Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [100]
Nothing in my life had prepared me for her sickness the first go around, where she fought through the treatments like a champ, so you can imagine how taken aback we all were when the cancer returned. Joanie Shepard—a woman filled with optimism and spirit, the most independent person in the world—actually needed assistance. It was a new situation to me. It was the first time in my life that I had ever witnessed someone close to me suffering. My Uncle Donald, who had passed away in January during my time in Charleston, was perhaps the lone exception, but even he had died with a smile on his face after eighty-four fruitful years of living.
Mom had a job prior to her lymphoma, but the unemployment benefits ran out during the first round of treatments. With the second round, finances were going to be tight. My father and brother lived in Raleigh and were able to look after her—running errands, taxiing her to and from the hospital for tests and treatments, and the like—but my parents were divorced, so my mom didn’t have a crutch to lean on for financial support. The only thing standing between her and broke was a meager disability check and an even more laughable savings account.
That’s where I came in, perhaps the ultimate irony of my entire project. With each of us working hard enough just to support ourselves, my brother Erik and I had to come together to provide financial support for our mom. I was to head home to Raleigh, where Erik and I would split the costs on a three-bedroom apartment to look after my mom, to essentially do what I was doing in Charleston, except now it was for real, beyond the scope of my project. I was being called home to Raleigh, where I would work for the local branch of Fast Company, and then as a wheelchair attendant at the airport for as long as it took for my mom to become self-sufficient and ready to go on with her life as her own, new person. When she was better, I would head to New York or California where I would have the freedom to begin to use my college degree in search of my own passion.
Unfortunately, I would have to start over on the bottom rung at the Fast Company in Raleigh. Each franchise is independently owned and operated, so while it would be rather easy for me to get a job there based on my experience, my salary would not transfer. By April, I had worked my way up to $11 an hour at the Fast Company in Charleston, but in Raleigh, I would start over and have to prove my worth to the company once again.
At the end of April, with my time at Fast Company in Charleston coming to an end, I began thinking about how well I had done, how I had stacked up as a worker. Was I average or above or below? How would my peers grade my moving abilities?
I figured many of the guys at the shop would probably give me a “C,” since most of them hadn’t had the opportunity to work with me for longer than a day or two, and since they mostly knew me by my catch-me shorts and horrendous truck-packing abilities. (Of the three times that Derrick had me pack the truck on small moves, he had to take over twice after seeing that we weren’t going to be able to make it on one trip. The other time, we drove to the unload with the back doors open and a dog house strapped over the edge.)
The management (Jill and Jed) would most certainly give me an “A” since they didn’t care if I was an efficient mover or not. As long as I was coming into the shop in the morning ready to work and in uniform and returning in the evening without a damage report, I was gold to them.
The customers would also rate me pretty high, I think, but there again, the grading scale was pretty slack. They would give high marks to any one of the guys at Fast Company who were delivering their furniture from one house to the next without a scratch on it. The customers couldn’t tell if we were fast or slow. By their standards, every mover was fast.
On the other hand, Derrick’s rating of my moving skills was a tricky guess. He would surely