Worker Men

From the archives at Alte.substack.com

Worker Men

by Wendy Saul

from the Archives: Alte.substack.com

“I WANT TO BE a worker man,” my grandson told me when he was 3. And as far as we were both concerned, the next day he WAS a worker man, hammering and sawing and carrying wood from one part of the yard to another.

As I watched our toddler, I thought about my friend Brad’s father, suffering from Alzheimers, who dutifully and with pride carried wood back and forth, again and again, from a spot near the barn to the place it came from. As observers, we see the young boy’s work as cheerful and promising and the old man’s as sad, even pathetic, given that he was once an engineer who played cello in a symphony.

But from another perspective, both my grandson and Brad’s father were both happily employed worker men, with plans and a job to be done. Reading the New York Times column of 01/06/22, which tries to describe the activities of the aging in terms sensible and familiar to the journalist, I think he got it wrong — wrong, at least, from the perspective of someone who now must consider herself old. The author’s mistake, I think, was valuing activity from a middle-aged point of view. The goals of the aging people that he chose to describe — to see grandchildren at the holidays, to get to Atlantic City, to make it to the next birthday — were somewhere between time markers and platitudes.

Truth be told, I am not very goal-directed these days. Happily, I am busy in much the same way I felt busy in college — go to class, do some research, meet with a friend, plan a party, enjoy a cup of tea, take a walk, get stoned, listen to music. Like my grandson’s or Brad’s father work, my efforts and activities are satisfying. I sometimes wish that my research was less of the “What ever happened to XXX?” variety, but then I think back to what a teacher friend used to tell his fifth graders, “The best questions are your own questions.”

And I still write. It’s neither for remuneration nor publication as in times past, but writing makes me feel more like the kind of person I want to be, more like myself. I am thinking about my grandson and Brad’s dad, and even Sisyphus who works to keep his stone from rolling backwards. From each we learn something  important about goals. I think it’s best to imagine each of us in okay health as busy and engaged, if not happy, as we move through the day.

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Wendy Saul is a retired professor of education and co-author of Thinking Like a Generalist: Skills for Navigating a Complex World.