She had told me that her husband was 90, so Mrs. Bailey had to have been in her 80s then. Unlike her frail husband, Mrs. Bailey was in remarkably good health. She lived down the road from some church friends, and they picked her up for service every Sunday.

 

It was at church where we became friends, and I would start up a conversation with her any chance I got. This small, elderly black woman had lived through the depression, and raised a family of six kids in rural East Texas, and I enjoyed learning about life from her.

 

One brief visit after service was on the subject of gardening, and she asked me if I had a garden at home. I told her that I did, and that it wasn’t much, but we sure did enjoy the home grown tomatoes it produced.

 

She said she also had a garden, and it too wasn’t much, but she had kept the garden for years and couldn’t stand the thought of giving it up. Then Mrs. Bailey asked if I had a way to sharpen a hoe, as hers was dull and her husband couldn’t sharpen it for her anymore.

 

I told her I’d be more than happy to come by with a hand grinder and do her this small favor. I asked her what other tools she had for gardening, and she said that old hoe was about it. I wondered how much work she could get done, especially at her age, with no more than that to work with.

 

Monday evening after work, I detoured a mile or two from my usual route home and turned on the small dead end road that led to her house. Pulling into the driveway on the north side of her home, my view of her garden was obscured by her neat house, the front porch, and the small shed out back. We exchanged greetings on the porch, and then she asked if I would like to see her little garden before going to the shed for that dull hoe.

 

As we rounded the corner of her house, there laid out before me was the most beautifully taken care of garden I had ever seen. The rows were as straight as the lines on a football field, and between each row of photo worthy plants wasn’t even a single blade of grass or a weed of any kind. Nearly a quarter acre in size, it looked like a cover photo of a gardening magazine, all done by an elderly woman barely five feet tall, in remarkably good health, using one well worn tool—itself quite a bit older than the far younger, stronger, and totally humiliated man who had come to sharpen it for her.

 

I shouldn’t have been that surprised because one thing Mrs. Bailey wasn’t scared of was hard work. Her whole life had been hard work, and she and her husband had made a good life of it. She would have been bored, no matter her age, if she was not working. As long as she was breathing, she was going to be doing something, and one thing she found to do was to raise the finest garden in three counties, tools or no tools.

 

I’m a worker, too, if not a gardener. And I’ll bet that if I make it to retirement age, I’ll still be working at something, or any number of somethings, and that’s fine with me. But today my job is running a commercial sign shop, which has grown a bit through the years. I have long since given up trying to do all the work myself. I have to have other productive staff members who help me get the workload out the door every week.

 

Now, it seems to me that in this world there are about five different kinds of people. There are people who design things, people who sell things other people make, those who do the accounting, and then there are the production people who actually get all the work done. (Yes, that’s only four kinds of people. I left out those who, as my dad says, “just aren’t worth killing.”) 

 

When trying to hire someone for the production side of our business, what I have found I need to do is to find people who are truly bored if they aren’t getting something done, and the more they get done the better they like it. Mrs. Bailey was no doubt that kind of person, but even today there are those who like getting in the trenches and making things happen—those who say the magic words, “I need more work to do.” 

 

Yes, I know all of this is simplistic, but the point is, I cannot make a production person out of anyone who isn’t bent that way already. By the time I hire them, they are who they are. My job, and maybe your job, is to find the right “type” of person for the position that needs to be filled, give them enough work to keep them from ever being bored, then treat them well enough to keep them part of our team for as long as possible. If the person I hire ends up being the wrong “type” of worker, I don’t need to waste time trying to re-invent the wheel that just rolled into my shop. 

 

I think Americans should respect work, of all kinds, and those who actually do it. Work isn’t a bad word. Why heck, it may be what keeps some people who amaze us youthful and amazing. People like Mrs. Bailey. If she could do all that with a dull hoe, man, I really should have gone back to see what she did with a sharp one! I didn’t. Widowed now, she has moved away to live with one of her daughters, but not without leaving an example I’ll not soon forget.