THE NATION

What Workers Really Want

I asked my dad, a NYC bus driver of 43 years*

Photo by Callum Hill on Unsplash

*That’s not my dad in the picture. That’s a stock photo of a worker on a train. My dad hates his picture taken and hates the Internet more. But my dad has that hat.

I have spent most of my life very aware of just how different I am from my father. He grew up on the streets of Queens; I went to a preppy independent school in the green hills of Staten Island. He skipped college and went to work; I was a literature major at Harvard. Yes, I’ve had a job since I was 13, but for most of my late teens and early 20s you could find me reading books under a tree. I am gay; he is most definitely not. And now, I spend my days, at 43, writing essays about the pandemic, and modern life, and how to build a “Happiness Fence;” my father rolls his eyes at my happiness fence and spent 43 years as a school bus driver in New York City — a union member, with a time card, counting the days ’til he could collect his pension. Along the way, he moonlighted (moonlit?) as an Italian-bread baker, poring over dough, flour, and a hot oven into the wee hours of the night.

Two jobs, sometimes three, plus my mom’s full-time salary, kept our family of five afloat. My mom was a secretary for a shipping company. She would bring home a bulky Smith-Corona typewriter from…