Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
Portrait of Monsieur Choquet (c. 1875)

"She remained a puzzlingly successful handful …"

I fear that these final installments of this Fambly series might have become too confessional, though I suppose it might be acceptable to tell all in the interest of fuller disclosure. I wanted to avoid creating one of those silver-plated tin sculptures so often offered as family history. I aspired to include actual history and not simply the mysteries and highest points on the excursion. I might have shown both the best and worst of times and thereby come close to presenting as it actually was, given that we have no clear translation of the manners of living from century to prior century. I assume enough without trying to edit out inevitable dirty laundry.

That said, I eventually became an Entreprenuer. How anyone becomes an Entrepreneur should properly remain a mystery lest the honest employee portion of the economy crumble in enthusiastic disinterest, for few if any of us prefer to do another's bidding, especially professionally. Say whatever you will about service and stewardship, I'd much prefer to serve myself and steward my own interests than prostitute myself for any others. The chief problem seems to be that nobody natively knows how to Entrepreneur and nobody can realistically teach anybody else the finer points of the practice. For me, and many like me, the route to becoming an Entrepreneur first passes through becoming otherwise unemployable, an admitted unthinkable condition to anyone depending upon their employer for their living. As with many things, though, the worst that could possibly happen in imagination tends to come with unanticipated silver linings. Finally forced to work for the one interested employer left standing, it becomes something other than a choice by then. Once anything becomes imperative, one learns requisite skills through sheer necessity.

When I left University, I continued working for the company that had paid for my books and tuition for the prior two years. They made me a supervisor, and, in fairly short order, I wrangled a transfer into a more interesting position, one of liaison between the systems developers and the system’s users. I would continue working for The Best Of All Possible Mutual Life Insurance Companies In The Greater Portland Metropolitan Area, Bar None, or Standard Insurance Company, "The Standard," or STINCO as its more grizzled employees referred to it, for fifteen years, until I'd become a Supervisor of systems developers. By then, I had a corner cubicle and had fallen in love with a coworker, something I certainly knew better than to do. I'd always known the danger of not believing in something because when experiencing yourself engaging in something you deep down don't believe in, things get unbelievably complicated. We managed to keep our secret until after I had exited into a midlife career as a consultant and teacher with a boutique Silicon Valley consulting company, but the secret kept so long cost us both more than we'd bargained for. Enough said about that chapter.

Three years later, that consulting company imploded and I inherited its intellectual property. By then, I had achieved the requisite experience necessary to become an Entrepreneur, by which, of course, I mean I had become hard-core otherwise unemployable. I reinvented myself for the third or fourth time since I'd left the music business behind. I told myself that I was just playing a different-shaped guitar. I'd inherited a decent mailing list and a couple of clients. I picked my way into the field by rewriting all the source material before losing that second love of my life to divorce and terminal misunderstanding. I fancied myself a Brief Consultant and fashioned my practice after Brief Therapists, professionals who treated preconceptions rather than symptoms. Usually, more than satisfactory results could be achieved by "merely" changing the way a client thought about their difficulties. Most "only" suffered from The Normals, anyway. I practiced my profession on myself, too, "deceiving myself through the worst of it, while hoping to make the best of it one day."

My life changed again when I met The Muse. She had been a participant in a workshop I was teaching. I hoped I wasn't repeating the pattern that had contributed to making me hardcore unemployable by falling in love with another co-worker, but our relationship bloomed after our teacher/student relationship ended. Not long after, but after. My co-workers embraced my choice and The Muse joined my entrepreneurial enterprise, enriching it more than it ever could have been enriched without her presence. We ruled our world for a few years, starting in that same sad apartment I'd fled to after my second divorce. After a few years, we relocated back into this valley near the end of the Oregon Trail, where we bought an old run-down house with decent bones near my Old Home Place, and thrived until the bottom dropped out of our business. We were masters of our Entrepreneurial universe for a time. If creating this history's taught me anything, it's taught me that nobody's ever master of anything, anything for any longer than for a time.

I remain an Entreprenuer, as does The Muse, by which I mean we both remain more or less hard-core unemployable. We no longer engage in work in anything like a servile or one-down manner. We are owners rather than renters, and we engage on our own terms or not at all. We do not wait for direction from someone who probably has no better understanding of the situation but choose and decide for ourselves after appropriate consultation. We cannot be employed because we already employ ourselves and our considerable talents. We contribute them where we damned well please or else we don't engage. After that bottom dropped out of our market, The Muse went on to master another profession, still self-employed while agreeing to have an employer. She remained a puzzlingly successful handful, just like every Entreprenuer should be. Afterward, she became my patron, agreeing to support my efforts to create stories and series like this one. I'll explore that manner of living in my next installment of this series, which will be the next-to-last installment of this series.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz