Lessons Learned from an Old Maid | Eastern North Carolina Now

    If a job is once begun, never leave it till it's done, be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all. One of my mom's mini-sermons.

    My dad did not believe in allowances. His philosophy was that any money that you got you would have to earn. It was not so much a philosophy as it was a matter of necessity.

    In any event, if I wanted any money I would have to try to earn it. When I was about 8 or 10 years old with no skills, about the only thing I could do to earn money was cut grass. An old maid nurse lived directly behind our house on the next street. Our back yards backed up against each other.

    My mom knew the old maid and arranged for me to cut the grass. The front yard was a football size yard about 25 feet wide by 25 feet long. It was uphill both ways. (I could not resist). There was no such thing as a power lawn mower. I guess you are ahead of me on this but the only lawn mower was a reel type that you had to push. The blades would spin and cut, and then you would have to rake up the debris and bag it to put in the back yard compost pile. Everyone in my city neighborhood had a compost pile and whatever size garden he or she could fit on the lot.

    My first efforts of cutting the grass were an abysmal failure. The cut was crooked and the ragged because of a young boy's rush to get the job finished. I had to do it all over again. I may have lost the job had it not been for my mother's friendship with the old nurse. That would not have bothered me but my mom would not let me quit. Once you commit to do something, you do your best to fulfill your promise.

    My mom's mini sermon is above but my dad's take on the same thing was more blunt as usual. His was "A broken word is a broken man". If I heard that a one time I heard it a thousand all the way into adulthood and just as you might have guessed, I used it repeatedly with my son, but I used my mom's mini sermon with my daughter. I guess that makes me a chauvinist.

    I remember that when I went to cut the grass, the old maid would come out to supervise after my first aborted attempt. She wore a bonnet and work gloves. She would follow me around the yard and point out the areas where I had not made a proper cut. After I had cut the grass, we would have to trim the edges. Under her close supervision, I did this on hands and knees with a pair of shears. You would have thought that every blade of grass had to be the exact same length.

    After raking and bagging the debris, she would go into the house and come out with an small old leather change purse. I remember her carefully opening the purse and counting out the quarters one by one that would be my pay. I cannot remember how much the pay was for the job but I do remember that I only cut her grass for one summer. The next summer I had better things to do. She returned to cutting her own grass and always with the same bonnet and shears.

    That was one of the many minor jobs that I had as a young boy. Another one was collecting scrap metal around the neighborhood. After I had acquired a sufficient quantity, my dad would take me to the scrap yard on Dekalb Avenue. He knew the owner, an old Jewish man who would carefully separate and weigh the metal on a set of scales in his office. He had a large scale next to the building where he weighed trucks full of metal but for my measly stash he could weight it on the inside scale. The pay probably would not have bought the gas used to get there even with the cost of gas around fifteen cents per gallon.

    In retrospect, looking back I realized that the object of these lessons was not raising money. My parents and that old maid were not providing jobs but were in fact raising men. A lesson learned by hard work lasted much longer than a handout of a few quarters. While we were not poor, there was not an abundance of extra money for luxury items.

    My brother was down visiting me a few weeks ago and we made what I have come to call "our magical nostalgia mystery tour". I took a picture of that old maids estate and I am guessing that she must have sold off some of the property, because the yard had indeed shrunk. Then on the other hand, she may have had one of those machines like in the Rick Moranis' movies.