Work is more fun than fun.
Noel Coward
With remarkable frequency, it goes something like this. You’re at a party, and someone—usually some guy in a high-paying, white-collar profession—asks what you do. “Oh,” he cuts you off, apparently not wanting to learn the particulars, “writing, that’s what I want to do. One of these days I’m going to start writing novels.” And on he rolls, like a dump truck without brakes: his ideas for best-sellers, film scripts, or the great American novel; his master plan.
We know a doctor. We’ll call him Jerry. Over the Christmas holidays a few years ago, Jerry squeezed out of his Jaguar and struck up a conversation with Frank on our front lawn. “You know, I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he said. “I have a million ideas in my head. Soon as I retire I’m going to write novels.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Soon as I retire, I’m going to be a doctor.”
There’s a moral to this story. It’s not so much that writing is hard as hell and takes time to learn. It’s the peculiar notion held by so many that you spend the lion’s share of your life wanting to do something else, envying other people their work, before you get to the sliver reserved for the “real you.” Or you work your tail off so you can retire early and do what you always wanted to do. Or you live for the weekend, where you do your “real work”—if you’re not too exhausted. And then you’re a writer, a painter, a musician, a carpenter, whatever. You’re the person you always wanted to be.
Good luck.
For us, the moral of this story has a name: Judith Freeman.
We’ve known Judith for more than ten years. In 1988, the year she turned forty-two, Family Attractions, a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, was published—Judith’s first work under her own name. A year later her novel The Chinchilla Farm, the quasi-autobiographical story of a Mormon woman from Utah who moves to Los Angeles after her husband leaves her, appeared to even wider acclaim, followed by her latest novel, Set for Life. At last Judith was doing the work she wanted to do, and she was doing it well enough to please both herself and many critics. Not bad for a writer who never earned a college degree.
We remember another, earlier time in her life.
With Judith, it wasn’t working another job and, like Jerry with his Jaguar, fantasizing about being a writer. In fact, Judith was writing. When we knew her in Los Angeles, she had co-written a pseudonymous novel, was writing stories in fits and starts, and was making the rounds in Hollywood, pitching movie and television ideas to producers.
But with the exception of the novel, for which she and a partner were paid $15,000, and which, she said, “had a lot of offensive qualities,” Judith did not appear to be bringing home much bacon as a writer. Nor did it seem there was any compelling reason for her to do so. Twice divorced, she lived, during our time in Los Angeles, first with her wealthy television-writer boyfriend in Beverly Hills, later by herself in a rented house in tony Santa Monica Canyon, a few blocks from the ocean. Since Judith only occasionally took part-time jobs that never seemed to pay much or last long, we could only assume that some other source was covering most of her bills.
From the outside it appeared to be a materially comfortable, if not lavish, west side existence, a life that held ample room for socializing, afternoon reading and walks, travel with friends. It was a life that many people would envy, that Judith herself did not appear eager to give up.
It’s easy to oversimplify, to draw too facile a connection between the change in her life-style and work habits and the dramatic change in her professional fortunes. Yet the facts are striking. In 1985 Judith met Anthony Hernandez at a benefit auction for which the Mexican-American photographer was donating some of his photographs. They fell in love. In 1986, the same year we left Los Angeles, Judith married Tony in a simple, outdoor wedding ceremony and moved with some trepidation into his stucco apartment in Westlake, a section near downtown settled primarily by Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan immigrants. Set back high on a steep bank from the street, Tony’s apartment, which he’s had since 1970, rented for an incredible $98 a month. In its three rooms, Tony had one chair, a mattress on the floor, and nothing on the walls. In what is now both their bedroom and Judith’s office was Tony’s darkroom. The place, as Judith described it, “was like a monk’s cell”—a monk’s cell that she transformed into a spare but homey nest.
Since making the move, Judith has flourished as a writer. She works hard but by no means obsessively, taking breaks during the day for swims, bike rides, and meditative walks to nearby MacArthur Park. She and Tony spend relatively little. The combination of their negligible rent and the fact that they prepare most meals in their small kitchen keeps their expenses extremely low. Earning $600 a month, Tony works half days in the mailroom at the Department of Water and Power, reserving the afternoon light and weekends for photography. When Tony is using their 1969 Volvo, which they bought used for $1,700, Judith takes the bus.
Is it accidental that Judith’s writing career blossomed during the same period in which she simplified her life, conforming her time and her material needs to her desire to write? We think not.
Before, hers was a life full of distractions. “Now,” she said, “it doesn’t seem as though there are those distractions. I have a lot of time for writing, a lot of time for work. And so when you say to me, ‘You’re so extraordinarily prolific,’ yeah, but the time has been created for it.”
We were talking with Judith and Tony in the spacious house of friends for whom we were house-sitting in a swanky neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Though we’d been there for the better part of a week, having to punch out the right code to appease the elaborate security system put us on edge. It made us uneasy to live, however temporarily, in a place that needed so much protection, that had to defend itself so aggressively from the outside world.
Judith and Tony had come to this house as our guests for a dinner of pasta, salad, and the apple pie that Judith had baked that day. Now, late in the evening, she sat beside Tony on a cushion couch, an illuminated aqua swimming pool shimmering through the sliding glass doors behind them. It was odd for us to talk about simple living in a $400,000 home so dissimilar from our own.
For Judith, the setting must have been especially jarring, as she was the only one of the four of us who had ever lived with such wealth. “I’m actually living much more in tune with not only the way I was raised, but the way I really wish to continue to be,” she said, holding her body motionless, her lips barely moving as she spoke, as if practicing meditation. “And happily, it’s a way that serves my choices very well as a writer.”
There was a double meaning in her last sentence. For not only has the change helped her focus on work, but her new neighborhood, which has surfaced in her writing, is an integral part of what she calls her “more engaged existence.” In The Chinchilla Farm, narrator Verna Flake, a former Utah bowling alley waitress who speaks in a voice remarkably like Judith’s, moves to a section of Los Angeles that is unmistakably Judith’s neighborhood. There Verna, like Judith, encounters daily a mix of Spanish-speaking immigrants and—particularly in MacArthur Park—the homeless, many of them Anglos, a few of whom she gets to know.
One homeless man whom Judith sees regularly calls her “Sister.” She calls him “Brother.” “I know the people around him,” she said, “none of whom are as together as he is. I go and sit on the bench. And it strikes me every once in a while that here I am with Gabe and with Tom and with a variety of other homeless people, talking to them. And it’s a strange feeling to realize that some of my most regular daily contacts are with this group of people in the park who sit on the benches.”
These lives—and the street scene in her neighborhood, where women sell homemade pupusas and chile rellenos from shopping carts they push along the sidewalk, where kids play in the alleys, men cluster on street corners, and brassy mariachi music erupts without warning—give Judith a sense of community she never had on the manicured west side. Sometimes, however, the urban vitality that has energized her fiction is frightening. On her first New Year’s Eve in the neighborhood, she told us, “there was about fifteen minutes of solid gunfire all around us. And we realized how many of our neighbors had weapons.” For the foreseeable future, at least, Judith is where she wants to be, living the way she needs to live to do her work. Many of her old friends visit only rarely. Some refuse to brave the neighborhood at all.
“People are really afraid of urban environments,” she noted. “You can live in these areas. One of the things that I’ve said to myself is that there’s nothing I can’t lose and do without. The only reason that we have a deadbolt to the bedroom is for Tony’s cameras. That would be the greatest loss for us, because those are his tools.”
Tony’s tools—and his eye for the offbeat, for social flotsam and jetsam—have made him an increasingly esteemed photographer, winning grants and prestigious gallery showings. When we first met Tony, he was at work on an intriguing project on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Using a small camera handheld inconspicuously at his waist, he was photographing pedestrians as they passed by. The results were chilling: a motley parade of unposed, unaware, often compulsive faces, of wealthy matrons from Beverly Hills and tourists from Topeka and Tokyo, linked only by their common attraction for the street synonymous with conspicuous consumption.
Other projects have proved equally disquieting: a series of photographs of desert trash heaps outside Las Vegas, where people come regularly with guns to shoot bottles and cans for sport; photographs of the homeless in Los Angeles.
Tony is a slender man in his mid-forties. On this evening of borrowed luxury in the San Fernando Valley, he wore a white, starched, button-down shirt, pressed jeans, and deck shoes he slipped off after dinner. When Tony was growing up with his two brothers in East Los Angeles, his father, a former Colorado farmworker, had material aspirations for himself and the kids. From a very young age, Tony said, he had a sense of himself as an “oddball” in a family where “everybody wanted things, to show them off.” One of his two brothers is now an attorney in San Gabriel; the other works full-time at the Department of Water and Power in field investigation. His brothers have an abundance of things. But Tony has a passion and an art.
“The main thing,” he said, “was that I wanted to keep working doing photographs. And nothing else mattered. That’s really what it comes down to. There are no guarantees, just a life, your own life. You just do it and don’t stop it or interrupt it.”
Tony’s words were inspirational. And so was his life, one so powerful and clearly defined that he had attracted Judith to it and laid out for her the formula and foundation for getting on with what she wanted to do in life.
It was not difficult to find parallels in our experience and hers. At roughly the same time that Judith abandoned Santa Monica Canyon, we left the west side of Los Angeles for what we hoped would be a better life. Like Judith, we wanted to hone in on the work that would be most satisfying, most meaningful. We wanted to make true in our lives Noel Coward’s maxim about work being more fun than fun.
Of course, our situation was more complicated logistically than Judith’s. Being orchardists and writers made for an unconventional work cycle. Frank was either on call or working full-time from March through October, with his busiest period running from June through August, when the summer fruits needed immediate harvesting. Wanda worked the cash register at the packhouse during cherry and peach harvests, about ten weeks altogether. In late fall, winter, and early spring, the orchard work slowed down. Although there remained never-ending management and financial responsibilities, this was our time for intensive writing. Our labors, quite literally, were tied to the seasons.
In part because of our need to generate income in excess of our living expenses, when we were able to write, we did not have the luxury of giving total focus to the writing that our hearts held. We were in the business of writing and, therefore, sought a wide range of money-making enterprises and opportunities, from writing for magazines and book review sections to selling publishers books from proposals. As the years went by, we branched out into teaching night courses at the community college and offering one-day writers’ workshops throughout North Carolina. Consulting work also followed.
Our need for money was real, and so, too, were the often competing demands of our various editors and the urgent call of ripe fruit on the trees. This combination of demands made us workaholics of the first order in our early weeks and months at the orchard. In 1986, a typical summer scenario for Frank was putting in six twelve-hour days a week picking fruit and then on Sunday—his one designated day of rest—getting up at six A.M. to write a book review that might take the whole day.
The unhappy result was that dissatisfaction crept into Frank’s orchard hours. He began to dread his days in the field. Once there, he watched the clock like an unhappy employee. Likewise, Wanda occasionally chafed at the bit over her long hours on her feet at the packhouse and winced when an orchardist neighbor teased, “This is not what your mother had in mind for you when you were growing up.”
When it became apparent that we were driving ourselves just as hard—and often harder—here than we had out west, we had a talk. How could we create more balance in our lives without relinquishing our ambitions? How could we devote at least a portion of our time to something we’d long hankered to do? They were questions we would mull over for months.
