Composing a Further Life

didn’t realize how much pleasure I was getting away from the product—the product for him being the work I was doing on the boats. And I was enjoying that, too, and proud of it, rightfully so. But that’s where I say I really got a lot more pleasure out of it than he realized. So by telling him that, I removed the guilt feeling that I might have had.”
    Jane and Hank could have earned higher wages in New Jersey or farther south, in a bigger boatyard, but that wasn’t the life the two of them wanted to have or where they wanted to raise their children. They bought a dilapidated house in Maine that Hank worked on after hours for over a year, waiting two years before they could afford a water heater and rigorously avoiding going into debt. In all the years that Hank worked at the boatyard, boating never became a significant part of the life he and Jane shared, because Jane tended to get seasick. When the time came to retire, “the plan was to go somewhere warm,” Jane said, “because he froze to death working at that boatyard all those years in the winter. He was always so cold. He said, ‘When I retire I’m not staying around here.’ ”
    I commented that Hank had chosen the right industry, because people take such pleasure in their boats. He could have done other kinds of skilled work someplace else that wouldn’t have brought that look to people’s eyes and wouldn’t have given him that connection between the quality of what he was doing and the satisfaction he was getting out of it.
    “Well, you know, that is an issue that might even go back many years to when the car industry was a big thing,” he said. “Back then production was a good thing and all, but they wanted more than just production, they wanted some real good quality workmanship. Then as time went on a lot of that disappeared. Production became such a big thing that the quality kind of fell off, and so the guy that was doing this quality work, a little bit of him went down the drain. After that, if you went to work for a car manufacturer, the job you were doing would be the same thing over and over. I think in retrospect that, if we had it to do all over again, we’d probably do it a little differently, because when you take a person that’s working and doing something, and take a piece of that heart out—that’s what you’re doing, you know, if they can’t do the job that they want to do and be proud of—if they lose, for lack of a better word, it’s pride, I guess, if you take that away, then I think you lose an awful lot of the person himself because he’s puttin’ a lot of his feelings into what he does.
    “One of the things that I always told the kids was, Don’t let the dollar bill tell you what to do. If you’re not happy doing what you’re doing for a living, you’re not gonna have a happy life. You’re gonna be working a third of your life, and a third of it you’re gonna be sleeping, and you doggone jolly well better be enjoying the third that you have off, because that’s all you’ve got left. But if you can work and be happy working the third of your life that you’re working, boy, you’ve got yourself about as complete a life as you’ll ever get on this earth. And I rest my case.”
    Hank settled back in his chair with a grin, and I turned to Jane. “But did you feel that way about working in the bank?” I asked her.
    “Yes, I did,” she responded. “I didn’t have to work. I wanted to work and I loved meeting all the people and it was somethin’ to get up in the morning and get dressed up for, you know, because otherwise you’d lounge around and watch TV and drink coffee and read a book and just not feel very productive. I really enjoyed meeting all the people. It was hard to give it up. And when we moved out to Arizona, I still went back in the summers, and even after I retired from that, the next two years when I went back I volunteered, filing and answering the phone—just to be involved with the people.”
    “You volunteered at the
bank?
I never heard of anybody volunteering for a bank,” I said incredulously.
    “Well, at first I’d just go back to my old job in the spring, but the worst part every year was learning the new whatever they put in the computer—you know, they change things every year. And it finally got to the point where I said, It’s taking too much out of me, I get too nerved up, but I said I’d love to come back and do some filing, answer the phone, stuff like