The Business Card
A temporary job can pay the bills for a year. Sometimes it introduces itself as the rest of your life.
The business card probably stayed on my desk longer than it should have. My friend left it behind after stopping in for coffee one day, and every time I reached for a pencil I found myself picking it up instead. It was thick paper with sharp black lettering, the sort of card people hand you after they’ve spent enough years becoming exactly what the card says they are.
Business cards have always made me uneasy. They pretend a life can be folded into a name, a telephone number, or, more recently, an email address, and one tidy occupation. Newspaper people carried them everywhere, and I was no different. Mine said Columnist, although there were weeks when I spent more time leaning against courthouse walls, wandering grocery stores looking for somebody with a story, or sitting in diners waiting for something worth writing down than I spent behind a keyboard.
His card named the work he’d done for almost thirty years. He’d become respected at it without ever intending to. Younger people entered the profession because they’d heard of him, and people with difficult problems always seemed to find their way to his office. Looking at that little rectangle of paper, nobody would have guessed it described the wrong life.
The odd thing about wrong lives is that they rarely look wrong from the outside. His career started close enough to the work he really wanted that the distinction barely mattered at first. The temporary job paid the rent, offered benefits, and was in the same general neighborhood, metaphorically speaking, as the destination he had in mind. There never seemed to be any urgency, since tomorrow always seemed willing to wait another week.
I’ve noticed that temporary things are remarkably patient. They never announce that they’ve become permanent. They just stay put where they are until everybody, including the fellow living inside them, forgets there was ever supposed to be a different plan.
Newspapers were full of people who drifted into assignments they never expected to keep. One reporter covered City Hall because someone retired unexpectedly, and they needed a person to fill in. Another edited copy until a replacement could be found. A photographer took a temporary desk job after injuring his shoulder, and years later everybody in the building thought of him as an editor who happened to know his way around cameras. Nobody planned those careers. They happened one ordinary workday at a time.
People have a habit of trusting the familiar. Employers look at a résumé and see the title at the top before they see the person underneath it. Recruiters search for experience that makes them think of yesterday, because yesterday feels safer than possibility. Every year spent doing one thing narrows the number of people willing to imagine you doing anything else.
My friend built a good life. There was a family, a home, vacations whenever the budget allowed, and enough security that unexpected car repairs never turned into household emergencies. Plenty of people would have traded places with him without a second thought. Even so, there are disappointments that never grow large enough to ruin a life, but never grow small enough to disappear.
There used to be a hardware store downtown with an entire aisle devoted to fishing tackle. The owner’s dream was to own a sporting goods store. He eventually stopped selling rods and reels because the demand dried up, and shelves filled with plumbing supplies took their place. Years afterward, three brass hooks still clung to the wall with pale circles in the paint where fiberglass rods had rubbed against them through countless summers. Customers walked past those hooks every day without so much as a glance.
Hardware stores have always suited bears. They smell like cut lumber, machine oil, and cardboard, and nobody thinks twice if a bear spends several minutes studying bins full of loose bolts before deciding he doesn’t need any of them after all. Children sometimes notice me standing there, then wander off toward the birdseed without appearing especially surprised.
After I cleared the coffee cups, I picked up that forgotten business card one more time before putting it away. It slipped into the old pencil cup that’s followed me from newsroom to newsroom for longer than I care to admit. It disappeared between two pencils worn down to stubs, and only the tops of the erasers remained above the rim.
