… a different direction

If you’d asked me ten years ago, or even five, to write a few hundred words about work, you’d be reading a different essay.

My first full-time jobs, after high school, were retail and office jobs. This was when all offices had a front desk and someone to answer incoming calls and handle mail and other supportive tasks. Entry level, they called it. In my late twenties, a chance conversation led me to a gig as a private cook serving a wealthy family, still one of the best jobs I ever held. Two years later, a small inheritance allowed me to do some traveling. When I returned, I got another entry-level position, this time in the travel agency that had ticketed my six-month journey. I was there through deregulation and until I married the man with whom I would start a family and move to Maine.

I have a history of being present at the end of an industry.

Writing comes as easily to me as talking, with the bonus attribute of time to reconsider. In the first half of my life it was a sideline — at best some freelance income and offhand remarks from passersby in my home town and, at the least satisfying, word vomit I’ll never share written in a journal or on a scrap of paper. I still have some of those journals and scraps, a couple of boxes for my posterity to toss out after I die.

When the kids were growing up I worked at home, domestically and otherwise. When the flow of money was slow, the necessity and scope of domestic chores increased. If you want to eat in an environmentally groovy, somewhat ethical, and health-conscious way you learn to make your own applesauce and pasta. I get a lot of joy and satisfaction from playing with my food, so that work was pleasant and fulfilling. When the kids and their father pulled chairs up under the archway to the dining room for an episode of “The Mommy Cooking Show,” I was in heaven.

Sometimes the wallet needed filling more than the larder. I found employment in clerical roles, as a studio assistant for the photographer who shot slides of my husband’s art, as editor for a few newsletters and one small subversive news site in the early ’00s. For a couple of years I made high-end desserts at home and delivered them to local restaurants. I’ve been writing columns since 1990 and have been paid for about half of them.

For a few months I worked on the small and feisty staff of a national political campaign, and for a few more I helped my mother through her dying. When that was over, I got lucky.

The editor of the local newspaper-of-record, where my Letter From Away was published, offered me a job as a general assignment reporter. I quit opining about politics, put on khaki pants and button-down shirts, and paid attention. I wrote as fast as I could by hand, in vertical notebooks that fit in a pocket. I made some photographs to go with what I wrote, and others that stood alone on the page and spoke for themselves.

My profession gave me the right to ask questions, to drive up strangers’ driveways and to be, in the words of a state senator at the time, a mile wide and an inch deep on a lot of different subjects. Occasionally it allowed me to go deeper, as happened when I began to understand the death of Maine’s winter shrimp fishery and the complex interactions of human need, ocean warming, and a global economy that cares for little but the destructive behaviors that we call growth.

Back at the office, I’d transcribe what I could decipher from my notes, call people for comments and clarification, and become part of the collective buzz of humans at work. I admired my co-workers and felt privileged to be among them, although I probably didn’t let them know that, at the time.

I’ve written elsewhere about my decision to walk away from rural journalism and go back to college. It turned out that I’d been there for some kind of end to that industry, too.

There was work at college. Difficult and exciting and oozing opportunity. Wanting learn how to tell the shrimp story and others like it, in ways that would entertain audiences into awareness, I joined a marvelous community of dedicated workers: students and teachers and staff, all brimming with focus and energy. And then it was over and, like most recent graduates, I settled in for a lot of resume writing.

In my late 20s, after ending a particularly uncomfortable working relationship, I decided it was time to retire. Decreeing that I would no longer seek employment simply for the money, I set myself on a path of only doing work that felt right. What I didn’t understand, when I made that plan, was that I would someday come to enjoy work, not just for its larger purpose, but for the moments of labor, the presence and inspiration of coworkers, the satisfaction of tasks well completed, the comfortable exhaustion at the end of a good day.

I failed to grasp the cultural changes that came in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s attack on the social contract. The retirement we took for granted in the 1970s would almost completely disappear by the turn of the century and I had traded an unrealistic idea of freedom in my young and healthy years for an almost complete lack of financial security at the other end of life.

It appears that no one wants to hire someone old enough to be their grandmother. Maybe whatever bad behavior I exhibited in my middle years is now known to anyone seeking local workers. I was brought up to believe I was one of the people who would be telling other people what to do, but I’ve never been asked to do that on any paying job. It’s taken a while for the arrogance to fall away; some say it hasn’t yet.

A course in pantomime, somewhere in the 1970s, taught that the energy needed to go from sleeping to waking is far greater than that required to go from sitting to walking. Since then, my body has taught me that sitting for very long will damage muscles and pinch nerves, that walking is really good for all sorts of ailments, and that boredom comes far too easily. For some people work is a chore; for others, chores are opportunities for accomplishment. I still want my activity in this life to add to the greater good but, at 68 what I fear most is the long stretch of idleness that our culture has decreed to be my future.

As long as brain and fingertips allow, I’ll keep writing, setting myself more deadlines as the list of other required tasks grows smaller. Like a many old people, I will volunteer — once the plague lets us gather again. Cooking will always give me the pleasure of complex and attention-demanding effort. But, I don’t know if I will ever again be part of the rhythm and flow of a busy restaurant kitchen or a bustling newsroom.

My long and varied resume does not rise to the top of the algorithmical pile on the remote and virtual desks of HR decision makers. I’ve submitted about 75 resumes since the pandemic took my summer job. Some carried cover letters; a few went into an actual envelope, stamp and all. About half were sent to email addresses and the rest required me to fill in web forms. The most recent asked me to record myself answering three questions. No video, no written answers. Just a pdf of my resume and an mP3 of my voice.

At least two of those 75 jobs were, to my mind, exceptional fits. I had read the lists of tasks, expectations, required skills and experience, preferred skills etc. Without lying or even stretching, my resumes demonstrated my understanding of the tasks, my ability to meet or surpass the expectations. My travels thought their websites — even some stalking on Guidestar and Google — helped me write honest and optimistic cover letters.

I think I’ve heard back from fewer than 15 of my applications. There have been three initial interviews, one in person, one on video, and one on the phone. I got one callback, from the guy who’d had me come to his office. That was last winter and I think he called me back because he liked watching my discomfort at his unwillingness to wear a mask.

The majority of email responses were obvious form messages. Most of those thanked me for applying, praised my qualifications, and informed me the prospective employer had “ … decided to go in a different direction.”

I keep wondering what that means. In spite of their admiration for my qualities, they were going in, “… a different direction.” What had I missed?

I didn’t count on this nostalgia for the society of a workplace. The sort of experience I’ve gathered is not wanted, and I’m surprised at how much I want to work. The thought of a place where there is no longer a place for me breaks my heart. Would it feel better to be getting a gold watch at a party with a sheet cake, surrounded by coworkers I had grown to love and a boss who was truly sorry to see me go?

Perhaps the working world is a language I no longer understand.