My dad tried to help!
Watch for those good ideas
‘You might consider being a naturalist. You spend a lot of your time exploring the hills and you have a great interest in cattle raising.
Being a naturalist takes that interest in the outside. Naturalist usually write about what they see and observe. As you’re a good writer, it might fit.’
My father had, over the years, made suggestions for my future endeavor. A career. Perpetually lost I had no clue what I wanted for a future job. I was a poor student, that’s what they used to call students who graded just barely above flunking. That was me.
‘You’d, of course, have to go to college to get the studies you need for doing the work a naturalist does.’ I think at some point my dad must have seen that my inclinations had nothing to do with business or the hotel business specifically. He and my mom were self made hoteliers, and after nearly twenty years, they had created a hotel company of six hotels.
These were full service hotels with coffee shops and formal dining as well as beautifully appointed lounges. By Central American standards, their hotels, which averaged a hundred and forty rooms, were considered huge and wonderfully extravagant. Pools and waterfalls surrounded by carefully grown jungle helped make the hotel’s destination places for all travelers.
My dad was just being a good dad by trying to interest me in something. The notion of working to feed myself never caught my attention, much less my interest. In high school in Michigan, I can remember many of my fellow students with ideas for the future, which always stirred my curiosity. Some spoke of working for their dads, one wanted to be a sheep farmer in Australia, another wanted to be a famous artist of stock cars and racing. The artist’s interest was in what they called rail cars, long, gangly machines that had two full-blown, rigged up, v-8 engines.
The artists specialty was painting what was called ‘funny cars’, a rail or another stock car as in a souped up 357 Chevy driven by a wild-haired, leather jacketed, monster with huge pointy teeth. The colorful rendition was painted screaming down a track, the monster’s tongue flying in the breeze behind him. In California, which was the mecca for this sport, the wildly popular paintings were called monster cars. My fellow student envisioned becoming world famous.
For five bucks he’d do a monster car on our schools sweat shirt. An instant keep sake.
Yet another student named Ross was a wizard with his hands, building and repairing stuff. There was nothing he couldn’t repair in radios and record players, what were called turn tables in the sixties. He’d keep himself in pocket money by charging to repair students’ sound systems.
We had at least two writers among us. One had published some poetry and enjoyed sitting just out of the limelight, writing away. Then there was Charly, who took the bohemians’ poet role a little further down the road. He personified the traditional, pain wracked thinker, the rebel with or without a cause, dark and moody, didn’t shower enough and chewed his nails to the nub. His skin was sickly white from never leaving his dorm desk. Nice guy though if one made the effort to know him.
I told him I expected to read about his accomplishments some day in TIME magazine, which he seemed to appreciate.
Amongst us were budding photographers, musicians, a few nutsy mathematicians, and several who were going to join the family car dealership businesses.
Amazingly, or perhaps not too surprisingly, many wound up doing exactly what they were planting seeds for in high school.
It was me and maybe a few others who had absolutely no plans. If not, plans then at least inklings of things to do in the future. Ross, the radio repair guy, finished up in California, the wild car mecca, reconstructing and reviving vintage collector cars. Hollywood movies have made use of his work as well. He can sell a finished sixty six mustang in the hundreds of thousands.
Steve, our hermit like violinist, a soft-spoken man who smelled of too much baby powder, played with the New York Philharmonic. He would finish classes and go directly to his dorm and close himself in the bathroom and played until the counselor told him it was lights out.
I had no such plans until I discovered cattle ranching. This is the closest I ever came to determining a future for myself. As fate would have it, however, I veered away from ranching just before leaving high school. Teenagers can be like that, fickle, and like humming birds zipping back and forth from hundreds of different flowers in minutes.
My dad recognized this in me. I wasn’t showing interest in future planning. In hindsight, though, it wasn’t because I had no interests. Through my primary and high school years, I’d always dallied in many activities, any of which could arguably be a path to my future. There were my microscope days where after school I’d be hunched over my microscope discovering the breathtaking world of protozoa.
My collection of microscope specimens from just about every thing you could think of which I’d mounted on glass slides was just over two hundred pieces.
My electricity interest had me building small electrical platforms which I’d rig up to a battery and watch mesmerized as they raced across the top of my desk. Dad came home from a work trip only to discover his brand new tape recorder in a million pieces. My curiosity drove me to see the machine’s innards. I couldn’t reassemble it, maybe that’s why it wasn’t a very good career choice.
Model fighter airplanes festooned my ceiling. My favorite fighter plane of all was the P-51 Mustang. I was pretty good with my hands that way, but as with other interests, building models slipped into the past. My chemistry phase was sort of rolled up of several activities. One afternoon I’d inject oranges on our orange tree with various chemicals to observe over the coming days (they’d all die). After injecting the fruit with a duly noted concoction, I’d sit at my table top lab and practice forming spirals from a straight tube of glass over an alcohol heater.
