The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I meet folks all the time who have jobs, careers, full employment, financial security, the whole economic enchilada …. but who don’t really like what they do. My parents called that ‘Reality’. Lucky for one of their rebellious kids, at least. I had a buddy’s kid tell me recently – at age 12 – he wanted to be an osteopathic surgeon. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? At age 12 I wanted to be a cowboy.

I mean, where’s the romance here? The adolescent will toward some kind of schoolkid passion? Some ideal of a calling untethered to adult notions of a proper career. Where’s the deep seated urge to … I don’t know, just do something fun, something for the helluvit? Mom, Dad, I got an announcement to make. I’ve been thinking pretty hard lately about what I want to do with my life. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head, you know, between updating Facebook and worrying about my acne, and I’ve finally come to a decision. Osteopathic Surgeon. Whaddaya think?

My folks might’ve been relieved I no longer aspired to Cattle Punching, but somehow I suspect they would’ve rolled their eyes and said, wait a few years, why don’tcha? You’ll find something you love. Course, trouble was, I did. I went through a number of career explorations. Restauranteur. Metro bus driver. Teacher. Substitute teacher. Dog pound kennel worker. Hospital orderly. Furniture stripper. School bus driver. Stained glass artist.

Oops. Stop the film. Rewind to stained glass artist. This is a career? This is what you went to college for? This is what you want to do? And expect to make a living??? Have you considered, oh, osteopathic surgery maybe. Or dentistry?

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather too. Sometimes life’s detours become an interstate. Occasionally passion will override the sensible and the safe and the sane. I know my friends who have impressionable children don’t want the kids near me for fear of contact contamination, but … I know this: life is way more fun, way more meaningful, way more worth living —- if you pick the life you love, the wife you love, the job you love, than if you choose the route that’s most lucrative.

Although …. I think those routes ARE the most lucrative — even if they don’t make much money. My folks might not agree, but at least they can rest easy knowing I didn’t become a cowboy. At least not a real one.

Right after I’d graduated college and quit my job as 8th grade teacher — deciding, I guess, I’d had my fill of institutional learning — I applied for a job as ‘food manager’ of the University’s Student Union. I’d been supervisor of the dining hall that served most of the old dormitories on the Univ. of Wisconsin lakefront for three years so I was hired to run a dining hall, an ice cream parlor and a grill on the side of campus where engineers and folks who wanted a career that would result in well-paying jobs would go to eat. Unlike the Union on the lakefront where folks who majored in Renaissance English or Poly Sci came to plot the Revolution, this being the late ‘60’s, early ‘70’s, when idealism trumped fiscal survival. Good Karma was all we needed.

I lasted three months, not long after the Union South Poisonings in which multiple students and staff ate the potato salads left under the heating lights to grow bacterial toxins. Hell if I knew mayonnaise would spoil so quick. I was good at managing a hundred employees. Food, not so much.

Dave, my boss who ran the entire Union, asked how I could not know that. I told him I had a degree in Useless Information, not Food Science. ‘You knew that when you hired me,’ I said as my no mea culpa, but in the end I pled guilty and told him I would move on soon as he found a suitable replacement, which took no time flat, some former military cook. The days of my employees smoking dope in the freezer with me were about to end. The General would tighten their ship, count on that, Mister!

Dave wanted me to go back to school, get a degree in Restaurant and Hospitality. Good jobs, he pitched. ‘Well paid. You could go anywhere and find work.’ Dave was a good guy, even after I refused to wear ties, dress up or act adult. I think he saw me as the kid he never had, but he could steer from delinquency to the straight and very narrow.

Course, I had bigger dreams. A month after I’d trained Col. Hardass my job, I walked into a Humane Society that needed a kennel worker, two bucks an hour, no managerial responsibilities whatsoever, got hired on the spot, started the very next day. The rest, as they say in the movies, was history. I was on my way ….