Unconventional Lives

Today is Labor Day, the day when we in the USA are supposed to celebrate the working person. 

Most people simply consider it the end of summer and the start of Autumn.

As my husband and I wind down our careers and lives, it occurs to me that we have lived rather unconventional lives. We were not the typical 9-to-5 couple, never yuppies, never ran with the "in" crowd - whatever that is.

My husband was a farmer and a septic tank installer when we first met. A few months later, he went to work as a firefighter in nearby Roanoke. He continued to work the other two jobs with his father.

As a firefighter, he worked a 24-hour shift that ran like this: M, W, F he would work at the fire station, then be off for four days, then he would work W, F, Su, and be off for four days, and so on and so forth. For 10 nights out of every month, I was home alone while he was at the fire station.

When he came home from a shift, he went to work on the farm or went to dig septic tanks. A lot of young firefighters these days come home from a shift and take a nap, but I cannot recall my husband ever doing that. He may have gone to bed early, but he did not lay out on the work around the farm or with his father's septic tank installation business (both of which are now my husband's businesses).

That is not a 9-to-5 life. That's a hard-working man's life, the life of a man who loved the land, the outdoors, and his family.

My life was not routine, either. For the first 10 years of our marriage, I worked some full-time jobs that were indeed 9-to-5, but I also went to college at night. A year after we married, I published my first article, and after that I wrote as a side gig or second job (and have never stopped). Occasionally I worked part-time and went to college and wrote, but nothing about my routine was normal.

We did not live a Leave-it-to-Beaver kind of lifestyle. We worked odd hours - sometimes I was in meetings I covered for the local newspapers until midnight - and we did things like build our own home with our hands in order to save money and obtain what we wanted. (At the time we built our house, in 1987, interest rates were 13% and the economists (who really know nothing), said that was as low as the interest would ever go. We refinanced when the rates dropped, of course.)

No, I cannot say we have lived normal lives compared to others, especially those on TV. My grandfather worked a conventional job; he had a 7-to-4 p.m. shift, and dinner was always on the table when he arrived at 4:15 p.m. My mother worked a conventional job, with a long drive from our home; she left around 7:45 a.m. and returned each night about 6 p.m., give or take the traffic or a stop at Mike's Market for bread. 

My father, after he stopped being a traveling salesman, also lived a double life, farming when he wasn't running the business he built from the ground up, a company that now has more than 60 employees and several locations. He's never been conventional about anything.

Today I salute the people I know and those I don't know who live unconventional lives. Maybe that is all of us, each person doing the best he or she can, trying to reach for whatever dream it is that prods that on.

Happy Labor Day.