The old man had long ago given up fixing shoes and gone into another line of
work, buying and selling and making a nice living. But he never found any
other work that gave him as much satisfaction as putting new leather soles
on a pair of uppers. Or putting a pair of Cat's Paw heels on shoes that
still had a lot of wear left, and doing it neatly, surely, carefully - to
last.
He loved the feel and aroma of new leather, the grain in the old. He was
seldom as happy as when he could hold a pair of weathered shoes in his
hands, turn them over and over, feel the tread, admire the workmanship, and
sometimes even name the local shoemaker who'd done it.
He might not have used an elevated, latinate word like Labor for his work,
but he knew it required patience, craft, concentration and something else.
An ineffable quality. Call it self-respect, and a respect for the work.
His boys could remember those rare occasions when the old man lost his
temper. Once he threw a poorly repaired pair of shoes against a wall in his
fury. What a sloppy waste of good leather! What a waste of time and the
customer's money!
In his old age, he was unable to contain his contempt when he would drive by
one of those glittery new shoe stores that sold cheap, shiny imports - the
cardboard kind sure to come apart in the first rain.
The old man took poor workmanship as a personal affront. Labor wasn't a
factor of production to him, it was a calling - and a refuge.
The old man wasn't much on theory, but he understood value received, good
will, repeat business, and, above all, the importance of trust between
people - customer and merchant, worker and boss, lender and borrower. To
him, commerce was friendship, trust, something that wore as well as the
shoes he fixed.
All the talk he heard about labor and capital, first from agitators in the
old country, and then as the standard fare of politics in this one, seemed
textbookish to him - not really useful, like a good solid pair of shoes.
He had a more personal concept of how economics worked. He thought of the
economy as a web of personal relationships: with his customers; with the
workers he hired and trained and sometimes had to let go; with the banker he
depended on to get him started in various new ventures; with the landlord
who collected the rent from him; and with his own tenants after he began
buying a piece of property here and there, and building some rent houses.
He liked his houses kept up, the lawns mowed, so they would look
like something. Like a good pair of shoes.
Continued... |