Jobs # 4 (Jerusalem Stone)

I kept moving. My senior year of high school was approaching. The high school I went to really wanted to kick me out after my dismal junior year. I performed so poorly in my Chemistry class that I had to attend summer school. Fortunately, I had a few friends who shared the same fate. We did our best.

That summer, I reconnected with an old friend with whom I used to play soccer when I was very young. This soccer team that we all endured as eight-year-olds was the basis for many relationships after the fact. Whether we liked it or not. He also played music with my friends and was generally a very lovely person.

So we met again as teenagers, after being apart for years. High School actually connected me to many of these people, including one of my best friends, whom I didn’t see between 1993 and 1999.

He offered me and my very good friend, P, a job at his father’s stone mason business. We worked all Summer, hauling gigantic countertops out to the suburbs, catching slabs when they were being cut, and generally just smoking cigarettes and not caring. We also remodeled a house along Gillham just for the sake of it. I look back now as a person who does physical labor regularly and I’m shocked at the amount we did to “have a job.” Smoking beedis, drinking Zima, and listening to the Violent Femmes.

P was a very important person in my life. He’s no longer with us. This is one of many things that he and I did together. I wouldn’t have done it without him, and I had the best time imaginable. Follow your feelings. It can work. Follow your heart.