Not Worth The Water...

Again Tuesday I managed to devote another 16-hour session to making corrections in the Glog manuscript. Now, I’m just waiting for the cover art before ordering printer proofs. I’ve worked on this book, off and on, for close to 20 years and now, all of a sudden, I’m anxious, jumping around with ants in my pants to see it finally in print.

So much for Glog …

One of my daughters lost her job.

Last night I got to remembering how painful it was when I’ve been fired from various jobs. I recall one supervisor saying, “Cowart, you’re not worth the water it would take to flush you down”.

I remember how scared I’ve been at losing a job. How would I pay the rent? How am I going to feed the kids? Why did this happen? I thought I was doing a good job and now, look what happened.

I remember the anguish at having to go home and tell Ginny that I’d been fired. I remember how ashamed I was to tell anybody and how I’d try to hide the fact that I was unemployed.

I remember the despair and the loneliness and the feeling of rejection and worthlessness and uselessness and hopelessness.

I remember the degredation of standing for hours in Food Stamp lines, of living in HUD housing, of taking sick kids to the packed emergency room of a chariety hospital.

I remember being so mad at God that this would happen to me. I raged instead of prayed. And even knowing that He Himself was “despised and rejected of men” didn’t comfort me one bit.

I remember five of the kids all coming home from school happy and bouncing and excited about their school photos, each in a packet costing about $40 and I remember not having money to buy anything but a single wallet-sized photo of each kid and they thought I would not buy their photos because I didn’t like them.

Damn!

I remember thinking about suicide so Ginny and the kids would at least have my insurance money; I felt I'd be worth so much more dead than alive.

But I remember something else too.

I’d worked for the local mosquito control board for over ten years and one of my duties was to grow mosquitoes for test purposes. Then I got fired. So here I was, a white male, pushing 40 years old who knows how to grow mosquitoes for a living.

Obviously, I could write my own ticket in the job market.

Not exactly.

I could not find a job doing anything.

So I wrote a magazine article about unemployment.

It sold.

But not for much.

So I wrote an article about coping with poverty …

And for the next 25 years I have been a freelance writer with scads of newspaper and magazine sales to my credit and a couple of paperback books. Never made much money at it. I’m not what anyone would call a successful writer.

But my work has been translated into as many as eleven foreign languages. Some pieces were transcribed into Braille. Several were used as radio show scripts. And readers from all over the world have thanked me for making life a little easier for them.

This year I’m trying to get my own publishing company off the ground, a task for which I feel eminently unqualified!

It's a bit like riding a grocery cart down a ski jump; who know what will happen at the bottom, but the ride is exhilarating to say the least.

And life does go on.

There is hope.

So, Patti, if you read this, I know being fired is a bitch. It hurts. But, Love, it is not the end of the world…. It can be a beginning.

Much Love, Dad