Holier Than Thou

My childhood home was peculiar as all must be, and one of its marked idiosyncracies was that no one ever mentioned salaries or pay.  This was immediately the result of the fact that once my father died when I was six years old, there was no member of the household who held a job and took in a salary.  So the one adult, my mother, had no one to whom she would naturally speak of earning a living.  More to the point, my mother never talked about money, not just earning but paying out.  We never discussed the price of things then or as I grew older.  It was “ill-bred.” She never suggested that the paper route which I took on at the age of 12 or 13 would be a good source of income for me, I don’t remember her even remarking on the money I made from  it.  Having a paper route, she told me, would be character building.  When I ran up a huge bill at the music shop while I was at Andover, she was properly irate, and required me to work the two summer vacations thereafter on the buildings and grounds crew of the public school system to pay her back.  From this I discovered the notion of a paycheck, reinforced when at the age of 18 I went off to New York City and worked as an office boy to support myself, so that when I returned home to attend the local university I took a job as an admissions clerk at the state university hospital’s orthopedics/pediatrics departments twenty hours a week afternoons Monday through Friday.  And when later Harvard University withdrew my scholarship, I went off to work as a nightwatchman for six months until they reinstated it. I don’t remember, however, shopping around for a job that paid the best.  I accepted my first teaching job without knowing the annual salary; it was never brought up nor did I inquire at the interview. So it’s clear that I did not go into teaching for the salary, never related what I did to what I earned, really, and that was my attitude for the next forty years, never tok a job for the money, nor while teaching at University A did I lust after the salary offered at University B. I found all my satisfaction and esteem from performing a service to others.  That may sound soupy, do goody, smug, but it is true.  I have never in my life thought of how I might profit from what I did in any real dollars and sense way.  I cannot imagine what it must be as a doctor in a practice that has fee for service where prescribing more tests is a way of boosting the income, ditto the lawyer who introduces another complicated wrinkle that will double the billable hours.  In sum I cannot imagine having done what I did for the money in it.  Of course, one expects this of Wall Street traders, bankers, and the like; money is all they  know, although I am probably discounting the adrenaline high of such work which makes it so sexy. And I seem to ignore that my pension is funded by forty odd years of their cutthroat derring do so that I can say ever so smugly: “Whatever else it is nice to have spent one’s life at doing a service for other people without thought of your own advantage.”