The classic American poets of the twentieth century wrote in a way that seems to distill time for us, anthologizing the little forgotten experiences many of us instantly recognize. A common favorite in this tradition is “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden.

It is only fourteen lines long, and it concerns a father who got up early on Sundays to light the furnace before the rest of the house stirred. Robert Hayden wrote it in 1966, looking back at a childhood in Detroit that was more brittle than sweet.

The father in the poem has hands that are cracked from labor. No one ever thinks to thank him. The house itself is described as full of “chronic angers”—this is not a portrait of a warm and fuzzy family. Yet, every morning, the rooms are warm when the children rise, and the son’s good shoes have been polished until they shine.

The son, now grown, asks himself a question that haunts the final lines: What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?

That word—offices—is the one worth pausing on. Hayden didn't choose “chores.” He didn't choose “duties.” He chose offices. It suggests that warming a house is a kind of sacred, dutiful work, a station to be filled with the solemnity of a priest at an altar. There is something liturgical in its repetition: Sundays, too. Every single day, whether the world notices or not.

The poem is usually read as a confession of regret—a grown man wishing he had offered a simple “thank you” while his father was still there to hear it. But I like to focus on the father himself. He has found his austere office: the quiet, hidden work he was built to perform. He fills it faithfully, without the need for applause, in the blue-black cold before dawn. There is a profound, steely peace in that. A man who knows his purpose is rarely a man who needs a standing ovation.

The question for the rest of us, of course, is how to find our own.

It was a natural question for George Washington Carver too - yes, the peanut butter guy.

They called George "the plant doctor" when he was about ten years old. This was in Diamond Grove, Missouri, in the years just after the Civil War. Carver was a sickly child—frail, stuttering, and deemed too weak to work the fields alongside his brother. While others were breaking their backs in the sun, Carver wandered the woods alone. He collected specimens. He transplanted wildflowers into a secret garden he kept hidden in the brush. He talked to the plants. "I will take care of you," he told them. "Maybe if I watch carefully, I can learn what makes you grow best."

He had a gift that bordered on the miraculous. He could see what an ailing plant needed—a bit more light, a handful less water, a different pocket of soil—when no one else could see anything but a dying leaf. Neighbors started showing up at the door, cradling wilting ferns like sick cats, asking a boy who couldn't yet see over the counter for a diagnosis. He nursed them back to health.

You can almost picture the scene: a line of neighbors on a Missouri porch, holding their half-dead rosebushes, waiting for a ten-year-old child to tell them how to fix their world.

Now, if this were a movie, the next scene would show young George looking wistfully into the distance while an orchestral swell hinted at future greatness. But that’s not how vocations work. There was no swell. There was no montage. There was just a boy who liked plants, helping the people who showed up at his door—which, if we’re being honest, is how most callings begin: inconveniently, and without background music.

Carver left home at eleven years old to find a school that would accept a Black student. He spent years wandering the Midwest, working as a cook and a laundryman, finishing high school in his late twenties. He was rejected from one college because of his race, but he kept moving until he became the first Black student at Iowa State. He studied botany. He became an expert in fungal diseases. His professors remarked that he was the most gifted collector they had ever seen.

When Booker T. Washington recruited him to Tuskegee, Carver spent the next forty-seven years doing exactly what he had done as a boy: helping sick things grow. The only difference was the scale. The "sick things" were now entire farms, and the "neighbors" were poor sharecroppers—Black and white alike—who were only one generation removed from slavery and chained to land that had been utterly exhausted by cotton.

He taught them crop rotation. He introduced the peanut and the sweet potato to replenish the nitrogen in the soil. He wrote forty-four bulletins in plain, accessible language. These were not academic papers designed to impress other academics or secure a tenure track. They had titles like How the Farmer Can Save His Sweet Potatoes and The Canning and Preserving of Fruits and Vegetables in the Home. You could read them without a graduate degree. That was the point.

He built the Jesup Wagon, a mobile classroom on wheels, so he could bring his knowledge to the farmers who were too poor or too busy to come to him. His mission, as he famously described it, was to serve "the man farthest down."

What is remarkable about Carver’s life is that the gift never changed; it simply grew and extended itself. At ten, he could see what a plant needed. At seventy, he could still see what a plant needed—he had just learned to see on a wider horizon. The rosebush became a region. The secret garden became a movement.

Frederick Buechner once wrote that vocation is "the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." It is a beautiful, evocative line, but it is easy to misread it as a destination—some shining moment where the clouds part and you suddenly "arrive." But the place Buechner describes is something you grow into, slowly, through the friction of repetition. You find it by doing small things faithfully, long before you understand why they matter. You find it the way Carver found his: by noticing what you can see that others cannot, and offering it anyway, even when no one thanks you.

Sundays too.

It is worth noting that both Hayden and Carver were Black men who built extraordinary lives in an America that often refused to see them at all. Hayden grew up in poverty, was passed between foster homes, and yet became one of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Carver was born into the institution of slavery, kidnapped as an infant, and returned to his home without his mother.

That they found their "austere offices" at all—that they filled them with such quiet faithfulness against such staggering odds—makes their wisdom land with a different weight. These were men who could have been forgiven for a lifelong descent into cynicism or bitterness. Instead, they got up early and did the work anyway, in pursuit of the “deep gladness.” The obstacles didn't stop the gift. If anything, the obstacles clarified it. They didn't have time for the luxury of resentment; they had a house to warm and a people to feed.

Some people find their calling in a flash—a big break, a sudden clarity, a door that swings open and never closes. But for the rest of us, the path is quieter. It is a small grace, repeated until it deepens into a purpose. It is a habit that slowly reveals itself as a vocation. Not everyone gets the thunderclap. Some of us just get the rosebush.

We spend a great deal of time worrying about our "legacy," a word that usually implies a bronze statue or a name on a building. But the reward for a life of "offices" is not recognition. It is something quieter and stranger—it is closer to the feeling of walking out of a theater after a film that moved you to your core. You aren't happy because anyone saw you watching. You are happy because you were part of a story that mattered.

The plant doctor started with a single leaf. He ended by healing a region. Most of us will not get an epitaph as good as Carver’s, which noted that he "found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world." We will be lucky if someone remembers to include our middle initial on the program. But the size of the stage is irrelevant to the quality of the work.

The question is smaller than we usually make it: What can you see that others can’t? What ailing thing keeps showing up at your door? What would you do in the blue-black cold, even if no one ever noticed?

The thing you do without thanks might just be the thing you were made for.

Find the grace only you can give, and give it—especially to those who won't yet know to thank you.

Sundays too.

John

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad