exfoliate" as geologists like to say, into loosened soil or space. It is best to work from the edges in toward the center, or out from the center if there is a hole in the middle,"chipping away". 

(Most "big jobs," things like how to deal with our carbon footprint and the resulting climate change, are best tackled in small ways, coming at them in all directions (conservation, solar, wind, geothermal, better construction, change of consumer culture, i.e.doing a bit at a time)).

Having mastered this important life skill I entered into the really hard work of marriage a few years later. Today, my bride of twenty-five years asked me to help her with a garden project – breaking up a gravelly, packed patch of yard that needed  to be made suitable for planting.  She patiently pointed out the perimeter and showed me how hard it was going to be to loosen the packed crust. 

Remembering my lessons from the country club (I skipped telling her about the pouting, thong-wearing, spoiled sirens) I went right to the jack hammer strategy in reverse. Break through the crust in the middle and chip your way out, in a spiral, with loosened soil on the inside of the spiral.

The work went fast and took a fraction of the time my beloved thought it would have. I would like to say I impressed her, but given that she has lived with me for so long, it would take more than a shovel job well-done to undo my mountain of spousal shortcomings.

"Since you have some extra time before you go to the prison workshops, you can bring up some wheelbarrows full of sand from the wash," she said, a gave me an appreciative peck and a smile. 

She returned to being a happy soul full of garden dreams, and I moved on to my next task.

 

 

As I wheeled my burden down to the wash, I flipped over a rake that had the tines pointing up, a state which could result in a broken nose if someone stepped on it. No need to make things harder than necessary.