He’s a familiar sight to pedestrians in my town of Albany: the homeless guy who lives on a median off Solano Avenue, turning discarded metal into art. He hammers away, all day, every day.
Nearby trees serve as a gallery to hang his sculptures. I doubt anyone would buy his crude pieces. But that doesn’t matter. He needs to make them. It’s his job.
Luckily for me, I, too, like my vocation. It pays the bills, but more importantly, it allows me to believe my life has purpose. Similar to the homeless guy wielding his hammer, I do what I do because I need to write.
Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I had to do something I hated. I think I’d go mad. I have had awful jobs, and I remember how it felt.
When I was 21 and desperate, I took a job selling costume jewelry out of a briefcase. I received 90 minutes of training, during which my boss assured me the product sells itself (which came as a great relief to me). Then I was thrust into a world presumably filled with people hot to buy cheap cloisonné.
First stop: my mother’s office, where I figured all the women on staff would be happy to help out Helen’s son. Wrong. Not even my mom bought anything.
I whimpered in the stairwell for a few minutes, then hit up the Laundromat next door, where a bag lady stared at me stupefied after I showed her my wares.
I turned in the briefcase right after that.
I now know that what I needed was to find a career I was meant to do, a quest that took years. It’s all about finding the optimal point on a plane where the “x” axis (a career that feeds the soul) meets the “y” axis (the jobs available).
Judaism has a lot to say about avodah, or the work we do. That Hebrew term is also the name of one of Judaism’s central prayers, which seems to link career and holiness in a direct way.
As Rabbi Michael Strassfeld wrote in “A Book of Life,” one’s profession is “not only a necessary part of life, it is a form of service to the world, to the rest of humanity, and to God. We are meant to be of service, to be partners with God in the ongoing creation of the world.”
Even if that means selling cheap jewelry or making street art out of scrap.
This doesn’t mean I love my job all the time. Newspaper deadlines are stressful, as is the responsibility of accurately reporting on the Bay Area Jewish community. Sometimes I want to run off to a tropical island, lie on a hammock and drink mai tais.
Then I snap to and remember that to be happy, I need to be here. Riding a hammock gets boring and gives you backaches.
My most compelling story on the subject isn’t about me, but about my stepmother, Tina Pine. She was a Brooklyn-born Italian-American dynamo who used the phrase “fugedaboutit” long before it became a cultural staple. A nightclub singer in her youth, she later became a successful screenwriting partner with my father.
She then transitioned into a brilliant real estate magnate, chef and interior designer. Her homes were the most elegant I’d ever seen, her banquets the best of my life. Tina never rested, as far as I could tell, because she filled her days with avodah.
Then, starting in her late 60s, she began a shockingly rapid descent into dementia, a severe form that eventually erased her personality. In those last years, there was nothing left of Tina but a shell in a wheelchair.
One day, about two years before she reached that awful, final stage, she stood in the kitchen, mute, her powers of speech by then nearly gone. My dad described her to me later as extremely agitated and upset, though there was no way to know what bothered her.
“What, Tina, what?” my dad demanded of her. “Just this once, please tell me what you want.”
What happened next caused my father, a true stoic if there ever was one, to weep for the first time during his wife’s horrific disintegration.
“Work,” she managed to say. “I want work.”
Dan Pine can be reached at [email protected].