Nothing

 FATHER:  One day, lad, all this will be yours.
 ERBERT:  What, the curtains?
 FATHER:  No, not the curtains, lad.  All that you can see!
          Stretched out over the hills and valleys of this land!
          This'll be your kingdom,lad!

-Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I used to work for a painting contractor, back there was music on AM radio and social media was a hand-written letter. He drove a 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88; light yellow, two door, leather seats, nice. But once, when his car was in the shop, he spent the day driving around in his son’s, my friend’s, Datsun 260Z. He had me ride along with him that day as he drove from job to job because he wanted to talk to me. The Olds was an automatic but the Datsun was a standard so he mistakenly watched the tachometer in the Datsun thinking he was looking at the speedometer. We spent most of the morning driving around at 30MPH and 5,000 RPMs in second gear, with him thinking he was going 50 MPH and wondering what that loud whine from the engine was. When I showed him the real speedometer he pulled over and allowed me to drive.

The reason he wanted to talk to me was to show me how what he did, what his company did, would be around for years to come. We went to a bank that was being constructed near the freeway where he checked on the status of the work and I sat in the car listening to Paul Harvey; he wouldn’t let me change the channel so there would be no AM music that day.

After the bank we went by St. Paul Armenian Church in the center of town, which was also under construction. After talking to the foreman he got back in the car and pointing at the cross on the very top of the church, he said, “That’s real gold leaf on that cross. It will shine for years.”

Our third stop for the day was and apartment building that was probably 20 years old and getting a sort of facelift paint job. My boss brought the painting crew some sodas and a watermelon to cut up. It was pretty hot outside.

At the end of the day, he said, “Years from now, I can drive by these places, point at them and say ‘I helped build that, or I helped paint that.’” Then he said, “A man should have something to show for his time here. He should have something he can point at, or hold when he’s an old man and say he made it, or fixed it.”

I spent the last 25 years working at two places; a ceramic paint manufacturing plant and a phone company. There is absolutely nothing that can be held up, touched, climbed, entered, seen, tasted, or even remembered as proof I was ever even there. No buildings I can drive by and certainly no crosses, golden or otherwise. I suppose I could drive out and point at neighborhoods and say, “You see those houses? There were people in those houses years ago who had faster access to the Internet because of me.” Maybe I could find a ceramic bunny in a thrift store and say, “There’s a 50% chance I tested the pink paint used on his nose.”

There is no legacy. What I have to show at one job is day after day of testing paint to see if the color matched the last batch, and the one before that, and the one before that. At the other job I have countless hours worrying that some other man’s systems or networks would go down, hours both at work and at home, while sleeping, while on vacation, while watching the Super Bowl, and while at Thanksgiving dinner. I remember driving out to the office during the 2002 World Series (Giants/Angels) to babysit a router. No manager, supervisor, boss, vice president, foreman, or any other management personage so much as called, much less showed up.

But every hour I gave to those two men who ran those two companies, one who I left to go to work for the other, are simply gone. They amount to absolutely nothing. I might as well have been sleeping (Like my Vice President at the paint company often did, pretending to read Sunset Magazine).

I don’t know how I can work at my next job, whatever that turns out to be, and still pretend to have any investment in it. How I can pretend to care? How can smile when my next manager brings in yet another unqualified friend or family member to sit in an office, attend meetings, and collect a large paycheck? How do you do it?

My painting contractor boss is till around, although retired. If he wants to he can drive by that bank building, which is now a comic book store but still as clean and as shinny as the day his men laid down the last brush stroke, or he can drive by that church and see the cross is still as bright as the day the paint, with actual gold in it, was put on it. I envy him, even if he is still driving that Olds.