Then, in October of 1986, we hit upon a plan. It was actually Frank’s idea, though Wanda was casting about for a follow-up to her newly published book, The Singular Generation: Young Americans in the 1980s. Though logic and publishing wisdom would seem to dictate sticking with nonfiction, why not, Frank asked, return to fiction—Wanda’s first love in college? And why not, he suggested further, write it together? He had a brainstorm for a novel to be set at a daily newspaper, tapping Wanda’s knowledge of that business from her three years at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Frank would contribute what he’d learned from screenwriting about advancing a plot. As long as we were working so hard, why not go at it as a team?
This was not a new idea. In the early days of our courtship, Frank had proposed ad nauseam that we collaborate on a screenplay, and Wanda had resisted with equal vehemence. Screenplays lacked the texture of good fiction, she said, and besides, the movie business seemed like a crapshoot, even riskier than the literary game.
To Frank’s delight, though, Wanda fell for this scheme with little persuasion. After years of writing separately, we both welcomed the idea of joining creative forces. It was, he congratulated her, a measure of how much less she was worrying about money than when we’d first moved to Virginia.
We set aside time to develop the plot and characters. By the spring of 1987 we were hard at work on the blueprints for the novel. Scores of five-by-seven-inch cards, each summarizing a scene, marched in fifteen-foot rows up and down the green living room carpet. Ironically, once Wanda agreed to tackle the “on-spec” project, she plunged in with zest and confidence, while Frank wrestled with doubt. Though the plot moved briskly and the characters were becoming as real as family members, the aftertaste of Hollywood rejection was bitter in Frank’s mouth. Now it was he, not Wanda, who was fretting over our shrinking bank balance and doubting that “this thing” would go anywhere. Though the friends who, upon hearing of our new writing collaboration, had jokingly recommended “a good divorce lawyer” were surprised by the mesh of our egos, though the inventive nature of the work was immensely satisfying, we were investing many hours of our time with no guarantee of return.
At last, in December 1987, apprehensive but proud of ourselves, we mailed the one-hundred-ten-page outline to Wanda’s literary agent in New York. The work itself, as we had hoped, had knitted us closer together. A few arguments, an occasional ruffled feather, but no serious damage. What would the agent think? And could she possibly convert our pages into a sale?
Late on a cold afternoon in January 1988, our phone rang for the first time all day. Wanda was in Mount Airy running errands. Frank answered the phone.
It was Wanda’s agent in New York. She had sold the outline for our novel to the higher of two bidders. The completed manuscript would be due in eleven months.
We dashed back to town in our pickup, bought a bottle of champagne, uncorked it, and let it flow. The advance wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to cover the bills while we cranked out the novel. We were as giddy as newlyweds. Not since college, when Wanda spent uninterrupted hours poring over her short stories, had she enjoyed “work” so much. And Frank dared to hope that the pall cast over his optimism by myriad Hollywood disappointments had finally lifted.
After the euphoria of the book contract wore off, reality set in. There was much work to do and—given the impending six-month fruit season—little time to do it. Still, we refused to rush it. Our work began with research in Washington, D.C., where the story takes place. We made the six-hour-each-way commute for seven weeks, returning from the capital on Wednesday afternoons to get ready for our Thursday-night creative writing class at Surry Community College and catch up on our messages, mail, and any other business. Then we headed back Friday mornings to Washington. We stayed for three weeks at Edmund Urbanski’s Silver Spring, Maryland, apartment and later rented a room from a widow in Bethesda. We interviewed journalists and politicians and visited favored Capitol Hill watering holes to take notes on food, beverage, and décor.
After we finished our research, and staring at a December deadline, we agreed to a rough division of labor. While Frank took to the trees, Wanda accepted primary responsibility for moving the novel along. To make our partnership work, we had to be adaptable. In our different workplaces, we didn’t always know when one of us would have to trade a tractor for a thesaurus. More than once, in the midst of a creative rush, Wanda was called to pick an emergency bucket of plums for a customer who had arrived early.
For Wanda, feeling indispensable both financially in our marriage and creatively in this particular undertaking paid deep dividends. Perhaps from her feminist upbringing, or perhaps from seeing friends whose low-paying jobs were trivialized by their husbands, whose contributions were marginalized when they married wealthier men, Wanda realized that she liked nothing so much as carrying the ball in a partnership collaboration.
We did, in the end, miss our deadline—but not by much. With Wanda’s start on the novel and Frank’s efforts once the apples were picked, we made rapid progress, sometimes writing together on the same scenes, usually writing separately, always abiding by the rule that if one of us didn’t like what the other had written, he or she had license to rewrite or delete. The other partner would have the next crack at the edited material, back and forth, until both of us were happy. The rule was rough on writerly pride at times but, we agreed, fair and effective.
Our individual strengths emerged over the course of the project. Wanda was the copyeditor and Frank the “spell king,” an ironic accolade with which he had been saddled in seventh grade after winning the county spelling bee. Wanda preached rewriting and seemed to thrive on it, while Frank favored the first rush of creativity and often clung tenaciously to what one writer has dubbed the “little darlings” of prose.
More significant, though, we looked forward to the work. There were thickets of disagreement and foul moods, but ultimately it was exhilarating to make our way through them. We were loving the process: inventing a world, coming to a mutual understanding about characters, imparting our values in the shape of the story. As never before, we were learning a common language as writers, breaking out of the isolation that plagues many who write alone.
