You Never Know

I was the type of kid that dreamed of having a job long before I was old enough to qualify. My parents offered an allowance for doing things around the house, but like most kids this just didn’t seem like a real job to me. I often wonder why I was so impatient to jump out in to the complicated world of busy adults, but I remember thinking that my life just wasn’t happening fast enough. I’d been preparing for the launch for 13 years! I wish I could have understood back then that at my current age life would happen at lightning speed, but what teenager thinks they will actually live 50 whole years!

I was able to find odd jobs here and there, but of course transportation to and from was always an issue. We didn’t exactly live walking distance to town and the only bus that passed my house was the school bus. So let’s just say that my options were limited. Picking up bottles beside the highway (aluminum cans were yet to be invented) and farm work were really my only options, and trust me when I say that I met very few self-made millionaires in this line of work.

One summer a neighbor with a very large farm planted watermelons. This particular fruit doesn’t lend itself well to mechanical picking and I had high hopes for a good late summer job. I knew I would be perfect for the job because by the end of the summer I had stolen so many of them for personal consumption that I could run the 100 yard dash with one under each arm in less than ten seconds! As luck would have it, me, my brothers and several other kids that lived close by got hired for the job.

I quickly discovered that running with two melons in no way compared to picking up, lugging and tossing melons for eight hours a day. This was real work! I was pretty tired by the end of each day, but I still looked forward to late afternoon when we actually loaded them in to the eighteen-wheeler. At this time I was able to talk to the truck driver and I guess I kind of felt like a big-wheel loading a product for over the road travel! An important cog in the wheel of interstate commerce!

I have never forgotten the day, as we finished loading the last of the trucks with melons, the truck driver came up to me and said “you are a really hard worker; you’re going to make somebody a good man one day”. At this point I would have worked for free! In hindsight this driver could have paid all of the workers this compliment, but I didn’t even consider this at the time. I knew that I had tried really hard and someone had noticed. This lone comment fueled my ambition for many years and in many ways it still does today; if you try hard, others will notice.

I won’t pretend that I thought of this exact moment last night as the 4-H awards presentation we attended came to a close, but the spirit was with me. My wife and I made small talk with the parents of the club members and gave a pat on the back to many of the award winners. But as the crowd began to thin and everyone headed for the exits I motioned for one of the younger club members to come closer so I could tell her something in private. “You are a good speaker” I told her, “Keep at it and you will be better than most of the others who spoke tonight”. You never know what will stick with someone…for fifty years!