Hard Work Makes A Happy Person
I walked to school along Steveston Highway, singing to myself, as I always have since I was six. It was the first day at my new school in Richmond. Would grade eleven become a harbinger for the next two years of high school until I graduated?
“I shall simply stay home. After all, there’s no beastly point in going to Vancouver for nothing” – March 30, 1963 – The Vancouver Sun. Source: West Vancouver Archives. # 315.WVA.NOR- the great cartoonist Len Norris, who captured the West Van ethos.”
I was a moody teenager who had spent his previous year moving from Portland to West Vancouver. West Vancouver was a small, dark and cloistered rainy place where everybody had grown up together since kindergarten. I didn’t go to kindergarten, as going to kindergarten meant being Catholic, which we weren’t. We didn’t even go to church in those years. We were wild, feral, non-Catholic kids up to our necks in snow in Montana. In Portland, we were discovering sex, drugs and rock n roll. The high school was modeled after a college with no bells to signify the new periods. One had to be an adult and know where you needed to be.
West Vancouver is another story. In-bred stiff upper lipped ex-Brits. The school felt like an English private school. No displays of public affection were allowed, contrasting with the open sex and venereal Portland. West Van has an old sub division called The British Properties, which was ….can you guess? Very British. The high school was called Hillside, built on a …..wait for it…a hill. As a budding teenager I hated it. I hated my parents for dragging me there, and generally I hated myself. It was very hard to make friends in West Vancouver. One kid was nice enough to talk to me. He called me Derek all year. I never corrected him. The next year, we moved from West Vancouver to Richmond for grade eleven. It was to be a brand new start. Even the sub-division we moved to was fairly new. More like where we had lived in Portland.
Welcome to the suburbs.
In the suburbs, I, I learned to drive and you told me we’d never survive.
Grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving
You always seemed so sure that one day we’d be fighting in a suburban war
Your part of town against mine
I saw you standing there just
I saw you standing on the opposite shore
But by the time the first bombs fell
We were already bored
We were already, already bored.
The Arcade Fire
We were fucked up. The Judys
It had rained the day before, so there was large puddles by the edge of the highway, adjacent to the sidewalk. A car raced past, right through the puddle, which was too large to call a puddle, yet too urban to call a pond.
I was soaked from head to toe by the resultant wave. Here I was on my first day of school, and not only had I “wet my pants”, but there was no place where I wasn’t wet. I had just reached the street where I needed to turn right. All I had to do was walk myself up the road to Steveston High. There was no time to walk back home. I never contemplated that even as an option. I would have to suffer the shame of wet pants for my first day in a new school.
Everybody’s talking about the new kid in town…..
I sat in class with a room full of judging teenage strangers. I was embarrassed. Wet assed and embarrassed. Shame was my first name. One of my first classes was Math. My teacher was Mr. Kagetsu. Steveston, which is a part of Richmond, has a history of Japanese workers in the fish cannery plant.
“Built in 1894, and nicknamed the "Monster Cannery", the Gulf of Georgia Cannery was once the largest of Steveston's 15 canneries and one of the biggest in British Columbia. Originally a salmon cannery until canning operations came to a halt during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the site continued to operate as a raw fish station and net loft until the 1940s. During World War II, herring was canned here to send overseas to Allied soldiers. Later, the cannery operated as a herring reduction plant until it closed in 1979.”
So ingrained was the history of Steveston with fishing and the monster cannery, that our high school football team was named the Packers.
Recently I saw a Facebook post about a restaurant and noted the commenter was Al Chorney. Al Chorney was the quarterback of the Packers at the time, a local hero who went on to University football, and the Pro’s. He dominated the high school football in our province. I left a comment asking if the person posting was Steveston’s Al Chorney. It is interesting to note that this commenter was not the same Al Chorney, but a different Al Chorney, who coincidentally was also a quarterback around the same time. Parallel Chorneys in a mixed up shook up world. Do wonders never cease?
Anyway back to the Math class with Mr. Kagetsu. He was a short guy with thick glasses, a moustache and a huge smile. He was always smiling. He would walk into the class in his shortsleeved white shirt and tie, and write on the blackboard:
Hard Work Makes A Happy Person.
Everyday. Everyday he wrote those same 6 words. It was his mantra. Simply by working hard at something, whether it be Math or not, the effort would bring you happiness.
About 20 years later, I was managing Uprising Breads. The new owner Ron Francisco would come each week to check up on me, after stopping at Tim Horton’s for his morning coffee-a double double -before coming to the bakery he owned, and he would ask me questions and tell me things to try to motivate me. His favourite expression were these choice pearls of wisdom from author and radio host Earl Nightingale:
"Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal."
Earl Nightingale, wrote The Strangest Secret in 1957, and he recorded it. This story became the first recording of spoken word to be certified platinum with sales exceeding one million copies.
You can listen to his scratchy baritone voice on the radio broadcast, as Nightingale had a radio program. He sounds a bit like Ken Nordine, except very straight- not beat like Ken. Ron would say the key was to make your efforts progressive, meaning you could feel the movement and see that you were progressing to something better. It was up to you to figure out for yourself what was “ the worthy ideal”. He said for him it was money, but for me it could be whatever motivated me. Save the world, if that is what gets you going. Just make sure the bakery makes a profit. For every month you achieve a 9% pre-tax profit, I will give you a cheque for $1000.
Ok. That was motivating. The $1000, not the saving the world. And yes, I have found that Hard Work Makes A Happy Person. and that Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.
I was noticing some friends reminiscing about the old days, the early punk days. The squats they lived in, the poetic squalor. By the late 80’s I had achieved some local success with my musical projects. Local, minor, cult hero. I had nice clothes, a nice place to live with my beautiful and talented Michelle. Money was not end all or be all for me. It never was.
But I was missing something. I asked her to marry me. She said no. She said, “You have to find a way to believe in the future.” I have written about this moment many times. It was pivotal. So I got serious about working. I applied internally at the bakery for the Wholesale Coordinator job. I got it. I turned the fortunes of the bakery around. The Manager was wanting to move on, so I applied for that job. And I got it.
It was a messy transition, in that the former Manager had not officially resigned. She had been expecting a new role. So for a brief time there were two Managers. Then things got legal. Then the situation was resolved, but not without acrimony and drama. But it was resolved and I was the Manager.
I have since gone on from that job, working next at Omega Nutrition and now at Avafina Organics. I always had a professional career, with my music projects on the side. And now my writing is on another side.
And always by my side, my sidekick, my rock, my shell of armour, my paramour, my paradise. My Michelle. The hard work of a relationship has always made me a happy person. Even if I wasn’t happy, I was always a happy person. Slowly progressing to the worthy ideal. So success.
What was the worthy ideal? The ideal is to always continue to progress. As corny as it sounds, to try to continually improve. Learn from mistakes. Try harder. Be more focused. Make time for the important things in life. That’s why I was up at 4-something. Why after taking Maisy for a “walk”, which is less than a walk now, and more of an outside bathroom break, why I decided before 5 am to give her a bath, why I got absorbed writing this and why I let my soft boiled eggs become hard boiled eggs. What I did not have success doing was getting a picture of Maisy, as she was always moving. Perhaps progressing to her worth ideal.