The work carried Wanda back to the great pleasure of her youth, in those halcyon days before her parents’ divorce, when she and her sister reveled in a fantasy world of Barbie and Ken. The dolls’ extended family of fifteen, with their extensive wardrobes, soda shop, fashion shop, sports car, airplane, and motorboat, occupied at least one-third of the floor space in Wanda and Jane’s attic bedroom. Wanda lived to play “B. & K.,” as they called it, with its complicated plots, intricate family relationships, petty rivalries, and feuds. Wanda was Barbie, and Jane was Ken. Barbie was ahead of her time—a self-starter in early 1960s garb, an entrepreneur who led a reluctant Ken and the troop of Midge, Skipper, Alan, Tutu, and the rest on camping expeditions out of the house and down to the pond. Other times, Barbie, now the nightclub singer, donned her “solo in the spotlight” outfit and took up a microphone before an admiring audience of her plastic peers.
As nothing else, for Wanda, writing this novel with Frank brought back that sense of play.
While we were collaborating on the novel, each of us realized the importance of maintaining our individual identities as writers as well. We continued to work independently on magazine pieces and book reviews, and when we could steal the time, we would push along literary projects of our own. But we liked working together so much that when the novel was finished in January 1989, we were already at work on another joint project, eager to keep the home partnership fires burning.
While the orchard was proving a congenial setting for our creative work, we were also bringing in lessons from the field and the sales platform that were slowly changing our lives. Often the lessons did not come easily.
When Frank was growing up, he wanted mainly to escape “learning the value of physical work,” or the other, similar homilies children are supposed to swallow. Like many rural kids who ultimately leave the farm for better-paying and more prestigious jobs in the city, Frank found his chores and orchard work monotonous, his father oppressive. Freedom and creativity were anywhere but here. And it was no accident that Frank passed up a full scholarship to nearby Wake Forest University and chose instead a college far from home, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
As an adult, he knew he should appreciate the value of manual labor: hadn’t writers from Walt Whitman to Gary Snyder to Wendell Berry extolled the virtues of honest sweat? And wasn’t he philosophically in accord? Yes, but none of those august thinkers had ever worked with Sam Levering. As endearing as Sam was most of the time, his wisdom could never be challenged. Both as boss man and father, Sam was always right. It was hard for a man in his late seventies and early eighties to change, to accept the new reality that his son and daughter-in-law were now his business partners. Some of Frank’s unhappiness in doing grunt work he blamed on his father’s lingering notion that Frank was merely taking orders. Having made all orchard decisions since 1939, Sam adjusted slowly and sometimes explosively to the democratic procedures of partnership.
Family businesses are notorious war zones, and in the years since 1986, Sam and Frank have incurred their full share of battle scars. But the battles—and Sam’s life-threatening quadruple bypass—have brought father and son closer, each man coming to know the other in ways not possible before their lives were joined in work, before they shared a common stake. For Sam, along with the pain of diminished power and physical prowess has come the joy of sharing hard-won knowledge with a son. For Frank, the years here have brought the conviction that this is our place, too, along with a new appreciation of Sam’s determination and grit.
In American culture, manual labor is reserved largely for recent immigrants, illegal aliens, blacks, poor whites, women, small farmers, teenagers, and leftover hippies. For Frank, who had made steady strides toward conjuring success in his new farmer fittings, the half-year diet of manual labor became easier to swallow as his investment grew in the orchard, as he helped decide what fruits to plant, what trees to cut, how to market four thousand bushels of peaches.
For Wanda, the everyday routine of making up a cash drawer, laying out bags and filling some with fruit, waiting on customers, and, at the end of a long day, clearing out and closing down, was exhausting. It was also exotic. Wanda liked to joke that she was the only member of Harvard’s class of 1978 to end up in the produce business. She could lose herself in this, the most mundane of human enterprises. How much more basic can you get than selling a gallon of fruit to a budget-minded retiree? Or hearing about a customer’s bunions as she slowly makes her way up the stairs to the loading dock platform? Or admiring a pickup truck newly purchased by a patron who wanted someone to notice?
Working at the packhouse provided a superb stage for a parade of humanity—everyone from those few who expected service on the double, or assumed you would slash the price of your fruit as if it cost you nothing at all to grow, to the thoughtful majority whose hallmark was courtesy. By and large, our cherry customers were attuned to simple pleasures—in coming great distances for fruit, in picking their own, and canning or freezing quantities to last for a year or two. Most of our customers were repeaters, longtimers who insisted they looked forward to receiving our annual mailing as if it were a treasured Christmas card. Occasionally a bicyclist from Spain might hop off his ten-speed and purchase half a pound of cherries to munch on as he pedaled up the mountain, but mostly Wanda dealt with the veteran customers who came back year after year, often week after week, bringing their friends and relatives and lingering to visit. For Wanda, the long hours at the packhouse carried a side bonus: making more precious the time she had for her writing.
Working on the orchard put us in daily contact with the extended Dawson family—Glenn, Randall, Mark, Esther, Bill, and Beth. No one, however, had more impact upon us—and especially on Frank—than Garnet Calvin Dawson.
Sometimes when Frank worked with him, that relentless old man with the scythe seemed a pretty good imitation of the Grim Reaper, come to take Frank’s life away—at least his life as a writer. The image was not as farfetched as it might seem. When Frank was small, he found Garnet frightening. Garnet had massive forearms and was resolutely taciturn, with a hawk-like face and piercing eyes that made the boy want to hide behind his father’s pant legs. Once, sensing Frank’s fear, Sam took his son aside and told him that his foreman was a good, kind man who would never hurt him.
When Frank was a teenager, a day with Garnet in the orchard seemed like toiling on a chain gang. A ferocious worker, Garnet showed no mercy for youthful frailty or for the boss’s son, driving furiously until dark if necessary to finish a job. Any activity other than work Garnet viewed with suspicion. Playing ball or reading a book were signs of sloth.