The length of spiral tubes would be used to perfect the distillers I built. Then I’d focus on my copper sulfate crystal production. Beautiful diamond shaped, shimmering green crystals formed magically in my beakers solution. I made a jewel box for my mother with three of the giant crystals glued to the box top.
The hobbies went on and on. Tinkering and repairing of lawn mower size engines took up much of my time. Bicycle riding to places out of the city, unexplored valleys where rivers yielded small minnows for my minnow tank.
My interest in firearms would be questioned today, I’m sure. At border crossings in Central America during road trips with my family, the first thing I’d do was find a soldier with a gun. Most of the time I would know more about the.45 in his holster and about the .30 caliber M1 carbine he carried. On more than one occasion, the soldier would let me hold the rifle. He’d first remove the ammunition and hand it over to me!
These interests just went on and on, really too many to relate here. The point being, though, was that nothing seemed to awaken within me as something that might become a part of my life as an adult. Having to have an actual job and feed me and my family never entered my mind.
No doubt my parents mentioned future preparation concerns to all my sibs but at least for me none of it really mattered.
It wasn’t until halfway through college that my dad began suggesting things I might find of interest. Unfortunately, I found most, if not all, his ideas as highly improbable. It was impossible for me to imagine how I could buy a house from being a naturalist. There was no connection between, ‘successful adult career’ and my dad’s ideas.
Who’s to say that had I not followed one of his enthusiastically delivered ideas that I might have been able to do something with them? In reality, this sort of thing happens often. A young adult stops and listens to the parents after years of ignoring them. Sure, it doesn’t happen from one day to the next. It takes a process, decisions, learning, then training and preparation. One day, the kid writes home and informs her parents she’s got her degree in electrical engineering.
‘Thanks mom and dad for the great suggestion.’
There’s no question that the sixties and the undue pressure young people found themselves under in those wild days played a part in my deciding not to choose any of the traditional careers. Sure, after all else was exhausted, I followed my parents into the hotel business. But this was after years bouncing around, being a part time hippy, drugs and swearing off the establishment. It’s a wonder I ended doing something constructive!
Near the end of my college days, making my way back from the blizzard storm of the sixties mayhem, my dad suggested several things he felt might work to make a living. He saw how I loved the outdoors, camping, hunting, and fishing and just about anything that was done outside. A naturalist, he assured me, would require lots of work and further study. Given my joy in writing, he felt this would make an additional good fit in the naturalist’s life.
He said: ‘It’s the observation and interpretation of mother nature. Still so, so many secrets there. You could do this.’
He even mentioned Thoreau’s Walden. This caught my attention, as in my rebellious years, Thoreau was one thinker we’d studied and admired. What occurred to me, though, was the very real near impossibility it would be to make a livelihood by following in the great thinker’s footsteps. You need to make a living.
At some point he dropped a surprise bomb shell of an idea. Make mahogany toilet seats. That’s right. Toilet seats. His vision was that carved toilet seat covers with catchy slogans or sayings would go big.
We were living in El Salvador at the time, and mahogany was plentiful. After finding a local carver who was down and out from no work and alcohol, we got him cleaned up and fed and gave him three ideas to carve onto toilet tops. They were beautiful. One read Bombs Away! Another went ‘Mom and Dad’. No doubt some might question what my motivation was in locating my parents right on top of the shitter. But if you can get beyond that issue, it was pretty cool.
Finally, one that said ‘Serenity and Peace’ seemed to make the most sense. My carver hit the bottle again and despite my best efforts, working with him, encouraging him, getting him into AA, he just couldn’t beat it. We only made the three. Just imagine had it taken off. Eventually the tops could’ve been machine carved and sold out of Walmart’s!
One of my dad’s last suggestions was pallets. Yes, pallets, wood pallets. Pallets are those mostly ignored wood, floor spacers used in every factory and huge store in the world. The supply truck or train arrives and a forklift truck unloads its supplies. The forklift sets the boxes on top of one thing: pallets! Virtually every business that moves enormous quantities of stuff, supplies, nails, paper, food, car parts, every last one of them at some point of their shipment, will be placed on pallets.
A better prepared person could’ve run with that idea. My dad had even offered to help with the start of it. After some quick research, I realized the competition was horrendously huge. There are zillions of pallet makers. There’s a little itch in the back of my head that says it could’ve been done.
Any morale in the story here? Words to the wise? Not really, I’m sorry to say. This was just a recounting of a young man’s wanderings. Mine. Oh okay sure, a better, more awake person just may have done something with one of these ideas.
Not me.
