Guest Post: Lyla Lindquist, “Mahogany Mystique”

We have been so blessed to have writers from around the world contribute to this project, “What I Learned From My First Job.” Today, Lyla Lindquist contributes her memories helping her father’s tax preparation business business. Lyla blogs at A Different Story and I must say she is one of my favorite writers, with fabulous insight and amazing writing skills. Her Work of an Adjuster is one of my favorite posts of all time. Want to join the project? Send me an e-mail here.
Mahogany Mystique
I grew up in an accounting household. During tax season, my parents worked long into the night and Saturdays for a CPA firm, preparing tax returns for stymied citizens torn between paying what they owed and keeping what they could. 

The U.S. Tax Code is a fertile animal, spawning more offspring in subtitles and sections than Abraham could have dreamed in his promised starry sky. But I’ve always been grateful, in a way: the spontaneously generating tax system put food on the table and spending money in my pocket.

When I was in grade school, my parents would sometimes take me along to their office in downtown St. Paul on Saturday mornings. With my feet dangling under a giant, dark wooden desk and sipping Pepsi from a plastic Solo coffee cup, I updated the rows of binders lining tall shelves that opened the mysteries of the tax code to the accountants under its spell. I worked meticulously through packet after packet, following the instructions to Discard pages 476e to 587g and Insert pages 477 to 503.

The atmosphere of that old-world office building stimulated my senses as a kid from the suburbs. We came in from a bustling downtown sidewalk through heavy wooden doors to the scent of tobacco from a small shop on the main floor. The proprietor supplied my mom with empty cigar boxes back in a time when it was acceptable to use them for pencil boxes in a school kid’s desk. 

The sweet tobacco scent could have held me there by the cigar shop and news stand all day, but work called us up the spiral staircase with the black iron rail and the worn marble steps. At the top, I was always transported to the mystical world of work where I met and put faces to the men and women whose names and stories peppered our dinner table conversation.

When I was in my teens, my dad opened his own practice in rural South Dakota, and I went back to work updating the loose-leaf binders, along with answering the phones, computer work and swabbing toilets. The office was set in a contemporary decor, oranges, browns and Formica of the late seventies and early eighties. The pay was certainly better but it never carried that old mahogany mystique of their downtown office. 

Sometimes I wonder if that’s why my favorite place to work these days is the clunky old wooden library table in my home office.

So how about you? For the next couple of weeks I’ll be highlighting voices from around the world, reflecting on what you learned at your first job. Send me a note here and join in! Click here to subscribe and not miss a single post. The Archive is here.


Amy Young