It was ideal preparation for high school and college athletics. After summers with Garnet, Frank showed up at football camp ready for battle. Savage war cries on the gridiron were nothing next to interminable days with the orchard foreman in the heat and rain. The man had a perverse sense of humor. In the midst of picking plums in an all-day downpour, he’d turn to a drenched Frank and say, “Ain’t nothin’ but a clearin’-off shower!”
These were scenes from the past. Getting to know Garnet better as an adult, Frank came to feel that the older man had changed. Or was it that Frank had learned how to talk to him? Getting a job done was still supremely important, but now the silver-haired Garnet would stop for a few minutes to catch his breath. For the first time, Garnet would quit work on the hottest afternoons. Not only was he more vulnerable physically than before, but he was letting his emotions show, talking candidly about getting old, about the waning of strength and stamina.
And he was telling stories as he worked, vivid sketches of Frank’s father and grandfather that made Frank feel part of a living tradition. Garnet knew every inch of this ground. Often triggered by the sight of something—an old rock wall Frank’s grandfather had built, the stump of a tree someone had cut—memories of people long dead invaded him constantly.
“Well,” Garnet would say at the end of the day, “we’ll try it again tomorrow.”
In his essay “Life Without Principle,” Thoreau surely had Garnet in mind when he wrote: “Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love.” Starting with summer jobs in his youth, Garnet has worked at Levering Orchard ever since, building a brick house and college-educating four of his five children from his earnings. Garnet and his homemaker wife, Esther Hiatt Dawson, have always lived simply: they rarely travel, never eat out. They can, freeze, or eat fresh much of their food from orchard fruit and an enormous vegetable garden. With ample savings and few expenses, it’s been clear for more than ten years that money isn’t what has kept Garnet toiling.
By the late 1970s Garnet could have retired, as family members have been urging him to do ever since. He could have spared himself cold winter days that aggravated the arthritis in his hands. But retirement was not a word in his Appalachian vernacular. When younger men, including Garnet’s youngest son, quit for less strenuous work, when Sam was a peace activist spending weekdays in Washington, D.C., it was Garnet’s steady work and dogged effort that kept the orchard going.
The longer Frank worked alongside the old man, the less preoccupied he was with the orchard’s debt, the more he began to see the orchard as Garnet did: not as a collection of numbers to be crunched, but as a complex organism offering mentally challenging, intrinsically satisfying work. It was more complicated than it looked. In pruning a tree for maximum vigor, a worker had to consider a wide range of variables, such as cutting branches to bring fruit maximum exposure to the sunlight. In picking peaches—the job he’d once despised most—Frank began to appreciate the skill required to do the job well. It took a subtle eye for color to know which peaches to pick, which ones to leave a few more days to ripen. Not only was his attitude changing, but Frank was learning practical skills from Garnet, who had a wide range at his fingertips, everything from how to negotiate a tractorload of fruit down a rain-slickened hillside to repairing a broken water line.
But probably most impressive was Garnet’s constancy, practically unheard of in this day and age. You couldn’t replace him. Experience taught that if you hired a younger man, he could never be counted on to show up for work the next day. Garnet was directed, steady, committed. Nothing else seemed to matter, and there was no higher priority than tending the orchard. Garnet offered a striking contrast to Sam, who despite the voluntary nature of his public service work had nonetheless set out to change the world. Sam’s were grand if intangible goals, an archetype writ large for what Frank had come to see as his own unhealthy quest for success.
Frank saw, too, that at the end of a day, Garnet put his work behind him and enjoyed a bone-weary sense of accomplishment that Sam never could or would enjoy. Sam’s goals could never be achieved. But Garnet’s goals almost always were. If Sam was thinking globally, Garnet was acting locally.
So when the 1987 season was over, the fact that we broke even on all the fruit even though an April freeze had killed three-quarters of our cherry crop made us feel grateful and lucky. That patience was a sign of progress. There would be better years ahead.
Garnet’s way allowed Frank to see the value in smaller, more immediate things. Not only with orchard work, but in his writing, Frank began to find pleasure in a well-turned sentence; he began to perceive success in writing a single good review. In the past, his drive and discontent had been so enormous that he’d vowed not to rest until he’d won an Oscar.
Orchard work helped Frank put his worldly ambitions in perspective, a perspective he had lacked in Los Angeles. With time, with sweat, with the revolving wheel of the seasons, came a growing feeling of connectedness—not only to a tradition and to the people who kept it alive, but to natural cycles. There were youth and age here, blended together, each with its strengths and frailties. In the world of plants and animals were life and death, growth and decay. Forgetting himself, Frank began to feel like a creature among creatures, part of the larger scheme of things. At times, even on the hottest days, swinging the scythe for hours on end, Frank lost all sense of time, felt a nameless joy merely in being alive in creation. Now that he was no longer begrudging his time, he was, just possibly, taking a long cool drink from the timeless waters of eternity.
Thomas Hosmer Price, Frank’s second cousin, is one of two pediatricians in Starkville, Mississippi, a town of a little over fifteen thousand residents when Mississippi State University is out of session. As a forty-seven-year-old, Ivy League—trained doctor who earns $70,000 a year, Tom has made a choice that parallels Garnet’s, Sam’s, and our own. In exchange for higher personal return, he has opted to stay at the lower end of the pay scale for physicians—far lower, given the fact that the average American doctor earns over twice that annually. Tom’s choice precludes many of the amenities that often cushion the lives of doctors: the vacation cruises, the luxury cars, and the country club memberships.
Turning down—or not pursuing—more lucrative job prospects in other parts of the country, Tom Price has chosen to remain in his native Mississippi to do the work he values most. As a result, he is able to take only a one-week vacation each year, when he and his family invariably visit his mother, who is our neighbor and cousin, Virginia Price. The rest of the year, if Tom isn’t at work, more than likely he’s on call. In his east-central Mississippi county, which is heavily populated with impoverished blacks, Tom is the only pediatrician who will accept Medicaid patients, for which he’s paid eighteen dollars per visit.
Tom is a short, muscular man who lives with his wife, Sondra Upton Price, and their two children, Rachel and Thomas Hale, in a modified A-frame near the edge of town. On the evening we arrived, we sat with Tom and Sondra beneath a high ceiling latticed with unfinished cypress beams, the kind of cypress, Tom told us, that grows in swamps and is immune to termites.
Tom’s life changed forever during the 1960s civil rights movement in Mississippi. That era, along with his own lifelong exposure to racial inequality, gave him the sense of mission that defines his professional life today. With his sister and two brothers, Tom grew up in Meridian, less than a hundred miles south of Starkville. Tom was working at a hardware store in Meridian in the summer of 1964 when three civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town between Meridian and Starkville. A good friend, he learned later, was on a crew resurveying a dam as part of an effort to conceal the bodies. At the time, Tom said, he was a Goldwater Republican, well aware that his father’s ancestors had fought for the Confederacy in what Daddy Price used to call “the War Between the States.” Though his mother had hosted meetings of civil rights workers in her home, received threatening phone calls, and had crosses burned in the yard, Tom had not been actively involved in the movement.
But with the advent of what he called “the civil war” in Mississippi, he began to ask himself what he, one man, could do to make conditions better. Tom’s father, who died in 1962, had been a physician. Enrolled as an undergraduate at the prestigious University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, Tom decided that he, too, could make a difference in that profession. When he learned about the appalling infant mortality rate in Mississippi—at the time the highest in the nation—he found his mission: helping to reduce it.
“My favorite verse in the Bible,” he told us, “is, ‘As you do unto the least of these, so you do unto me.’ There’s no ‘leaster’ you can get than being a black teenage girl pregnant in Mississippi.” As Tom recounted the trajectory of his life and the emergence of his thinking, we realized that we too had always identified and empathized with the disadvantaged: minorities, outsiders, newcomers, immigrants, victims, even the underdogs in ball games. But Tom was putting that perspective into hands-on work.
It was not hard to see that Tom’s empathy had in part been born of personal experience. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was Tom—a white Mississippian at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School—who was “the least of these.” “One reason I came back to Mississippi,” he said, “was the prejudice against me up north. At a party someone would say, ‘Where are you from?’ If you said ‘Mississippi,’ they’d literally turn and walk off.”
Though many were brave and some paid with their lives, it had always been striking to hear Virginia Price’s view of white northern civil rights activists who came to Mississippi. Hers was a story not told by Hollywood, in whose scenarios white northern activists are the unqualified heroes, spurring reluctant blacks to action. Native whites, almost without exception, are one-dimensional and racially venomous. Virginia’s account presented a more complex picture. The white northerners who came to two meetings in her home, she told us, were suspicious of local whites and not interested in learning the culture or in doing the spadework necessary to work cooperatively for change. They tended to lump together all white southerners in a monolithically racist society to which they were morally superior. Southern whites like Virginia who endorsed racial progress, who knew blacks intimately from years of daily interaction, she said, were simply ignored.
Though it now has more elected black officials than any other state, and though the sheriff often associated with the three Philadelphia murders is now working for a black man, Mississippi continues to evoke simplistic images and painful derision. At dinner one evening, Tom joked about a recent poll of business executives in which Mississippi was rated as America’s least desirable place to live.
“So let’s move,” chimed in teenaged Rachel. “I can pack in a day!”
Sondra, also a Meridian native, could only grimace. When she was a newlywed she had wanted to live somewhere else, but she has long since resigned herself to her husband’s commitment.
For us, knowing his mother’s version of history, Tom’s story about being rejected up north simply because he was a white man from Mississippi conveyed the ultimate irony. In 1972, right out of medical school, Tom had gone to work in a clinic in Jackson, working almost entirely with black children. Since 1977 he’s been in Starkville. Where now, we wondered, were those morally superior white northerners, those who preached racial equality and would have nothing to do with white natives?
To get to Toms office, 1.8 miles from his home, you cross the main drag—Dr. Martin Luther King Drive—and skirt the edge of town, driving through pine woods and past a brick low-income housing project where black kids play in the streets. Sondra, who works with Tom as a nurse, described the Starkville Children’s Clinic as “children-friendly.” As if to illustrate the point, a young Thomas Hale immediately clambered up to the top of a large wood playhouse and, letting out a yelp, swung clear to the floor like a monkey. “Patients,” noted Sondra dryly, “are not allowed to do that.”
In addition to the standard features, to sunny colors and prominently displayed antismoking literature, the office has two waiting rooms, one for sick and one for well children. It was not hard to visualize the broad strokes of Tom’s and Sondra’s workdays or to hear the cries of impatient children as Tom and Sondra went about their tasks in the smaller rooms down the hall. For privacy, Dr. Tom—who wears a trademark bow tie because it can’t be yanked by juvenile patients—retreats to his personal office with its framed diplomas and studio portraits of Rachel and Thomas Hale.
Directly across from the office is the one hospital in the county, where Tom makes regular rounds, doing emergency work and often putting in long hours, sometimes for little or no pay.
We piled into the elevator and rode to the upper-floor nursery, where Rachel and Thomas Hale pressed their heads against a glass panel. Behind it were tagged newborns in bassinets, black and white, some asleep and some awake, none of them much larger than the football Tom used to cradle in his hands as the center of the Meridian High School football team.
