What do we fear most?

OK, I’m a boomer — born after the Second World War but before suburbs. My family survived the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and the Second World War. They told me stories of Okies chugging along Route 66 headed to the fruit groves of California. If they ran out of gas, my grandfather would stop the dump truck he drove for the city. He uncoiled a garden hose from behind the driver’s seat, siphoned out a few gallons.

Most migrants drove at night to avoid local police. They camped near my grandmother’s. She would make a stack of bologna and cheese sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper. The children would cry when they saw the simple gesture. If they had a flat tire, my dad would fix it using a hot press and a piece of rubber. My mom would wash and iron clothes we had outgrown and hand a pile to grateful mothers. One woman, my Mom told me, sifted through the stack and pulled out an apron. She put it on and turned to the crackling, gurgling cast iron pot suspended over a fire.

This was the past. It would never happen again if I worked hard and stayed humble and kind. Work was always the word of the day. If you had work, a job, everything would be OK.

At 6 a.m. I swept the office, bays and driveway of my father’s gas station for a quarter a day. Then I pumped gas, wiped windshields and checked the engine oil. Between school and the family business I was always busy. “You don’t want to be a bum, do ya?” my uncles cautioned. I didn’t realize it was an option. “If you don’t have a job then you’re a bum, is that what you want?”

Between 16 and 22, I worked as an auto mechanic, a dishwasher, a truck driver, a produce stocker at the Piggly Wiggly, a movie projectionist and a picture framer. I sat at the business end of a John Deere under the spring sun towing a cultivator over tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, cotton.

At a liquor store I filled a walk-in refrigerator with wooden cartons of bottled beer. In Nathan Weiselman’s Tailor Shop, I sold men’s paisley ties so loud you couldn’t hear yourself talk. I washed, waxed and detailed cars for $15. At a brick factory I stacked concrete blocks into cubes, just right, so a forklift could load them onto a 40-foot trailer. I drove a front-end loader at construction sites. I framed houses with men twice my age. I laid flagstone patios and brick pathways. Being a mother may be the hardest job in the world, but roofing in Houston in August must be a close second.

“He’s a nice kid,” my uncles would say, “but he can’t hold a job.” This was the ’60s, with protests, flower children, mantra chanters and pot was $25 a bag. Bums.

I finished school and started my education. Working at a desk was boring but paid better. The comment years before still nagged. Yeah, I guess, I did want to be a bum.

If work was so rewarding, why did people have to pay you to do it? I wanted to sit on a park bench, strum my guitar and read a thousand books. The irony is, to be a bum you must be rich. You go on Oprah and complain about being fat, stressed and unhappy while taking your jet to Nassau. If they are miserable, I think the hotel maid would disagree.

People with a job eat, pay the rent, clothe the kids, feed the cats and put something aside for dentures and hearing aids in their old age.

The “Greatest Generation” feared soup kitchens. The current generation fears Wall Street. How much toilet paper does one person need? Next week we may have to eat hormone-injected polo ponies.

If work was so rewarding, why did people have to pay you to do it? I wanted to sit on a park bench, strum my guitar and read a thousand books.