Resume Building

Resume Building

Noel Laflin

10-12-15

I wasn’t sure that I was amounting to much in life until the day I overheard my father talking with our old neighbor, Ralph.  I was twenty years old at the time, half-way through an undeclared major at college, riding a bike to campus when there was no money to fill the gas tank, living at home as I was too broke to live anywhere else, and trying to repay that courtesy by helping my father with the constant gardening upkeep.  I had been assisting him in that outdoor endeavor ever since I was old enough to push a mower, handle a pair of pruning shears, and master a short-handled hoe.  In fact, I had been a manual laborer by choice since earliest childhood. Gardening skills were about all I could boast of back then.

 

As far as a life's resume at this point, had I even known what the word meant, I had little to show.

 

Come summertime, however, my dad was pretty much on his own, as I would head up to the mountains and play camp counselor for the next two months.  It had been going on this way for six years.  But my folks approved of the arrangement, and I was grateful for the break from both school and chores.

And so my life as a staff member at Scout camp was also somewhat predictable until the summer of my nineteenth year when I took it into head to build a log cabin.  The timing coincided with a new-found love of photography which worked out well for documenting those fledgling pioneering skills. My folks took interest at the progress of the cabin’s construction when they came to visit periodically that summer, as did the parents of a hundred other teenagers who partook in the chopping, hauling, sawing, lifting, chinking, and hammering into place homemade wooden shutters and shakes. If my folks couldn’t physically see the off-season weekend progress being made, they were constantly bombarded with the black and white photos that I produced from a tiny closet-turned-darkroom back home.

My blossoming resume would have to now include knowledge of proper axe handling, two man sawing skills, and Photography 101; still not much to brag of, however.

But, by late June of the following year, the cabin was nearly complete. It had four walls, a cobblestone floor, a hefty ridgepole now in place, and a roof over head.   I’d be moving into the structure with three of the original builders by week’s end so that we could fashion a door, bunk beds, loft, and call the place home. Camp would then be open for business once again and we four would have the coolest house on the mountain.

 

Thus, I was on the eve of my last hurrah helping my father with the mowing and trimming when I happened to overhear the back fence conversation one afternoon.

“Did I tell you about my grandson?” Ralph was saying as I was about to turn the corner of our old shed, hauling a metal trashcan filled with lawn trimmings.  I could tell by the tone of voice that he was in a boastful mood.  I knew the old man well, as I had also been his gardener for a number of years.  I had lifted our old push mower over that same rickety barrier the two men now leaned upon every Saturday for nearly a decade.

“No, I don’t think so,” my dad replied, resting against the fence that had separated our homes for the last twenty years.

“He just graduated from West Point! Can you imagine? Here, I brought a photo.”

“And my great-nephew just entered law school,” Ralph bore on, passing along another couple of snapshots.  “His sister just completed her doctorate in psychology.  Those kids are doing me proud,” he concluded boastfully.

“Say,” asked Ralph, after a lengthy pause, “what’s your boy been up to lately? I miss my young gardener. How’s he coming along in life?”

“He’s built himself a real log cabin,” my dad said with a smile.  “Hold on while I fetch some photos.”

I retired back to the other side of the shed unseen.

My newly hewed resume now included a father’s humble bragging rights and a son’s grateful heart.