Since Tom first decided to become a pediatrician, the infant mortality rate in Mississippi has dropped significantly. It is now “better than a few other states,” he observed happily. And then he sobered. “But I’d like to get it down a lot more.”
Not that he’s doing the job by himself—not by a long shot. But as future statistics are gathered from Starkville, Tom and Sondra Price will be a major force behind them.
The British writer and social reformer John Ruskin once wrote, “In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.”
In looking at our own work lives, we knew that we were fulfilling the first and last of Ruskin’s three conditions—we were fit for our work and enjoying a modicum of success in it. But, like Tom Price, we were painfully aware that we fell dangerously short on the second condition: we continued doing too much work. And yet, as we settled into the orchard, listened to its seasons, learned its lessons, as we zeroed in on the work we most wanted to do, we understood that the time had come to modify the conditions surrounding our work, to become, if not less ambitious, at least less consumed with work.
It was little comfort that our workaholic condition was shared by millions of Americans and was, in fact, a hallmark of the “singular generation” that Wanda had identified in her first book. Indeed, many of our peers had paid a far greater price for overwork than had we. For although overwork was denying our lives of fullness, it had not affected our health or torn at our commitment to each other.
Our L.A. friend Michael Levine had suffered more deeply than we. He believes that workaholism cost him his five-year marriage. The New Jersey native and his wife were partners in crime. Both would come home from twelve-hour work days, “put something in the microwave, fall into bed, turn the television on, and each read our trade papers. We wouldn’t talk to each other. The TV’s going in the background—the blue glow, you know? And we’re dying.” Eventually the glue that held them together had dried up.
Dr. David Shi, chairman of the History Department at North Carolina’s Davidson College and author of two books on simple living, said that “this sense of being in a rat race, of being out of control of time,” is the central concern of many who attend his lectures on the topic. “I hear a lot, frequently from lawyers who raise their hands and say, ‘I know I lead a harried and too complex life, and I know that I’m not doing justice to my family responsibilities, but I work in an environment where I cannot voluntarily choose to decelerate. The whole ethos of my firm is bring in more hours, more clients.’ They realize they’re caught in a vise. And for them, getting out means leaving that prestigious law firm with its six-figure salary and perhaps hanging out a shingle—taking the risk of being a general lawyer in a small town, with a much more modest income.”
Such a leap of faith would bring the side effects of slashing one’s work hours and making less money, and it would place one squarely in the simple-living tradition. Wrote Richard J. Foster, Quaker theologian and author of Freedom of Simplicity, “Simplicity takes vigorous exception to both the slothful and the workaholic.”
Optimum efficiency is one way of getting more done in less time. It was a concept cited frequently by those trying to simplify their lives.
“If I carefully organize my time every school day,” said Farnham Blair, a forty-nine-year-old English teacher at Orono High School in Maine, “and make a tight schedule in advance, I wind up having extra time on my hands. I can then use this time as I please.”
No doubt time management was what we needed, too. But efficiency is a factor difficult to summon with the snap of the fingers for something as elusive as creative inspiration. But we did notice that when we were wearing our writing hats, being productive was almost always a function of feeling fresh and enthusiastic. As recently as five or six years ago, though, no matter what the job, we would grit our teeth and grind it out. We’d rarely take a break until the thing was done. This bulldoggish approach applied as much to peach harvest as to a writing project. Tough it out, the attitude was. No pain, no gain.
Since then we’ve decided to say “no” more often: to turn down tempting free-lance assignments when we’re already at work on something else. We’ve also shortened our work hours while simultaneously focusing on the work we most love. To our surprise, with this new reduced work schedule, we have managed to remain as productive as before—possibly more so. And there have been other intangible rewards.
Half a mile down the mountain from us lives Emma Dawson, Garnet’s aunt. Miss Emma, as everyone calls her, is 109 years old. Still of sound body and mind, she is the oldest person in Carroll County, perhaps in southwestern Virginia. Like Garnet, she is a link to another time, to the Blue Ridge culture before cars, TV sets, and the ubiquitous satellite dishes.
There’s an expression among the mountain people of Miss Emma’s generation, one we’ve heard repeated nostalgically by folks like her youngest child, Everett: when you’re not working, when you’re sitting on the porch in the cool of the evening or visiting neighbors on a Sunday afternoon, you’re “enjoying time.”
For us, given the pressing demands of our work, enjoying time—when not working—has been the hardest trick of all. Learning it just might be one of the keys to that longevity on which Miss Emma has the local patent. Or, if not to longevity, then at least to a life in balance.
Oddly enough, water helped to poke a chink in our work armor. Or, to be more precise, a swimming pool. In nearby Galax, Virginia, Wanda discovered an indoor public pool. Always a sucker for pools, she started swimming, guilty at first for the time away from work and for burning the fossil fuel needed to make the fifty-mile round trip. Frank simply refused to go. Too much lost work time, he growled.
These days Frank is the first to pack his trunks and towel. For six months each year, twice a week, he quits work at four forty-five to drive to Galax for a five-thirty swim with Wanda. Lap swimming has become a ritual, a mental break from work, and—we’ve both discovered—a means of making our work hours fresher.
Not long after we started swimming together, Frank put up a basketball goal on the side of the old barn. In his youth Frank and older brother Ralph had played basketball religiously, but the goal was long gone and so, Frank had told himself, was the childhood license to play.
Most work days now, we take several breaks to shoot hoops. There’s still a residue of guilt: Aren’t we supposed to be working? But we’re overcoming it. Frank shoots with one ball, Wanda with a second. Sometimes the balls clang off the rim and go bounding over the fence and down the hill. We tear after them like kids, lest they roll clear to the foot of the mountain.
