TERRY MOSHER
I can’t believe that today it’s cloudy with a cool breeze waffling through the trees. That’s a big change from the blistering hot and unusual weather we have been having.
Change is what I want to talk about today. Mary and I were talking last night about the incredible story of her mother who through sheer will and determination and belief single-handily lifted herself up from poverty to become a wealthy landowner in Longview, WA. She did it by overcoming long odds and important people in the community who insisted that she couldn’t possibly do it.
That got me to talking about myself. I don’t want to sound like a braggart, but I think I’m fairly intelligent, yet I have not accomplished as much as I should considering that. And I think there is a reason for that.
The Mosher Way is steeped in a hard work ethic. It likely started with my paternal grandparents. They were Germans who believed in work, work and more work, and little talk. My grandfather and grandmother were farmers who like most farmers back in the 1920s to 1950s had to survive the Great Depression and did it by working the find dirt of this Earth over and over again and running dairy cattle on their large acreage outside the small New York village of Allegany on what was called the Five Mile.
My father and his two brothers worked alongside their dad while their mom took care of the house and the cooking. My picture of my grandmother is of a large, stout woman with an apron wrapped around her while she baked pies and cooked large portions of chicken and beef for, not dinner, but lunch.
Meanwhile, my grandfather was up early working the farm, the land, and coming in to the house only to eat and sleep sometime after darkness and quiet fell over the farm.
In all the years I knew my grandfather, I never heard him say more than a couple words. If talk got you money, and more talk got you more money, my grandfather would never have had any money.
It was work that was valuable to him. If he couldn’t work, he was lost. That tradition of work carried over to his sons, especially my father. My father only stopped work long enough to eat and sleep, just like his dad. Entertainment to my dad was working.
That farm work and that German DNA produced a large and powerful man in my dad. He was six-foot three and a trim 230 pounds in his middle age. His hands were the biggest I have ever seen, and his natural strength was unbelievable. I’m sure he didn’t know his own strength. He just assumed everybody could lift a car motor out of a car; it was no big deal.
That combination of little talk, hard work and strength and power and no complaining (my father in his later years discovered that somewhere along the line he had broken his pelvis bone, which forced him to walk with a little limp, but he doesn’t know how or when he did it, and didn’t seem to care to find out) has moved on to his sons.
Of my father’s four sons, I’m probably the most talkative, but if you ask my immediate family they will tell you I don’t talk much. And they are right. I’m more of a listener. However, I do talk pretty well when I have a keyboard and computer screen in front of me as I do now.
But the point of all this is during the conversation Mary and I had last night it suddenly dawned on me that the reason I have not had more success is because of the Mosher Way I just described. I’ve been working since I was eight when I worked on a farm and I’m still working, if you consider writing work, which I really don’t.
I have had no expectations of myself other than just to report to work each day (I never have missed a day’s work in my life, and my dad never missed a day in his 38 years working for Mobil Oil) and do the best job I can do. I have never plotted a work-plan with a time frame that would set an upward climb of a job ladder. I just have always concentrated on today and left tomorrow to chance.
As we talked last night, I told Mary I felt like a failure because I had never looked to the future and said this is where I want to be. I just didn’t plan things. If I had, I told her, I likely would be retired by now and living in the south of France, enjoying the beach and all that goes with that life.
Instead, I became a grinder. You could depend on me – I’m a very loyal person – to be there, be there early, and be productive, and while others around me got promoted to better positions I just kept my head down and kept on grinding away.
So today I’m upset with myself that I didn’t promote myself more, that I didn’t have a plan of action that would move me up that ladder of success. But I couldn’t force myself to be more than what I was – a Mosher doing it the Mosher way. Work hard and get things done no matter how long it takes, and then report to work the next day and do it again.
Anyway, I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t reach the potential that was in me, and that I didn’t use the intelligence that God gave me to make things better around me and for myself.
Mary says it’s not too late. But I don’t know. I’m 107 now and the curtain is being drawn on my life. Can I get up and stop the curtain from closing? Maybe. Maybe not.
What makes me even more disappointing about myself is the raft of presidential candidates who mostly are village idiots and I think if they can run certainly I could too because I may have not lived up to my expectations but I’m no village idiot.
That’s enough for today. I’ve talked about myself too much.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day
You are loved.