January 24, 2018

Have I ever mentioned how very much I love my job? In the here and now, my life is so much different, so much better, than I thought it would be, sixteen years ago when, in the aftermath of a triple by-pass, I became a retiree.

Before I had that mild heart attack at the age of forty-eight, I was working in the field of accounting, and I very much enjoyed my work. I enjoyed working with numbers, and although I didn’t have a college degree in the field, I had taken a few college courses in accounting. I’d learned, through my working career, how to handle a computer, and I did a pretty good job of it all, too.

Meanwhile, while I was fortunate to have an office job, where I got to sit in a comfortable chair, and work, for the most part, on my own, my husband worked in the aggregate industry, and for the most part he worked outside.

Driving a huge haul truck with tires taller than he was, that was what he did for just the last few years of his career at the quarry. For most of the thirty-nine and a half years he was employed there, he worked outside, year-round. Early on, he did a lot of shoveling, and a lot of “unjamming” of the crusher.

A crusher is a machine that takes large rocks, the size of your kitchen table, and reduces them to much smaller rocks, of various sizes depending upon the need. A lot of those large boulders ended up gravel. And sometimes, those boulders would get stuck and the crusher could not work. Enter my husband, sledge hammer in hand. Yes, he would stand over the rock jammed in between the jaws of the crusher and hammer away until it was stuck no more.

 Ah, the early days. He used to have very well-defined biceps and triceps.

In the winter time, it wasn’t the crushers that got stuck so much as it was the conveyor belts. Snow and ice would accumulate at the top, by the pulley. In those early years, when that happened, my husband would climb up those hundred-foot-high belts and fix the problem. During those same winter months, when there would be a tear in a belt, he sometimes worked up there, in the snow and the wind and the ice, cutting out the piece of belt that was defective and lacing in a new piece.

One thing I can say about that industry in those days: they never heard about the folly of putting new wine into old bottles.

I share these bits of trivia with you, so you can understand why I always assumed that David would retire early, and I would keep working until I hit 65. In fact, I had no doubts whatsoever that was what would happen.

Imagine my shock when at forty-eight, my “working life” ended. I was worried about no longer bringing in a pay check, although I knew I would be all right for a year, because I had not collected unemployment benefits for a very long time. But that wasn’t my only worry.

What was I going to do with my time? I had a hard recovery from the heart surgery and it took me a very long time to feel good. I tired easily, and I was feeling almost hopeless. I could see—hopefully—decades of life ahead of me. What would I do to pass those years?

And then I began to pursue my dream, and before five full years had passed, my first novel was published. That was in 2007. Yesterday, I submitted my 55th novel.

I love my job. It gives me what I need, which is the ability to go to work in my pajamas; I avoid traffic and difficult co-workers. I get to immerse myself in a fictional world that operates according to the ideals of honesty, kindness, integrity, and decency. The good guys win, and the bad guys lose. And the very, very bad guys are always brought to justice.

All this, and people buy my books, so I even get to bring in a paycheck, too.

And the very best part of all is this amazing job has given me wonderful friends who’ve made my life so much richer than I ever could have imagined it would be.

Who wouldn’t love a job like that?

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury