Fortitude

My first experience with hard-work was not sitting on the lifeguard stand in 1992, swinging a whistle around my finger while scanning Lake Pontchartrain's horizon for lightening.

I thought that was work. Ha.

Fast-forward. Manhattan, circa 1995. After a month of "sizing rounders" at the midtown Gap (ex-Gap employees, you know what I mean), I got a job slinging buffalo wings and serving pitchers of beer on the Upper West Side. I lived across town in Murray Hill. The wing place was two subway trips and a five block walk away.

Getting to work was work. One can imagine the despair when, after my first ten-hour, Friday-night shift, my manager told me to marry the ketchup and breakdown the patio.

Marry the who? Breakdown the what? Huh??? Where's the busboy?

Here's what I figured out fast: I was the busboy.

I am still the busboy, a lesson that the universe serves up on a regular basis. Sometimes, it doesn't take very quickly.

This is my third central Pennsylvania winter. We've gotten plenty of the white stuff this year. Last snowstorm, I was certain that local kids would seize the opportunity to make some cash. Shoveling stoops is big business in Brooklyn.

I was determined to avoid hard weekend labor. My neighbors, I thought, were foolish to get up at 7am on a Saturday to shovel snow. (A sound I will never forget...scccrraappe...scccraaappe.)

The snow, I reasoned, was not going anywhere. Shoveling could wait a day. Or two.

And then it's Monday morning. In heels and a skirt, I frantically chip away at the snow frozen around my tires. I curse. I cry. I lose a glove in the struggle. My skin burns. I try to make a fist. I'd like to shake it at the sky. The sun is bright. Everywhere I look, icicles glint.

Ok, I say to the universe, I get your point.

My early-bird, snow-shoveling neighbors are not foolish. They have fortitude. They do what needs to get done to keep their lives in motion.

Navigate the subway. Marry the ketchup. Breakdown the patio.

And now, suck it up and shovel the snow when it falls.

I am my own busboy.