I grew up in a place—postwar Brooklyn—where I learned early that work was what you did to “make a living,” and by “you” I mean men, and by “living” I mean enough to feed, house, and clothe a wife and children and transport them to an upstate bungalow for the month of August while you stayed in the thick-aired city, making a living. Work was not redemptive, nor, pace Freud, as important as love; nor was it something you talked about except to complain, but never too loudly. It was work.

I learned more when, as a teenager, I began to help out on weekends and around holidays in one of the prepared-food stores that my father had started with a couple of ex-GI partners. My job was to quarter raw and roasted chickens, to weigh out a half-pound of potato salad and then throw my hands in the air as in a holdup so customers could see I wasn’t thumbing the scale, and to make change at the register by counting backwards and out loud so no one took advantage of me. When I was strong enough, I began to work “in the back,” hauling dripping crates of ice-packed meat and poultry from delivery trucks to the walk-in cooler, stripping yellow-skinned raw chickens of their hearts, kidneys, gizzards, and fat pads, which customers generally didn’t want to see turn up on their dining room tables, and taking phone orders and filling them for pickup.

There was a three-man crew at each store—Sam, Moe, and Blackie were my companions—and every morning before opening up they got to their knees on the floor behind the serving counter and pressed down layers of broken-down cardboard boxes, making a carpet on which they’d be standing for the next 10 hours. Stay on the boxes, they warned me solemnly, and you’ll never get bad feet like us. All day, while we served up chicken, carrot stew, coleslaw, and other deli items, they nodded at customers’ stories and laughed at customers’ jokes. I watched them stand on the sidewalk during cigarette breaks, sometimes turning their heads to follow a woman’s progress along Kingston Avenue, sometimes just looking around. And each of them visited the walk-in cooler regularly, where a bottle of brandy and plastic cups were on a shelf at the back. You could clock the workday by the amount of liquor remaining in the bottle. And at closing time, my father, who worked in the business’s warehouse and kitchen, would arrive, count the cash against the register record, and drop the day’s take into a paper bag for bank deposit. And he’d leave the register drawer open with a 20, a 10, and a five inside, hoping that if someone was dumb enough to break in during the night in spite of the Police Athletic League donor sticker on the door and the insurance paid to the Mob (no door sticker), the guy might just be happy to grab the cash and run without making a mess. And meanwhile, Sam, Moe, Blackie, and I mopped the floors and carried and rolled the day’s trash—including the flattened and stained cardboard flooring—out the back door to the alley, where the flies were waiting.

I escaped, of course. my father—a good dancer who once wanted to be a Broadway hoofer—was simply earning a living. He never saw “the business” as a legacy. It was a tool. His children, if they could manage it, would do work that gave them pleasure. And we managed it.

In the context of work generally, it’s a rare thing, even today, to be happy at work, and no book I know illustrates this more powerfully than Studs Terkel’s Working (1972), a set of oral history interviews Terkel did with 135 men and women who worked for a living between 1920 and 1970. “This book,” he writes, “being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.” Though his storytellers range widely—prostitutes and policemen; farmers and cab drivers—their testimonies are alike in their poignancy. “You force me to look back and see what a wasted life I’ve had,” a New York businessman jokes with Terkel. “I’m 30 years old and sometimes I feel 50,” a janitor confesses. “Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit,” concludes a corporate editor. Only about a dozen of Terkel’s subjects had found work large enough, among them a nun (“My idea of a calling [is] what I’m doing right now”), a jazz musician, a librarian, and a grave digger who believed that what he did was service and art. Shovel in hand, he regularly stood by at strangers’ funerals for which he had dug the graves, and he always carried sunglasses, in case he felt like weeping.

Our story of student encounters with large jobs begins here.