"Work is love made visible.

Tuesday, September 12, 2000

"Work is love made visible."

"And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy." – Gibran

Well, I haven’t made it to the "temple gate" yet, but haven’t we all thought about it?

Last week I was reading an editorial in the St. Paul paper about adolescents and their need to accomplish or develop competence in what they’re doing. The article featured a young lad who helped on a ranch with fencing and what have you – and how he took pride in what he was doing.

The fact that these young folks take pride in their accomplishments was the point, and the other point made was how school has moved away from this. TV hasn’t helped either.

I guess my own experience wasn’t exactly a love story. As a child, I helped my dad in the garden when I wasn’t down at the creek fishing. My job then was to weed. To hear my late father tell the story I was pretty good at.

Then when I grew into the fort and war stage and baseball days, work went to the back burner, so to speak.

One of my first jobs was to substitute on a Minneapolis Star paper route – a downtown route. Collecting was impossible. I was glad to see Jim come back.

In high school when we were beginning to drive and my friends were stopping by to go cruisin’, I was busy raking up all the rocks in our new back yard created by the Corps of Engineers when they rerouted the Turtle Creek.

My "but, Dads" didn’t get me very far. So off they went while I raked an acre of rocks.

Between our junior and senior year, a bunch of us were hired on at the pea vinery. My first day out I was placed in a truck loading beans. The first day they didn’t have a pitch fork, the other guy did, and I was told to use my hands to spread the pile. It took good timing and worked, until I reached in at the same time he jabbed his pitchfork that ended up in my right arm. It didn’t go in very far but far enough to shorten my 12\-hour day in the field for a trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot.

Perhaps in my own way then I gave thought to alms at the gate. Next I moved to the site where the beans were dropped off and run through the machines that stripped the beans from the vines and readied them for the trip to the bean factory.

We had electric forks, and we would take turns with another like-soul, lifting the fork full of beans onto the shoot.

Sometimes mine would stall for no reason, and I would go report this to Bob Radloff, the supervisor of the process. This never seemed to happen to Mike Chafee, my fork partner.

Years later, over a couple brewskies, he told me he would turn off the switch in back. I’m sure it was hysterical from his point of view.

My view – where’s the temple?

In high school, I worked at Fashion City on Main Street and later at Bob’s Drive-In. There one could speed around town delivering food, that is until the switched the street names from Kenwood, Water Street, Allegheny, Park Street to Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue and the real killer – the Drives. The streets and avenue were manageable but the drives chilled down many a tenderloin.

Later, I worked at Younkers, where I had one of my best working experiences. I had a delightful bunch of people to work with and a great boss in George Oldaker.

After college I started teaching in Austin, before I was ready. I was back in those buildings that seemed to close in around you – even more so as a teacher.

But that’s changing.

I see where some of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation money from their fortune is headed to Minnesota; $4.43 million is ear-marked for the EdVisions Cooperative, the teacher-owned co-op that runs the Minnesota New Country School in Henderson.

Knowles Dougherty, Bill Orcutt and I visited the school a few summers back before they built their new school, when they were operating from store fronts.

I asked a sophomore who stopped by how she like it there. She had come there because her brother came before her and was bored in the traditional high school. "I can’t believe all that we are doing here that I never thought could be done in school," she said.

These are the students who discovered the deformed frogs and a couple years ago sent a student during the summer to New Orleans to study the effect of pollution where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf – a dead zone.

I bet she won’t find herself at the gate of the temple taking alms.

They’re using the money to start more schools – interested?

Bob Vilt’s column appears Tuesdays.