The Wreckage

 It's easy to focus on life’s inconsistencies. Dwelling in our own missteps mentally grants us the excuse to justify our absence from the things we want most. If you think about it, we use every reason not to jump at opportunities because we’re scared of failure. We let fear take the wheel as we sit in the passenger seat of our life without the slightest nerve of being a backseat driver. Our eyes simply stare out the window absent of fire that once burned furiously with ambition and formally directed the car.

These pity parties we entertain only inflate our desire to stay complacent in our exaggerated misery. By and large, negativity and hopelessness has never helped anyone reach a new goal. No one will give you anything in this life, much less if you’re sitting around sulking in your own pessimism.

I’m guilty of throwing myself the aforementioned pity parties. I’m only now realizing how selfish it is to lay among the things that I call my wreckage. This so called wreckage consist of things of luxury that some people could never dream of. To have the opportunity to call such things my "problems" should really be counted as blessings. In order to be in a mentally healthy state, we must cease from focusing on the difficult situations and think about the opportunities that may develop as we get past them. There’s no room for negativity if happiness is what we want. It’s time to pick ourselves up  and select the first piece from our “wreckage” and decide in which direction to start cleaning up the rumble. It just takes that initial action to set in motion those that will subsequently follow.

Lesson learned

As I made my way down the driveway towards my father’s gardening truck, my nostrils were bombarded by the odor of burned gasoline from the dated leaf blower and the sharp tart like aroma from the freshly cut grass. On my back, I carried a large grey garbage can that no longer displayed the luster of its former life on aisle four of Home Depot. Instead its exterior was decorated with deep scrapes, holes and a loose handle exhibiting the signs of a life lived. Inside it held 15 pounds of leaves, weeds and the remnants of unwanted debris.

Upon reaching the truck, I lifted the can above my head and dumped the waste on to the bed of the truck, letting out a loud sigh while wiping the beads of sweat produced from the physically demanding labor and the angry sun that sizzled at a lofty 110 degrees.

I walked over to my father’s orange water cooler that sat nestled on the side on his trailer and poured myself a cup of water. I embraced the feeling of the chilled water as it touched my lips and traveled down my throat.

As I proceeded to drink the water, I looked onward and saw the street as it did its best magic trick attempting to dislodge from its solidified form.

I refilled my cup with water, took off my base cap and poured out the cups contents letting the water droplets race down my face.

At 18, I was spending my last summer before leaving to college helping my father with his gardening service. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to be doing this. I had been helping my father since I could remember and I had my father’s clients remembering for me before I could claim any of those memories as my own.

By the time I was nine years old, I was constantly hearing: “Wow! Look how you’ve grown." Angela would say as I stared in awe that I was hearing a British Accent. I remember when you where this tall and you would stand next to your father digging the little holes so you could plant the flowers. You must have been five or so.”

Stubby Kay, her husband, would quickly interject, “He’s paying you well, right? If not I’ll tell your mom and she’ll take care of him.” I simply smiled and nodded my head.

As I grew older, I started to become more and more possessive with my time. I remember telling my father not to speak so long with his clients “on my time” because apparently it was my time that he was wasting and not his time earning the money that would put food on our table. Instead of reprimanding me for my brazen attitude towards him, he shrugged it off and teased me occasionally with his clients.

I selfishly thought gardening was my father’s form of cruel and usual punishment that I had to endure as some sort of right of passage. So summer after summer, winter vacation after winter vacation and spring break after spring break, I was pulling weeds, trimming trees, picking leaves, cutting roses, mowing lawns and washing down drive ways. Although I didn’t immediately see the purpose beyond earning extra cash while I was 10 or 13 years old, as I got older I started to realize my dad’s lesson was beyond the concept of fiscal responsibility and even beyond the value of hard work.

At summer’s end, I was extremely eager to leave the hot summer sun behind and find refuge from the physically demanding labor. Thus, every fall I would find that refuge in the form of four decorated walls, 30 desks, textbooks and an instructor to guide my peers and I. While my friends talked about their summer vacations, I would change topics when it came for me to rehash the summer that I thought I had missed out on.

Contrary to my selfish mentality, the concepts of hard work, patience and focus that my dad reminded me of every summer had transcended into my nine months of academic success. My father instilled in me the importance of education by displaying the arduousness that is manual labor and the consequences of taking education lightly.

Gradually I began to take note that there was a method to my father’s madness. At 17,  I was accepted into Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles and a few other schools. I graduated valedictorian of my senior class, I was senior class president, captain of my track and field and cross-country teams. All these accomplishments were are traced back to the summers I spent sweating under the desert sun.

Each summer, I was enrolled in summer school and my father was the teacher. There were no books, no homework and no classmates. The only form of grading or validation was through my own evaluation on how much effort I put in that day. On my last summer, my dad gave me a history lesson telling me that he started working when he was nine years old. When he was 11, he had stopped going to school and started working full time. The first male of his family, the second child of a growing family, he no longer had the privilege to attend school. He was a child in Mexico working to partially contribute to a family that continued to increase in size until the family reached maximum capacity at 18 children.

Although my father had never gone into detail about his upbringing, it all made sense to me. The reasons as to why I was there summer after summer was his indirect way of having me choose the words in books over a lawnmower and a rake. As a teenager, I never gave him the credit that was due, he was one of my greatest teachers and it took me awhile but I had been given the best lecture that anyone could ever give a student by a man that had never studied beyond the fifth grade.