Chapter 2:
My second job.
One day when I was at the small grocery where I picked up my papers, and spent a lot of my money. I was approached my the manager of the store and she asked me if I wanted a job. She said that she new I was dependable because I had been picking up my newspapers in front of her store for a couple of years. The job would be stocking and carrying out and cleaning. I would get $1.15 per hour. I couldn’t wait for my parents to get home from work to ask them if it would be alright.
I was busting at the seams when my mother arrived home. I couldn’t wait I ran out to her car to tell her the news. She told me as she had said many times over, wait till your father gets home. Now with my father you just don’t go running up to him and start in, you have to wait for the right time usually after supper. I couldn’t wait much longer to tell him so at supper I did. He told me that I had been fairly responsible with the paper route and that he thought it would be okay. There were a couple of things that he expected from me though. One, was that I could not work if I could not do my home work. Two, was that I must start a savings account and put some of my pay away each week. Three, I needed to start helping by paying my way now that I was a working man, so $5.00 each month to them for room and board. I found the last one the hardest to want to do. I really wasn’t making that much money!
By working at the store I had found that I got an employee discount. Not much but still a perk. Made it easier for buying Dr. Pepper and Three Musketeers bars. Then one day the son of the owner gave me an idea. I should buy a box of candy bars it would be cheaper. Then I really got an idea, I would buy a box of candy bars and take them to school and sell them to the other kids out of my locker. It worked! I sold the whole box in two days. I sold each candy bar for the regular price that they had at the store. I kept this up for a while then I started selling the most popular, gum. Back in those days there was no age limit on how old you had to be to buy cigarettes. So that was the next thing for me. Buy now I was doing pretty good. I covered the $5.00 that I had to pay to my folks with the extra money I was getting. So now I was drinking soft drinks, eating candy, and now smoking cigarettes. It seamed the more money I was making the more I was spending.
Later in my life I learned that often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
