As we prepare to celebrate Fathers Day (yep, I’m a Dad), I
was reminded of some conversations I had with my father prior to my graduation
from high school. The things that
particularly come to mind are not the things that he told me, but the things
that he did not tell me.
My dad never went to college. He doesn’t event have a technical school
degree. He grew up on a farm and later
worked for a railroad on freight trains.
He made a respectable living doing this, and I would even say he made
far more money working for the railroad than I ever did working as a
reporter.
Even though he made a comfortable living, he always used to
say to me (usually while getting dressed for work on a freight train in the
middle of December in Minnesota) “Don’t
ever do what I do for a living. Get
yourself a desk job, working indoors somewhere.” That stuck with me, and even though I did
some farm work of my own while growing up, I have had a “desk job” ever since
leaving high school.
My dad never really had a conversation with me about
college, or saving for college, or trying to get scholarships for college. That’s probably due to the fact that I had
horrible grades in high school. It’s not
that I wasn’t smart enough to get good grades.
I just didn’t care, didn’t try, and didn’t understand how important they
were at the time. As a result, my father
never tried to steer me toward college, other than to say “If you don’t go to
some kind of school and learn how to work at a good job, you’ll wind up digging
ditches for a living.”
His dad dug ditches for a living, and I don’t ever remember
my grandfather complaining about money.
However, he also didn’t appear to be overjoyed with his job digging ditches
or plowing county roads in the winter.
My grandfather, like my dad, also never went to college.
After working in the job market for more than two decades, I
slowly began to realize how important “going to a good school” was in getting a
job and in using that education to do the job well. I can’t blame my father for not telling me to
do things that he himself never did. In
his own way, he tried to give me good advice, and it was good advice: “Go to a good school, don’t do what I do for
a living and learn how to do a good job.”
I wish he would have also said “Save your money for college;
get not just good grades, but GREAT grades in high school; study hard and take
your SAT; apply for every scholarship you can find; and get yourself a college
education.”
Sadly, I probably would not have listened. I wasn’t mature enough to understand what
exactly he was trying to tell me. Now
that I have sons of my own, I find myself telling my oldest many of the same
things my dad had told me: “Study hard,
don’t do what I did, you’ll wind up digging ditches for a living.”
However, I have wised up a bit. I also tell him to save his money, apply for
scholarships and to study for his SAT and ACT.
I tell him about CLEP exams, the benefits of distance learning, and
the many resources that are available online to help him find student aid…the
type of things that I wish my dad could have told me.