For countless Americans the concept of work has evolved simultaneously to that which gives meaning to our daily lives and then strips its meaning away with the same all-encompassing gesture. The economic downturn has offered many of us an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reevaluate our relationship to work. We needed a pause and we got one. We've started to ask ourselves what the hell we're working so hard for. Could there be something out there, some lost key to the kingdom of happiness that is being over-looked? You bet your ass there is. It's called pleasure.
Case in point, Chuck Risconi, aka Castello Eros Risconi, age 43. Chuck graduated from Oroville High School back in the eighties where he established an ongoing friendship with his buddy, Jesse James Hart. Chuck is the only child of Lena, a beautiful Dutch woman, and Vic, an Italian olive grower and processor. When Vic died, without a moment of doubt or hesitation, Lena picked up the reins of the business and from that time forward it began to grow at a faster pace than ever before. When she needed assistance, Chuck quit college and went home to work with his mother running the front office as best he could. But they quickly determined that the long hours required were just not for him. And so Chuck moved from Oroville and created a new life for himself in Atlanta, Georgia as a new age entrepreneur. He opened the Oroville Olive Company's first brick & mortar retail operation and lives upstairs over the store. Unfortunately, in his view, the boutique business took off immediately in Atlanta's sea of upscale yuppies and then snowballed throughout the South with the onset of the Internet. He's been forced to open additional retail stores in Charlotte, Savannah and Nashville. Business is good but requires a 60-hour work week. Not what he was hoping to achieve.
Meanwhile, his mother remains robust enough to endure her own 60-hour work week rigorously managing both the ranch and the adjacent processing plant. But her doctor suggests she needs a change of pace. Feeling the urge to travel to, and perhaps even to retire to the Italian Alps, she's just closed the sale of the processing plant to Del Monte Foods. Now she wants Chuck to come home and take-over or sell the olive groves.
As the story begins, Chuck agrees to fly out to the coast for a "man-to-man" about the future of the family business. On orders from his mother he will be fitted for a new tuxedo upon arrival. It seems he will be escorting her to the many events taking place during the annual Oroville Olive Festival for which she has been chosen the event's honorary Grand Marshall.
Copyright 2010 G. Leo Maselli
Work sucks, what is there without it?
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