Pointing to the Parakeet

In 1964, I had $419 in Social Security Earnings. I know this because the Social Security Administration sends me my Earnings Record every year.

In 1964, I was sixteen. I had already worked for my dad at our family’s Ben Franklin Store for four years and he had already fired me twice. I remember one time was because, as he said, I “was making a career out of cleaning the [store’s] bathroom.” That seemed unfair to me because the bathroom really needed a lot of work plus it was a great respite from customers wanting to know why we were out of purple moon thread.

I didn’t mind waiting on customers although my dad had clear rules about how that was to be done. For one thing, if you were asked where some item was, say measuring cups or parakeets, you were supposed to lead the person to the item and not just point. Pointing conveyed the message that whatever you were doing was more important than the customer. And that, my friend, was never the case. If you are staunching the bleeding from a coworker’s near fatal chest wound and you happen to be asked where the Philip’s head screwdrivers are, you must quickly pack his or her chest with a dust cloth (always kept in one’s pocket) and lead the way.

My father didn’t think having his 12-year-old daughter working for a dollar an hour in his store was in any way odd. His whole life was working. Well, actually, his whole life was the store. We talked about the store all the time. Why the weekly shipment was late. Who was sick and didn’t come in. How the new K-Mart down the street was beating us on Aqua Net. “It’s a loss leader,” he said. So, he would ‘loss leader’ them back and then we’d talk about it at dinner. Aqua Net. The Aqua Net Wars.

I never minded working in the store, my two firings notwithstanding. I liked the physical nature of retail, cutting glass for bins with a glass cutter and then knocking on the glass to make it separate into two pieces. I liked making keys, the loud buzz of the key machine, the art of it, art gone wrong many times but art just the same. I liked measuring out fabric on the big table and cutting it with pinking shears and browsing through the pattern books, looking at flowing skirts I could make. I liked breaking down boxes in the backroom. It made me feel like a million bucks. I don’t know why.

I never told my dad I liked working in the store. I thought it would give him an edge the next time he wanted to fire me. So, the summer after my senior year, before I went to college, I got a job as a secretary in a company that made roofing tar. I drove there in my mother’s car and sometimes went to lunch at a nearby mall. The days lasted forever and made me tired and sad. I missed the store.

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Photo by Fredrick john on Unsplash