“Aye, There’s the Rub!”

My son Ian turns 20 today. As warm and as humid as it was in Minneapolis today, it was nothing like the 90+ degree heat in San Antonio, where Ian was born at Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lakland Air Force Base. It’s hard to believe that 9 pound baby has now become a man, who has done a lot in his young life to make both me and his mother very proud.

The thing that you notice when your kids become adults is that you can remember very well what you were like and what you were doing at that age. Ian is now between his Sophomore and Junior years of college.

I remember the car ride with my father coming back to Minnesota when he picked me up at Wartburg College. On the ride back to the Twin Cities, my dad did not mince any words: ” Steve, the Real Estate business is not doing very well. Whether you go to France at all in September, and how well you are going to live once you get there is going to depend on what you make this summer.” As my thoughts turned to just HOW I was going to make that kind of money, my dad brought a little more reality to this reality check: “Don’t think you are going to be able to make enough money working 40 hours a week-you are going to need to work and save a lot more to be able to pull this off.”

I ended up working at two restaurants, a pizza place called “My Pie Pizza” and a “Perkins” accross Highway 55 from the Channel 11 studios in Golden Valley. I would average 60-70 hours a week in those two restaurants for the rest of the summer into early September. My typical day during that summer of 1981 was this:

0900-Wake up

0930 Peddle my bike to work and start working as a prep cook(usually making pizza sauce or cutting mozerella) Start washing dishes at around 1115.

2PM Leave work and ride my bike home, where I would nap untill about 5pm.

6Pm Leave my dad’s house and ride my bike to Perkins, work as a busboy-dishwasher untill  bar rush was over, about 0200-0230 and go home.

That was a typical day.

In the end, I saved up enough money to get to study in Montpellier, France. I had a great year, and I don’t mind telling you that I really appreciated it so much more because I paid for it myself.(That and selling some stock that my grandfather had left me when he died) That summer gave me a great appreciation for hard work and the value of a dollar and saving money-talk about the gift that keeps giving!