There is a young man who works the counter at the gas station on my way home, and some nights he looks so tired I worry he will fall asleep standing up. I asked him once how he was holding up. He told me he drives a delivery route in the daytime and comes here after. Then he smiled and asked if I wanted my receipt. I drove home thinking I had just met one of the finest people in the county.
We talk a great deal in this country about the dignity of work. I want to say a word for the dignity of more work. A man who holds down a second job is not a man to feel sorry for. He is a man in training. Every hour he spends at that counter after a full day on the road is an hour he is not spending on the couch, or on his phone, or at some meeting where people talk about their feelings.
My grandmother made quilts. She made them at night, after the cooking and the washing and the garden, out of scraps of whatever was left over. Those quilts are the best things anybody in my family ever made. I do not think that is in spite of the hour she made them. I think it is because of it. A thing made from what is left of you has more of you in it.
I will be honest about something that worries me. I worry about the man with one job and his evenings free. What does he do with them? He reads things. He forms opinions. He goes to school board meetings and asks questions about the budget. Idle time does not stay idle for long. A second job keeps a man’s hands busy and his mind on what matters, which is making it to the end of the month.
People ask about the children. Who is home with them while their father is at the second job and their mother is at hers? I would say the children are learning, too. They are learning to warm up their own supper and to put themselves to bed. They are learning what it looks like when a parent sacrifices. I can think of no better lesson to leave on the kitchen table. Some of my best memories are of the evenings my own father was home, and I sometimes wonder whether I would have learned more if there had been fewer of them.
Enough is a dangerous word. I have watched it settle over good men like dust. A man who has enough stops reaching, and a man who stops reaching stops growing. I would rather a man be a little short and a great deal stronger.
I am voting for my party’s man for the Senate this fall because I want that young man to keep both his jobs. As I understand it, the other fellow would like one job to be enough to live on, and I worry what a man would make of all those free evenings.
I have only ever had the one job myself. I suppose I was never given the chance to build that kind of character.
D. M.