The spring and summer of 1980 are particularly memorable to me. I was just fourteen years old, but had a brand new motorcycle my father had purchased for me over Christmas. It was a beauty! It represented everything that a young man could want: style, speed, class, prestige, respect, and above all, freedom. Well, I had to check in with the parents before I went anywhere, but once I got the okay, they didn’t have to know I took the back roads, and that I took them a little faster than I should have. All these things—style and freedom and such—came with responsibilities. And if I wanted to keep all that, then I’d better live up to them. That, and I needed gas money.
My dad caught wind of an available job. I was to report to Ku-Tips Nursery Saturday morning, 7:30 sharp. It was, in fact, the first job I ever had. Ku-Tips was a greenhouse owned by a man named Willie Kutack. He was Czechoslovakian, which was ironic because my maternal great-grandparents were also Czechoslovakian. They had accents and they all knew each other. Also, the job became available because my uncle had quit the same job only a week earlier. So my new boss had employed my uncle and also personally knew my great-grandparents. Aren’t small towns wonderful?
Willie was a nervous overachiever. He would go nuts when things weren’t happening fast enough. I swear the man could not sit still long enough to go to the bathroom. Driving? Unreal! I am so glad there was no such thing as a cell phone back then! (Remember those days?) He’s the kind that would have tried to drive a stick shift, drink coffee, fiddle with the radio, and have a conversation with you at the same time. A cell phone in the man’s hand would have meant certain death for someone—someone other than Willie, anyhow! He was so fast, however, that if he had been involved in a vehicular accident, he would have simply phased himself into hyperspace and watched it happen in slow motion from the safety of fourth-dimensional space-time. Ironically, he didn’t drink coffee; the caffeine would just slow him down.
Anyway, he showed me the greenhouse, which was clear plastic laminate lying over a rickety two-by-four frame, and wanted me to make a door. Basically, all I had to do was cut out some plastic. Then I was to move the “peh-toonies” (petunias) out to the display. No problem! He handed me the tools and “whooshed” out to another part of the store. I had hardly gotten started when I heard “JOHN! COME HERE!” Being that I was only fifteen minutes on the job, I hustled on over. “Yes sir!” I spouted.
