Hats

A couple of things have had me thinking about identity, specifically self-identity.

I guess I'm a little different from most 40-somethings. I've held more jobs, and lived in more places than I really want to count, but what kept me sane throughout was my experience in High School in Carroll County, Arkansas in the early 1980s.

The summer after graduation, I held down three different part-time jobs. From 8am until midnight on Monday and Tuesday and from 8am to noon on Wednesday, I was the darkroom guy for my local weekly newspaper.

Wednesday night, Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night I was an actor in the "Great Passion Play".

Thursday afternoon, Friday day and afternoon and Saturday day and afternoon I was a cook at a locally-owned fried chicken place (not a KFC).

I got used to changing my persona in the car as I drove from one job to another. At the newspaper, in the darkroom, I pretty much supervised myself. I knew what the standards were, I managed my own workload, and the Editor really didn't want to see my face, just the finished prints. At the chicken place, I was a grunt, the junior man on the staff, the guy who got all the jobs no one else wanted to do. At the play, I was just another face in the crowd. As long as I was in the right place at the right time making the right motions, my boss could have cared less (and probably didn't know my name).

Oh, and at the same time, I was still living on my parents small farm, getting up not much after dawn to milk goats, collect eggs, weed a garden, etc.

On top of all of that I was trying to sustain a relationship with my first girlfriend and my first love.

In many ways, I lived the song "Hats" by Amy Grant ".

The one thing that sustained me, then and now, was my personal values. I'm not a deeply religious man, but I have strong personal values and convictions, and no matter how often I changed "hats", my values and convictions remained the same.

I remember a professor, Captain Ford, who's motto was:

"A professional is the person who does the job they are supposed to do, and does it right, even when no one will ever know, even when no one will ever care, and even when, if someone knew, they would belittle them for doing it."