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]> 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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