because I needed a job…
This is another in our series on decisions that have changed our lives. For previous installments, see here, here, here and here.
A decision that changed my life? For one, ‘twas the decision to apply for a job as a canvasser at the Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG) in 1976.
After graduating from college at Wesleyan in Connecticut in ‘72, then busking in Paris followed by music-ing and learning how to be a hippie in Chapel Hill, my girlfriend split with me and I returned to the Nutmeg State in ‘76. My new girlfriend and I, and a couple I'd befriended during college, got permission from Wesleyan to open a restaurant in the lounge of a dormitory. The endeavor didn't last long; too much work, especially since there wasn't a kitchen available so we had to cook at home then schlep what we prepped to the campus.
Because I needed a job and heard that CCAG, based in Hartford, was hiring folks to go door-to-door all over the state to raise money and further the cause, I applied and got the gig. It wasn't my first job in sales: a year before I'd worked part-time for a few months making phone pitches for an investment firm—the last thing this skeptic re: capitalism wanted to do, but I was out of money.
I learned that I was not too shabby at sales, which gave me the confidence to try canvassing. Plus, I was so impressed by CCAG's progressive efforts around the state that I was proud to solicit help for the org.
Before I knew it, this introvert had learned how to be a fake extrovert. I discovered that, when someone responded to my knock on the door, if I looked them in the eye, smiled and made my pitch, it often had good results. I became one of the group’s most successful canvassers, then applied for and received a promotion to a community organizer position. I got to make good trouble and play songs of peace and justice at rallies.
Then another before-I-knew-it happened. Years before, in part because my dad was an attorney, I'd considered law as a career. But then, when I moved leftward from liberalism in college due in no small part to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, I concluded law was a tool of the establishment. However, via my canvassing-then-organizing CCAG work, I began to meet and learn of attorneys doing fine progressive work.
By then I was five years out of college. “Noble” attorneys began to appear in my headlights. The notion of putting myself on a path of lawyering for good causes crept into my brain. Then, four years into the canvassing/organizing schtick, I learned of my dad's colon cancer diagnosis back in NC. A scenario involving tooling myself with a joint law/planning degree at UNC crystallized.
I’d “mediocre-ized” the law school admission test fresh out of college with my mind minimally considering the lawyering scenario. This time I worked hard prepping for the LSAT and achieved a score that got me into UNC law school, and I succeeded in getting UNC’s City & Regional Planning program to also accept me. I returned to North Carolina and plunged into the joint degree program.
Early on I lost my dad to his illness, but I persevered and, in ‘85 at the age of 35, the four-year joint degree came my way. Forty years later I’ve glidepathed out of a career working at reining in polluters and returned to music.
Do I have a right to complain? Absolutely not.