Mountain hikes on our property are easier in winter. In the pathless woods we don’t have to worry about briars or snakes. Though we lack Garnet’s knowledge of every topographical quirk in the area, we do have our favorite destinations: an abandoned mountaineer’s cabin halfway up the mountain, an unmarked pioneers’ cemetery at the top of an adjoining cove.
In short, we’ve blown the whistle on ourselves. “Time out,” we’ve declared. Time out to write letters. Time to sit on the porch watching the sun go down, enjoying time. Time to visit with Sam and Miriam at midmorning or linger with the newspaper after lunch. To cook from scratch, to tend our two woodstoves, to make our beds in the mornings and clean our house on Saturdays. The simple sorts of things that unfrazzled people do.
Along with our new attitude has come some new ground rules: Sunday is a day of rest. This was a biggie. It would have been unimaginable in Los Angeles, and when we first arrived at the orchard, at least part of Sunday was always devoted to work. And except on our busiest harvest days, we now quit work the other six days by six-thirty and take time to cook dinner together. At long last Frank has shed the late-into-the-evening macho ethic of one of his former employers, a sort of who-can-work-whom-under-the-table contest.
We readily admit that this new balanced life of ours is still a work in progress. We have not arrived, but we are well under way.
For inspiration we look to those who’ve succeeded at striking a healthy balance in their lives—one of whom, given his executive status at a major sock manufacturing company in Mount Airy, would seem like an unlikely candidate: Robert Merritt.
Robert Merritt makes socks—lots of them. In 1989 the U.S. hosiery industry produced 4.2 billion pairs, and Americans spent nearly $3 billion buying socks. As chairman of Renfro Corporation, which sells exclusively in the United States, Robert certainly did his part. “When Americans woke up this morning,” he told us proudly, “one out of sixteen put on socks made here at Renfro.”
The mind boggles. How to visualize? A huge crowd on the mall in Washington, D.C., one out of sixteen bodies wearing a pair of Robert’s socks. Times Square in New York: one out of sixteen pedestrians wearing a pair of Robert’s socks. It was easier to deal with the man than with his market share. Here Robert was, a trim, five-foot-six, sixty-four-year-old grandfather with a soft voice and a boyish smile, casually dressed in a golfer’s shirt, sitting behind a desk in his office. Behind him, on the pale yellow wall, was his own painting of the deck of a house overlooking the ocean.
Frank’s family has known Robert a long time. After World War II Roberts father and Frank’s father worked closely together as supporters of the United Nations. But it wasn’t until after we moved to Virginia that we got to know Robert and his wife, Cama Clarkson Merritt.
And, trying to develop our own business practices at Levering Orchard, we were interested in what Robert had done to give Renfro its reputation as one of the most profitable and worker-friendly companies in our area.
Not that we were drawing too close a parallel. With 1,600 employees in five plants and gross sales in 1988 of $56 million, we were not exactly in Renfro’s weight class. Still, it was stimulating to talk with a man who, like us, produced a humble product. What could be more basic than a piece of fruit or a pair of socks?
Robert’s attitude toward his work, his sense of humor about both making socks and himself—and his enthusiasm for life outside of Renfro—intrigued us. On the outside, he acknowledged with a grin, “making socks seems about as exciting as signing an alimony check.”
Robert has managed to inject excitement into a calling that he fell into through what he calls “classic nepotism” and in which he advanced rapidly through the ranks. Since 1955, when he joined the company, he has challenged his ingenuity while benefiting the company as an inventor. One of his inventions, on which the company holds a patent, is “a device for measuring the coefficient of the friction of yarn, which allows you to measure how well lubricated the yarn is, which helps you knit more efficiently,” he said. Likewise, as a manager, Robert has long been an innovator, instituting such pro-employee policies as profit-sharing and flextime and offering health-education programs like a smoking cessation clinic.
“When I came here,” Robert said, “we paid minimum wage, and I wasn’t proud of what we were doing. I saw a lot of long-service employees who retired humpbacked, without much savings to show for their labor.”
Today, two-thirds of Renfro’s employees are women and, along with their male counterparts, they are, Robert says, the only plant workers in Mount Airy—a town teeming with textile and furniture plants—to participate in profit-sharing. Renfro workers share 20 percent of the profits, before taxes, as well as receiving annual bonuses based on a percentage of their salaries.
Good management has meant good business, and Renfro’s market share has grown from 1 percent in 1965 when Robert became president to the over 6 percent market share it now holds. But with his business victories well in hand, what is most striking about Robert today is his responsiveness to his own needs, the balance he has struck between work and other dimensions of his life. “There’s only a limited amount of time and opportunity,” he said. “I don’t ever want to say I wish I’d done something.”
So he does it. Robert has served or is serving on the boards of the local arts council, literacy council, and community college. He is a past president of the Mount Airy Rotary Club. And as a passionate amateur, he has tried his hand in a number of the arts. He photographs local topography and people and faithfully carries his camera when he and Cama travel abroad. He has offered photography courses at the community college, mastered hang gliding, and plays a mean guitar at the sing-along Christmas party the Merritts throw every year. At the community theater, he played an intense Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind and Merlin in Camelot.
We like Robert’s nerve. We like the way he’s always learning, always trying something new at an age when many of his peers are lounging at the country club. We like the way he approaches work and play with zest and confidence and combines the two.
It was not difficult for Frank to remember a time when movies seemed to hold the key to his happiness. It was all larger than life: the big screen, the big city, the big success. In that vision of work that was supremely important, apples, socks, and small writing achievements held little rank. But no more.
“I’m never satisfied,” Robert told us the day we visited his plant. “I don’t think we’ll ever arrive at where we want to be but the trip is a lot of fun.”
For our work, too, those seemed like words to steer by.