Bob Seeger said it, and he said it very well: "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then". Touché. After eight and a half years of marriage, two and half years of running a business, and two children, I know a lot of things that I didn't used to know.
What depresses me is the astonishing number of things I did know then. I just don't seem to be able to do anything about them. Like Oedipus, I cannot seem to avoid my own fate.
For instance- I was just fired, and I couldn't avoid that. They call it being laid off, and for $224 a week I suppose I ought to keep my terminology straight. But the way I learned it, being laid off was a situation created by a lack of work to sustain your job. There was, and is, plenty of work for me at the ole' shop. They just found someone to do it at half my salary.
Never mind that I spent six years of formal education learning my craft, that I have plenty of practical experience, and that I'm much better at it than my replacement is. Never mind that when the new boss took over he told me that my job was as solid as a rock. It feels like an earthquake from my perspective, and the fact that I'm not surprised doesn't help.
It only makes it worse. I knew this could happen when I was sixteen. I knew all about the business world then, or at least I thought I did. It is startling to discover just how right I was. The sleazy salesmen really do seem to make most of the money. The back stabbers I had heard about act just as they were reputed to. Apathy and boredom and shoddy workmanship and pecking orders are all there in abundance. The man who fired me will use me in his resume. He made the bottom line a little blacker and maybe even moved a decimal point somewhere one place to the right.
But he lied to me. And that lie is about to cause my family some very real pain and deprivation. I don't think that that worries him; he lies to customers all the time, and then brags about it. So I'm not surprised to be fired, just astonished that I ever took the job in the first place.
I was going to be different. I was going to write my own music, sing my own song and wake up every morning ready to dance. No matter what I did, I was not going to wake up every morning dreading the coming day, not unless I was in prison for some highly idealistic cause.
But my small business became another statistic, so I took this job. Now I don't have it. All I have is bills, so I know that I am going to take another job just like it. I ran as hard as I could in what seemed to be the opposite direction as my father's, fearing his fate, and found that I have gone in a circle. I now know for sure what I thought I knew then. And I desperately wish that I didn't.
Copyright (c) 1987 by Henry W. Farkas
This story was purchased by Marketplace, a National Public Radio show, and broadcast on National Public Radio by WSHU in Fairfield, CT in 1997.