Yesterday on Grafton Common

Yesterday I walked up to the Common from my house (about a 10-minute walk) after it stopped snowing. I bought Christmas presents -- a scarf and some earrings at Peggy's Place -- and a couple other goodies at the Grafton Country Store. The Country Store also houses Latte A'More and I would have stopped for a cup of tea, but I wanted to get back to watch the Patriot's game (they won and clinched the AFC East title - woo hoo!).

5:02:57 PM      trackback [] 

Harvard Works Because We Do

This morning’s Boston Globe has an article about Harvard Works Because We Do, which is a book of photographs and interviews with the people who do menial jobs like dishwasher and janitor at Harvard University. The author, Greg Halpern, is a former student and was one of the leaders of the Living Wage Campaign, “a three-year drive culminating in a three-week sit-in to win higher pay for Harvard laborers.” Halpern was also recently on NPR’s The Connection and you can see some of his photographs there.

Some of what Halpern described sounded familiar. Like him, I went to a fairly wealthy college – Smith – maintained by a staff of low-paid workers. I don’t remember anyone being particularly mean to the staff; more likely as Halpern notes they tended to be invisible to most students. I won’t say I was “a friend of the worker” or anything, but I related to them well enough. I held similar types of jobs when I wasn’t in school, and during the school year as a financial aid student I washed dishes a few times a week in the dining room.

I do remember feeling resentful that in the summer while some other Smith students had internships or went to Europe, I stayed at home working at the only jobs I could get. One summer I cleaned toilets as a chambermaid at a dumpy motel. That was the worst. Another summer I worked the snack bar at the local country club, scooping ice cream and making hot dogs for the kids at the pool, then cleaning up the greasy grill gunk. The best summer job I had was at a decent family restaurant where I waited tables for two summers. That last summer after I graduated stretched into the fall when the summertime waitresses went back to school and the “lifers” came back, until I got a corporate job in December.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But I guess it strikes me that maybe the reason we have an administration hell-bent on putting more money into the pockets of people for whom it’s just a drop in the bucket of their wealth is that many of these privileged politicians just have never really seen the people on the bottom.

12.11.03 Update: See The Onion report, Poor People Pretty Much F*#&ed [they spell it out, but this is a family weblog ;-)  ]

8:55:05 AM      trackback []