A life's resume

 

The only thing longer than the list of my mother's malaprops is her inventory of jobs, an accounting that runs in the double digits. While she was a homemaker for most of our growing up, Mom ventured into the job market here, there, seemingly everywhere in her freer years, at mostly part-time work.

Fast food. Retail. Health care. Restaurants. Gardening. Hotels. Tourism. She was an Avon lady, a waitress, a desk clerk, an office worker. Long ago, she was an usherette at the old Randolph movie theatre in Philadelphia. She worked the takeout window at Taco Bell, the register at Rite Aid, the ticket counter at Eastern Airlines, the phone at a telemarketer.

There are about 50 jobs in all, at least the ones she remembered enough to compile in writing. Can someone hold that many jobs in a lifetime? Most likely not, but the secret to Mom's list is that many of the jobs were shortlived: one year at a dry cleaners, a few weeks at Chi Chi's, one day at Auntie Anne's ("the hardest place I ever worked"). Were she younger, she might be working for Amazon, but the company's rumored too-few bathroom breaks would be a deal breaker.

There were other job market deal breakers for the woman my dad once dubbed Regina "Take This Job and Shove It" Wiser: the diner cooks who took out their frustrations on waitresses, the elderly drug store customers who had to pay such high prices for their prescriptions, the cigarette packs she could barely reach behind the counter at Wawa. It should be noted here that my dad had experience at that same busy store: They formed a Wawa comedy duo, she struggling to keep the coffee pots filled and he working the deli counter, where he once designed a customer's Italian hoagie with no meat in it.

Mom was selective about her work hours, too, namely that there not be too many. We used to kid that she couldn't work on days that ended in y and needed summers off. But there was one job that, as my mother would put it, took guts: tour guide for a popular bus company. Never conversant in geography or history, except her own, she would rely on my Dad to give her advance tutorials on, say, Civil War battlefields or the functions of Congress. What my mother did have that qualified her for the job was a vivacious personality and the ability to laugh at herself, good qualities when you're babysitting cranky travelers and warding off advances from bus drivers with too much time on the road.

The other day, as she got her second "COVIC" vaccine and asked me why Dr. Anthony Fonzie didn't just quit the coronavirus task force rather than endure criticism from Donald Trump, she mentioned, again, that she wished she weren't too old to be a volunteer somewhere, maybe reading to kids or visiting nursing home residents. She's had experience similar to the latter, when she worked at a home for retired nuns. That, too, was shortlived: She sat at one sister's bedside to read her a book and promptly fell asleep.

I don't recall her saying what the book was about: must have been history or geography.

Movie usherette, circa 1952. Young man unidentified