When I was 15 I worked for a groundkeeper on a large estate. He was in his 60s then and regularly offered words of wisdom about what is important in life. One bit of advice was, Never hang around with people who arent smarter than you are...you cant learn anything from them. He had a rule that if I was walking from one place to another on the lawn and saw a twig lying on the ground, I was to pick it up and carry it to a good place to dispose of it. Otherwise, he reckoned, the lawn we just carefully mowed and trimmed will look like, someone dressed up in a suit for Sunday church who forgot to shave. He also believed in conserving energy, not so you dont get tired, but because then you could maintain a pace all day do productive things that made you tired at the end. He said, Any time you dont have something to do right then, sit down and save your energy so you can get to work immediately when there is something that needs to be done. Once I tried to get him to hire a friend of mine too since there seemed a vast amount of work to be done. Old Jim just smailed and said, If I have a boy, I have a boy. If I have two boys, I have half a boy. If I have three boys, I have no boys at all. Jim was a very hard worker, a very smart worker, and had standards where when we were done with anything we could proudly say, well done. Ill always be grateful to Jim for those life lessons delivered at a critical point in my trip through adolescence.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 17:18:39 +0000
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