Superballs & Labor Strikes
Episode 05:01:2023 - Prompt: Labor
Where labor took me…
Last week in MONEY, I wrote about joining the labor force at fourteen with a full-time payroll job the summer before my junior year of high school.
I got the weekly paycheck bug.
I could have focused on my grades, strategizing college applications, and building up my extracurricular credentials. Instead, as soon as I had my driver’s license, I got a job in the kitchen at a hip Bookstore Café.
The position was as social as it was intense, cranking out salads, bread plates, brunch waffles, and sandwiches to blaring mixed tapes on 7-hour shifts.
I’d skin hundreds of baked potatoes and go to school the next day with raised nicks in my palms from the knife.
I remember walking into the guidance counselor’s office one day where my best friends were gathered excitedly around a 4-inch thick soft-cover book.
“What’re you all doing?” I asked.
“Looking up colleges!” a friend responded.
The book was like the Let’s Go Europe of US college programs.
They were imagining campus life in Providence, New York, and Seattle when we still had another year of high school to suffer.
I knew in that moment I was on a different path.
During the period - from 18 - 24-years-old - I worked consistently in the food & drink service industry, but one job stood out from the rest.
I noticed the ad on a job board at the Towson Library.
A woman was looking for a caretaker for her adult daughter once a week. I believe the words “art therapist” were part of the description of an ideal candidate. As were “car and valid driver’s license”.
Looking back, I saw this job as a career opportunity: art/therapy.
I can’t imagine what I wore for my in-person interview with Mrs. K.
I didn’t have clothing that screamed Professional.
Mrs. K explained that, while Christine was 38, she tested at the developmental level of a third-grader. She spent weeknights at an assisted living group home in the city and the weekend at her parents in the suburbs.
My job was to meet Christine on Fridays at her vocational training facility, plan 6-hours of creative activities and outings, and drop her off at Mrs. K’s at 7pm.
Christine was everything I’d hoped: funny, raw, smart, and invested in what we were doing as long as it was engaging. Some days we’d make a picnic and eat in the park. Other days we’d do art projects with glitter and glue or bake bread.
I’d take her to the library, and as soon as we entered, she’d shout:
“Why’s it so damn quiet in here?!”
I’d laugh. She’d laugh. She knew how to read a room.
Christine had a haircut appointment, which was going to be my first with her, so I arrived early to pick her up. I was greeted at the warehouse door by a friendly work-therapy assistant.
“You’re early. Why don’t you come inside?” she said.
I had long wondered what Christine did in there all day. I asked her about it, but she’d simply say it was her work.
I followed the assistant through two large doors and entered a massive hangar filled with long picnic tables and benches. At each table sat four mentally or physically disabled/challenged workers, all with some functioning capacity.
The formation mimicked an industrial assembly line.
As a kid, Slime and inedible gummy worms and Superballs and other toys in plastic eggs were all the rage.
Insert a quarter. Out came the surprise.
Now I knew how they were assembled.
This was Christine’s “work therapy.”
I barely recognized her slack face as her shaky hands fit little toys into eggs.
“Christine, you have a guest,” announced the assistant.
Christine looked up, angry.
Angry to have been interrupted?
Angry to be reminded she had a name?
When she saw me, everything changed.
“Michelle! Look! Look what I do. This is my work.”
She broke down the 3-part assembly system, illustrating her task with pride.
“Christine, would you like to leave now? I’m early,” I asked.
She already had her coat on, heading for the door.
From that day forward, I have considered how the stuff we buy is made. Whose hands skinned those potato jackets? Whose hands put that knick-knack in a plastic egg? Whose hands mixed the cement? Put your phone together…
And so on…
YOUR TURN: Midnight is the deadline for the Writers Guild Association of America to enter into a labor strike if negotiations are unsuccessful. Screenwriter Zack Stentz wrote an OpEd piece (the link should lead you to a gifted article without paywall) saying The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Isn’t About Money. It’s About Survival.
Where does the theme of LABOR take you? Labor of Love? Labor of Childbirth? Labor Strikes? Hard Labor? There’s no wrong answer here.
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Happy writing!
"Oh, you sweet, little bundle of hard work," I cooed to the baby being held by her mother. We were waiting in the checkout line of the infants' section of a mall department store. I was buying a baby shower gift for one of my young colleagues at school. With my child-raising finish line in sight, I had a sense of what was ahead for the baby's mother: the chasing infant and toddler years, grade school carpooling, teenager angst. Perhaps God timed female menopause to coincide with their children's adolescence, so mothers could physically, emotionally, honestly, and happily say, "I'd done." Now, twenty years later, I think about those labor-intensive years with a bit of nostalgia. But when I look at my kindergarten-age granddaughter, I say to myself, "Oh, you sweet, little bundle of hard work."
I worked at Dunkin Donuts when I was 15. I was making 3.15/hour. My father used to drive me to work at 6am so I wouldn't have to take the bus. I didn't realize until I was in my twenties what a real sacrifice that was. I don't know what it would take for me to drive anyone, anywhere, at 6am.