1988 was something of a crisis year for me. It was the year that things, to a certain extent, fell apart and I found myself a bit directionless and little more than perplexed about what to do next. Since 1983, I had labored under the idea that a life of social work was for me, as it was for my father (who didn't see May of that year) and my sister. Social work was the family business...or so I thought. A year at the BU School of Social Work (dad's alma mater) coupled with a field placement at the Brockton MSPCC brought into bold relief the idea that I was entirely unqualified for social work. A fervent belief in fighting for the uderdog can only get you so far; likewise for a punk's contrarian, anti-establishment philosophy. I had neither the stamina nor the emotional rigor for such a rigorous career. (Yes rigorous: more rigorous than anyone can imagine. Spend a day with a social worker sometime; accompany them on a 51A home investigation and wrestle with the real possiblity that, in order to save what's left of a child's life will require that child be removed from his parents. And after you've made your decision, go home and look in the mirror and tell me what you see.) When you don't enjoy what you do, when the stress bolts you to your chair, it's time to find another line of work.
But the folks at the MSPCC seemed to like me. Some had worked with my father, who was well-known in Boston's allied health circles, and grafted a little too much of him on to me. Still, they felt the loss when I pulled out of the field, and took time from a late afternoon's work to give me a goodbye party.
One case worker I was close to, a Deadhead named Liz, gave me a copy of Terkel's The Great Divide as a going away gift. I've received far too many books as gifts, but of all them, this one was my favorite. The subject, like many of Terkel's books, was the testimony to Americans at work. Terkel, perhaps not the greatest listener our country has produced (Joseph Mitchell deserves that title), was certainly the most emphathetic. And that empathy brought out the dignity of those engaged in the struggle. One of the things that drew me to social work was the part of the job that required you listen to people tell their stories. I like listening to stories, I like listening to people discus their day-to-day existence. How a person lives his life is what makes all the difference, and no one was better at capturing that than Studs Terkel. Reading this book in that crisis year made feel less alone. It also made me realize that drifitng, such as it is, passes, but dignity remains.
I am obsessed with grandfathers of a certain kind: not blood relatives, neccessarily, but men who have gone on before and paved their distinctive way with their distinctive style. Men who led singular lives, men who gave me to understand that a life on one's terms, not only was possible, but mandatory. Orson Welles is one such grandfather; Bob Dylan another; the retired highschool teachers I presently have the pleasure working with represent several other grandfathers. And Studs Terkel represents one of the finest grandfathers of the lot. Confident, passionate, ebullient, affirming, and wonderfully unassuming, Terkel was a punk before Joe Strummer, a crank before Hitchens, the Nightfly before Donald Fagen sat down at the keyboard, and the historian that the mad Joe Gould envisioned, but could never become.
The world is not colder now that Studs has left us. We are all the more warmer for his having lived among us for so long and so well.
