Hope

The Road to Hope, Minnesota

Hope is one of the most common place names in the United States. The most famous is probably Hope, Arkansas—the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. Traveling around last summer, I kept seeing signs gesturing toward hope.

I turned 47 today. I hope that the upcoming years are as interesting as the past years were. I have every reason to suspect they will be. As I have often said in the past year, life is perhaps better than its ever been. It’s nice to be in a good relationship for a change. It’s nice to be able to research the things that I really want to research. It’s nice to think that I can actually continue down this path until I don’t have the strength to do it any more.

Going to visit my mother this week, I started to think about my father a lot. He was the same age I am now during my teenage years. I was a late baby. This age was not a kind one for my father; he was bitter and anxious to retire. He ended up retiring at 55, settling for a meager $400 a month in pension just because he couldn’t stand to work another day in the oil fields. I don’t have that feeling at all, but then of course I haven’t worked nearly so hard across the span of my life. So much of it has felt more like play—I’ve always done pretty much what I wanted to do, and never had the sort of responsibility he had. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t had responsibilities—I did help raise a pair of teenagers—but I’ve never had to do the sort of back-breaking soul-destroying work he did.

The strange thing about it was that work was the most important thing to my father. He really taught me that. Work can save you from the pains of disappointment, from the things that you can’t change. If you work hard, then eventually you can make a difference in some way to some thing or somebody. Stopping is seldom an option. What bothered my father about his job wasn’t the work—it was just that it wasn’t the work he wanted to do. He wanted to build another house. He wanted to raise cattle. He wanted to raise a garden. All these things were still work, but it was working for himself—not someone else.

I think that’s the reason I feel so much hope about where I am now. The work I do for me is coincident with the work I do for money. Like my father, the rest of my life has been far more dissatisfying and self-crushing. Now, I work for me. I hope it can stay that way.

March 18, 2005 2:23 PM