In them old cotton fields of Arizona

In an earlier blog I talked about how long I have worked in this lifetime. It got me to thinking.

Poverty defined my childhood. I cannot remember a time when we were not on welfare or I and my siblings were not wards of the state living in foster homes.

My father and mother were both alcoholics. Dad seemed to have trouble handling responsibility and Mom I think was just a party girl. Nonetheless we lived a pretty hand to mouth existence.

Mom was a high school drop out with limited job skills. Dad, well Dad, let us just say if three strikes had existed during my childhood he would have died in prison.

If I wanted any money to spend I had two choices: steal it or earn it. Stealing it was not a good option I learned very early on. I would sometimes sneak change from my Mom’s purse. Eventually I got caught and learned that thieves are punished.

That lesson came back later when Dad robbed a liquor store and landed in prison for the third time and the longest stretch of his criminal career – 5 to 15 years.

So work was the only real option I believed available to me.

I remember very well my first real job. We actually were “on the lam” with Dad, who was running from the police for writing bad checks.

The family ended up in what then was a small town: Chandler, AZ. It was a rural town with an agricultural backbone, mostly cotton.

At the time, the family lived in a one-room motel room on the outskirts of town. Next to the motel was a cotton field. I’d see people stooped over all day long in the field stuffing cotton in bags. The pay was 3-cents a pound.

I was 9 years old and convinced the foreman to let me pick in the fields. It might have been the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life.

Picking cotton is unforgiving work. It is hard on the back dragging the every growing weight of the bag and your fingers suffer from stinging cuts from the sharp points of the cotton bowls.

Most of the pickers had bags that could carry 100 pounds of cotton. My little bag probably could hold about 15 pounds.

I did it mostly to earn money to go to the movies and buy popcorn. My first day I think I earned about 30-cents. To me that was a lot of money, more than enough for the 10-cent movie ticket price and another dime for popcorn.

Later I did other things to earn money like raking leaves in the fall, mowing lawns in the spring. At one point I had a paper route. Once in high school I worked as a bag boy in a market and later as a janitor’s assistant in my high school.

The point is that I’ve been working for 52 years of my life and really see no retirement in sight or available to me.

I don’t think I am alone.