Tangible Work
The joy of seeing what you’ve done
I love tangible work.
The first time in my life I truly understood the value of concrete, measurable work was when my second husband and I cleaned out the two huge apartments (plus one hotel room in Montreal) of a very wealthy, VERY eccentric woman. She had been a hoarder, lonely and paranoid and complicated; above and beyond all the random and crazy things we sorted through in those apartments (carefully annotated TV Guides, thousands of cashmere sweaters, a city block’s worth of antique furniture and a major orchestra’s worth of musical instruments, chests full of newspaper clippings about her divorce forty years earlier, unopened bottles of Haig & Haig scotch from the 1950s, dozens and dozens and dozens of keys, stacks of junk mail separated by sheets of paper towels and plastic wrap interspersed with the occasional ten- or twenty-dollar bill and once even a stock certificate worth a lot of money), there was the sheer delight of sorting a room, separating out the treasures from the trash, and finishing it. We moved methodically through both apartments and the hotel room. It took about a month; every day, we were visibly farther along than we had been the day before.
It was extremely satisfying.
And then there was the time when I left a job where I was variously shouted at, praised…
