Late Night With Luca

Sometimes as parents it can be overwhelming, trying to make sure your children know everything they will need once the time comes for them to be out in the world on their own. Frankly, I sometimes wonder if mine will ever be ready for such an endeavor, but that’s a topic for a different post entirely.

My husband and I have been trying to get the PBA to understand the concept of money…as in, we don’t have a bunch but we always have enough, and that we choose to live within our means. By many people’s standards we are “rich” but that doesn’t mean we can always go out and buy whatever we want, whenever we want it. We want them to know that money doesn’t buy happiness, and may only give a sense of false security.

That being said, we don’t want them to choose their future careers based on money or potential money; we want them to follow the path God has laid out for them; we pray that they will love the jobs they will train for and someday grow up to have – and that they will be passionate and diligent and strive to do their best.

In our past discussions with the PBA, we have shared with them a few of our previous work experiences:

• my 3-week stint in high school at Speedy Spaghetti (yeah…I quit just a couple weeks before the Board of Health shut them down; I had nothing to do with that, by the way);
• my summer work as a nanny (in which I determined I was NOT going to have boys, and I DEFINITELY was NOT going to give my children names with the same first letter…how annoying is that?)
• my husband’s first job ever, working at JCPenney’s (can’t you just picture him wearing his dress shirt with his knit ties? Handsome!);
• and my husband’s job at the Coca-Cola plant one summer (during which he drank more Coke than anyone should be allowed to drink).

However one job in particular seems to have gathered the attention of my 9yo’s interest the most:  my husband’s job at FanFare. It was at Lafayette Square Mall and required selling sports apparel and other merchandise; he had this job while he was in high school. The self-proclaimed “pumpkin on a toothpick” that my husband was in high-school (super-skinny with a big head, for those of you who may have trouble envisioning what I mean), knee-deep in NFL paraphernalia. I’m sure it felt like Heaven to him.

Just recently my husband was talking about when he worked the closing shifts and would walk down to Luca Pizza, just before it closed. The restaurant employees would sell whatever they had leftover for bargain-basement prices, just to get rid of it and not take a total loss; they clearly could not save the pizza for the next day (I mean, I love leftover pizza, but I don’t suppose there is much of a market for day-old, leftover pizza, being sold directly from a restaurant).

Fast-forward to today: my 9yo is talking about how terrific his dad’s job was in high school.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The one where he got the pizza really cheap at night.”

“And that made the job great?”

“Oh yeah!”

While I can appreciate the child’s penchant for eating on the cheap, I think, perhaps, we need to better define what makes a job “great” as there seems to be a slight misunderstanding.