I was programmed to work. Not by ideology, but by life’s necessity.

In a single-parent corner of Los Angeles, the only way out was forward. If I wanted a bike, I shined shoes or delivered newspapers. If I wanted gas for the car, my buck-sixty-five-an-hour job covered it. That’s just how life worked back then: You earned what you got.

So, when I married young, Mormon-young, and Carrie got pregnant three days later (yes, that fast), I did what I was wired to do. I worked. I studied. I built.

I didn’t ask “why.” The “why” was survival. The “why” was a cramped apartment across from CSUN. Eventually it was a house in the Santa Clarita Valley and three kids to raise.

And somehow, that drive worked. Decades later, I sit in a warm home with the bills paid and the wolf that once chased me now wandering harmlessly at the property line.

So why does the air sometimes feel thin?

Because the compulsion that built our lives has nowhere left to go. We were shaped by struggle, and much of that struggle is now gone. Retirement, comfort, convenience … they’re wonderful gifts, but they don’t ask anything of you. They don’t require muscle or grit........

© Santa Clarita Valley Signal