Am I learning yet?

My part time job at 16


When I was a teen, a long, long time ago as they say, ("Hey dad, were there dinasaurs back then?") , my world wasn't all too big. Dad bought 8 acres (3 hectares) when I was 13 and built a house there, a 'gentlemen's farm' as some call it.. This put an indelible stamp on me; more on that another time. But it was in the country, past the suburbs of 1953. My days were mostly filled with full time school, part time work in the summer, and chores at home. With 4 horses, 150 chickens, 4 heifers, 2 geese and 1 turkey there was more than enough to do, plus a vegetable garden of about 1/2 acre and a lawn twice or more that size. My brothers were too young to help much, so I always stayed busy. And at age 18, I had 2 jeeps and snowplows to keep me busy in the winter and (help) pay for tuition. Dad wanted to get me started in business....

Other than riding around with a friend in his car on the weekends (mine wasn't all that much fun) or going fishing or hunting, my days were taken up with the above. I dated very little, and never having had a sister, girls were always a mystery to me. I didn't even know how to talk to them. All I know is that, while girls were very attractive, they were not a part of my regular life. But then, it wasn't exactly a sexually open climate that I lived in, either. Quite the opposite, really... The only 'sex education' I got was from sneaking a look at Playboy when I could. Oh yeah, and the one time my dad tried to talk to my younger brothers about birds and bees in the orchard. What a laugh...

A lot of things hadn't been 'invented' then, let alone things that are aimed at kids, and so it was mainly an adult's world, and living outside the city limited my social contacts to mainly church and school, and I had to get home from school to do the chores, so I seldom took part in school activities or hung around.

That sounds strange to me today, as I still have two kids at home, 12 and 17. What a different world! But then not only the times are different, but also the place.

It was with this background that I met my future wife. My friend had set me up with a 'blind date' and we 'doubled' that first time or two. That first date was awkward, and we just rode around mainly. But I felt comfortable with this girl, and she was pretty, plus my folks approved of her as well. She was, after all, the same religion and background. It just kind of felt familiar and natural. Mind you, this was the first girl I had had more than 2 actual dates with. And I could count the earlier girls on the fingers of one hand. Easily.

I went into the Army Reserves active duty for 6 months at that point; when I got back at age 20, many of my friends were getting married, so this began to influence my world again. As the months went by, more of them married and I could feel a kind of nudge to do the same. I had been dating this girl for some 18 months by this time. And we did marry the following year when I was almost 22.

Such was my preparation for marriage, and such was my knowledge of the world as preparation for adulthood.

Good old days? Maybe. But I was hardly prepared for life and marriage. Looking back, I would say that I knew plenty about my church and beliefs, and a limited social circle, and some academic things perhaps, but little about reality and the world.

After all, 'believe and do as we say' was all that was necessary, plus some hard work.

Was it?