Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.
My primary job these days is walking dogs around the streets of Contoocook. As I do my job, I get to watch many other people do their jobs, and it has been eye-opening.
The biggest job I’ve gotten to watch was when the Hopkinton Highway Department re-routed the driveway to the high school from Kearsarge Avenue and built a new parking lot for the softball fields. Unlike most people who saw the work occasionally from their cars, I passed by the construction site, or through it, on foot seven times a day, seven days a week.
As a sidewalk superintendent, I learned just how much work, and how many different kinds of work, went into making what look like a pretty basic driveway and parking lot. Before I hang up my leash and set aside my roll of poop bags, my walking shoes will carry me across that parking lot and up that driveway thousands more times. Having seen them get made, I will never take them for granted.
When visiting teams play the Hopkinton Hawks, they often compliment the quality of our soccer, field hockey, baseball, and softball fields. Good fields don’t happen by accident, and I get a front row seat from which to watch all the early morning work that goes into making those fields so good at game time.
Our Hawks play hard, and the town’s groundskeepers work just as hard fertilizing, mowing, and dragging our fields to keep them in tip-top shape, not to mention emptying all the trash barrels on the sidelines.
I also watch the town Highway Department and the state DOT spring into action when the snow flies, plowing the roads and clearing the sidewalks. For a dogwalker, clear sidewalks are a big deal, and seeing the clearing get done makes me appreciate the road and sidewalk crews even more.
I also get to see the private sector hard at work. Three or four large trees, diseased or storm damaged, have been cut down along the route of my daily walk over the last several years. For most people, those trees were here today, gone tomorrow. But I got to watch skilled arborists take them down, limb by limb. With each pass by, I gained a greater respect for the skillful and safe way they did their work.
It’s easy to take for granted the well-stocked shelves of a grocery store. When I walk by the local grocery, I get to see all the work that keeps the shelves stocked, daily deliveries from dozens of suppliers. And if I’m not watching a delivery truck pull up to the loading dock of the grocery store, I’m seeing a truck or a tractor heading into the cornfield behind the grocery store. It’s just more work that sustains my world, work I never thought that much about until I started to see it every day on my walks.
Perhaps it is all the work I see every day that once inspired me, over the course of several walks, to compose in my head the presentation I would make if I were ever invited to address the careers class at Hopkinton High. The next thing I knew, an invitation came, and I found myself in front of a class of high school students who were learning about the world of work. I told a couple of work-related stories and concluded with the crowing achievement of my work life.
After my historic preservation job with the state evaporated and before I went to law school, I spent fifteen months milking cows for the Cretes at Highway View Farm in Boscawen. I was never the fastest milker; in a parlor that held nine cows on a side, my partner always handled five cows to my four. But I did have two dairy farm superpowers.
First, I was good at detecting cows in heat. Second, I was never so much as a minute late for work, and I never missed a shift without asking for the day off two weeks in advance. From July 12, 1995, until Thanksgiving Day, I worked at least one milking shift every single day.
At the end of my last shift, Bruce Crete handed me an envelope containing a crisp green severance bonus that equaled a full week’s wages. I have never felt so honored.
I told that story to impress upon my students the value of hard work and reliability, traits that will serve them in any endeavor they might undertake. Recalling my job on the farm also helps me recognize, and appreciate, the work that goes on all around me, nearly invisibly, work that allows me to live a comfortable life without having to think very much about how and why it is so comfortable.
Finally, my ability to see so much ordinarily invisible work also puts me in a position to ask some important questions. Did that decades-old maple tree really need to come down? Are grocery stores and agribusiness the best ways to satisfy our food needs? Is the work we do, as a society, the work we should be doing? But those are questions for another My Turn.