Like Father Like Son

Ever since I was a little kid, I always liked working with my dad. Yard work, painting or electrical work, it didn't matter. Whatever my dad was working on, I wanted to help. Despite this, we will most likely never work in the same career field, let alone for the same business. My dad is a salesman and I am majoring in mechanical engineering. However, I can share many of the feelings that Dave Stribling, from Studs Terkell's Working, has about working at the garage with his father.

First I remember the resentment for my father's old fashioned ways of doing things. While snowblowers exist, and are very popular where I live (Cleveland right in the middle of the snowbelt), we still shoveled the driveway through my senior year of high school. He did get one after I left for college and couldn't help out anymore, but that makes sense with him getting older so I'm happy he finally got over his stubbornness. This seemed exactly Dave's sentiments about Glenn using hand tools instead of power tools.

Next I remember his need to do chores that I found completely useless. We had two large cottonwood trees in our front yard which lost a lot of small sticks in the fall. Every day it was necessary for him to make sure all the sticks were clear from the yard before he could go to sleep, despite more sticks always ending up in the yard the next day. I hated picking up sticks but still did it every day in the fall, because that's what he wanted. This memory came on page 551 when Dave was talking about how he does most of the work but his father thinks that he does all of it because I remember having that exact feeling as a kid.

I really liked hearing Dave's opinions of working with his dad and it kind of made me miss working with mine.

Questions:

Does anybody else have cool stories of working with a parent?