Challenge #2: Summer Jobs. What summer jobs have you had? Which was your favorite and why? Which was your least favorite and why? Is there anything you have “taken with you” as a learning experience, or a story, from a summer job? Is there anything that you would never do again? Is there anything that you would like to do again? Who were the people you worked with? What were their habits? What were the sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes of that summer job? So often as adults we ask people, “what do you do?” Think about what you could learn if you asked, “What summer jobs did you have?” With this as your touchpoint, this week capture your memories of either a cherished or loathed summer job and the people and place that made up the environment. You can do this as a writing exercise, or record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts—then share here on The Paper Compass.
Although not on my original list, this challenge was inspired by an in-class writing exercise from the Summer Workshop for Returning Writers that I’m taking, taught by Julia Thacker. She was, in turn, inspired by author Aimee Bender’s monthly writing exercise on her website. I thought that it was too good a summer challenge to not share.
I find summer jobs infinitely interesting and a wealth of great sensory and plot details. With their seasonal beginning and end, they are not unlike short stories. With a summer job we get to experience people and tasks (and sometimes even places) that we will most likely not see or do again (much to some people's relief).
Summer jobs are often filled with a creative cocktail of repetitive activities and really interesting people which is ideal for creating “sticky” and interesting details. For instance, my brother worked at the record store at the mall one summer, and if I remember correctly, his manager spent a great deal of time sleeping under the desk in the back. My sister worked in the sundries shop at a local hotel and had stories that covered the spectrum from wedding nights
gone wrong to strange conversations with even stranger guests.
While not my first summer job, the most vivid of them—my time hostessing at Chuck & Harold’s on Palm Beach, the summer after my freshman year at BU—was the first to come to mind for the in-class writing exercise and I have placed it below to share.
Summer Job 1997
In June, on Palm Beach, it rains at least twenty-eight days out of the thirty in the month. From the hostess stand at Chuck & Harold’s, I would watch the sheets of it fall every afternoon like clockwork. Sweeping in from the west, it would come as a downpour, flooding the street and knocking down husks from the palm trees lining Flagler Drive. It would end just as abruptly, leaving the evening air smelling humid and lush.
When the rain began, the busboys would unroll the plastic curtains around the outside tables that lined the sidewalk. When the curtains were rolled back it signaled a shift change. The daytime staff would take off their aprons and finalize tips with managers. While the evening servers and night managers would arrive, straightening ties, and tying on their aprons. The tables would be reset and the menus would change from brunch and lunch, to early bird special and dinner, the paper would sometimes still be warm from the printer in the back office.
I would take my break and eat conch chowder and a fresh, warm roll out in the courtyard behind the kitchen. When I returned to the front, the parrots would be on the power lines outside the post office with their loud calls and the first of the early bird diners would descend, elderly and frail with dispositions that belied their looks.
A veteran waiter once told me that he believed people are at their worst before eating. By the end of the summer, I felt that I had enough anthropologic evidence to back up his theory. One event, resulting from a busboy hazy with purpose while wooing one of the younger waitresses, hastily cleared a table without watching where he wiped the crumbs. When I arrived to seat a party of four, one of the men said to me, while shaking a liver-spotted pointed finger, “You can brush the crumbs off that chair or buy me a new suit.” Evenings that began like that signaled a long night.
The afternoons, though, when it rained and the only customers were the trust fund bachelors who would come in and sit at the bar, greeting the entire staff by name, were slow and good for daydreaming. I would answer the phone, take reservations and, in-between calls, write lines of poetry on scraps of paper with the thick waxy pencil from the hostess stand. It was my favorite time of day—the dining areas set and expectant, the rain moving east, out to the ocean, and the summer stretching ahead feeling slow and infinite in the moment—safe with the promise of another semester of college on the horizon.
*****
All of this is inspiration for the second summer challenge: summer jobs. What summer jobs have you had? Which is your favorite and why? Which is your least favorite and why? Is there anything you have “taken with you” as a learning experience from a summer job? Is there anything that you would never do again? Is there anything that you would like to do again? Who were the people you worked with? What were their habits? What were the sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes of that summer job? So often as adults we ask people, “what do you do?” Think about what you could learn if you asked, “What summer jobs did you have?”
With this as your touchpoint, this week capture your memories of either a cherished or loathed summer job and the people and place that made up the environment. You can do this as a writing exercise, or record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts—then share here on The Paper Compass.
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