When I was a kid, I didn’t get an allowance. I was told if I wanted money, I would need to work for it. Occasionally, there were things to do around my house that my parents would grant a quarter or two for me to complete, but generally I was expected to go elsewhere to earn money to help ease the economic burden on the family. My first job was washing pots and pans in a bakery at age ten. I didn’t like it and was only subbing for a friend who did it regularly. Then I subbed on his corner selling the evening newspaper. I would run out into the traffic lane at red lights and hawk the paper to drivers and hopefully complete my transactions before I got run over by commuters drag racing off the line at the green light. Often I got stiffed by drivers who took the paper and then said they didn’t have the money when the light changed. It wasn’t the perfect job either. Finally, I found my niche at age twelve. My folks had bought a new-fangled rotary mower and many neighbors would prefer to have me cut and edge their lawns rather than work up a sweat shoving their push mowers around. Every weekend I would do a dozen lawns within a four block radius. The early models of rotary mowers didn’t have catchers for the cut/mulched grass, and so I had to spend more time raking up all the cut grass and sweeping it off the driveways and sidewalks than I did mowing. I kept looking at the situation and knew I had to figure out something better. One day it came to me and I got a cardboard box from the grocery store dumpster and cut a hole in the end and hooked it over the chute that spit out the cut grass. It worked like a dream, and cut my mowing time by more than half. I wound up making $3.00 an hour when the minimum wage was $1.25 and hour. Not bad for a twelve-year-old kid. My customers marveled at my “invention”, and it was several years later until the manufacturers finally started selling catchers like mine with their mowers if you wanted them.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, but I think in my case it was more likely that my father was always tinkering with things and had invented a few useful items himself. He had even eventually motorized a push mower with an electric motor before we bought the rotary mower. I learned that that was an important way to look at problems: “How can I make this work better” rather than saying “it is what it is.” Why do I bring that up? Because I find that I often need to do that in my writing. It’s amazing how many times I put something in cold storage and then read it later and say, “that just doesn’t work well.” I think it’s important to tinker with things in writing sometimes. It’s amazing what you can come up with.
1 Comment
Rose M. Vieira
8/29/2017 09:49:38 pm
Your dad and my tinkerer dad would have gotten along well. His example served me well inmy job in educationat the Zoo, coming up with crafts and activities based on using ”junk” of all kinds to stay within our small budget. I enjoy your writing - very creative and insightful - so if you tinker with it, it certainly pays off!
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