Thanks Max and Andrew.
Max, I did consider altering the tone or making some exceptions with
teaching but with a small poem like this, the aim was as you said, to find
something overarching in all those jobs. I have a faormer high school
friend who worked sporadically at goldsmithing and making lead light
windows in between various blue collar jobs but the longest stint has been
as a mailman which he still does and likes. He used to ride zappy trail
bikes and even later a 750 Ducati but now he putt putts through the suburbs
doing the mail run.
Strong communitarian element here at Hepburn Springs. Once a month someone
throws open their house for aperitifs from 5.30 - 7.30 of a Wednesday
evening. BYO drink and glasses and nibbles are provided with conviviality.
Off to such a gathering shortly, two streets away.
Cheers,
Bill
On Wednesday, 6 January 2016, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> O Bill, seven or eight jobs in a lifetime, and the underlying connection,
>
> the common factor emerges now convincingly.
>
> Lyrically done! the chorus that changes after the third stanza…
>
> In retirement I guess most do like you look back and ask:
> What was I doing?
>
> I know I do.
>
> And often think I might have lived a better life delivering mail,
> a job I did well and was healthy,
>
> Or as a librarian maybe.
>
> My two recent experiences of hospital have been striking:
>
> I’d been feeling how the life I’m away from, the NZ/Australian
> little world, had a strong communitarian element,
> whereas here in the US (meagre samples, yes) life seems
> more ‘every person for him/her-self’, dominated by the ethos of
> business competition.
> Though Australia has been moving that way, my recent experiences
> have made me pine for what used to be called ’the welfare state’.
>
> It turns out that the feel of the medical world - which I know is criicized
> for its being profit-driven, big pharma, etc., -
> has been: nurses and the rest doing their best for me, and giving off a
> sense
> of high morale that comes from feeling the skills you’ve acquired are being
> applied for the good of others.
>
> Your lines on teaching perhaps play down the good work I like to think
> you had a chance to do, and did.
> So that a full answer to your last question:
> what have I enabled?
> might come out with a few affirmations -
>
> the world of teachers like the world of nurses
> having a lot to be said about it that’s good…?
>
> Max in Seattle
>
> [the link below is to a piece that makes out teaching in Japan to be more
> honored
> than it is in the US:
>
> https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america
>
> On Jan 5, 2016, at 14:41, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
>
> > Keeping customers from ripping
> > into management, delivering
> > newspapers to right letterboxes,
> > prescription drugs to the pained.
> >
> > All my jobs, keeping
> > the lid on things.
> >
> > Getting groceries to suburban eaters,
> > intact dinner sets to entertainers,
> > payments to tertiary students,
> > statistics to government fiddlers.
> >
> > All my jobs, keeping
> > the lid on things.
> >
> > Squatting on bubbling-up in schools,
> > keeping bums on seats, hosing
> > down spitball revolutions,
> > affirming the competent.
> >
> > All my jobs, what
> > have I enabled?
> >
> > bw
>
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