If you're lucky, you remember your first job.

I got my first job when I was in the fifth grade. My neighbor offered me $2.50 to hang on to a lawn mower that outweighed me and cut his grass.

No one mentioned, though, that my neighbor had lost some of his toes to a mower.

From that day onward, I was a member of the working class, transformed by sweat, responsibility and alarm clocks that crowed before the roosters.

The money I made allowed me to buy a Schwinn Varsity 10-speed. It was orange. It got me to other lawn jobs.

The memory of my early laboring rattled in my head the other day after dropping off Firstborn at work. It was her first day at her first job — a milestone that left me proud.

She doesn't know it yet, but the job will change her forever. Love it or hate it, work sets you on a path that can define your character.

Once I began working, I never stopped. My whole life, I've worked one job after another.

In high school, I passed my first real job interview — paid my first taxes, too — and began parking golf carts at Mid-Pacific Country Club.

It was like free money, and no one seemed to care if you crashed the carts into each other or smoked the cigars the golfers left behind.

We sobered up about fooling around, though, when a co-worker was accidentally set on fire during horseplay with a can of WD-40 and a lighter. I can still remember the smell of burned skin.

I bought my first car with the money from that job. A 1968 VW Bug. What a heap.

At the University of Hawai'i, I was hired one summer as a groundskeeper at the Institute for Astronomy. First day, my boss — a reformed LSD dealer from Queens — shook my hand, then said he would fire me the moment I screwed up.

But it was free money. Punch the clock at 7 a.m. Appropriate low-hanging mangoes. Sleep in wheelbarrow. Start work about 8 a.m.

You know, there are trees on the lawn of the institute that I planted that summer. They're as big as a house.

The day after graduation, I exchanged my mortarboard for a hardhat and a job working high-rise construction. Joined my first union, too.

That was not free money. I remember the back-breaking labor, the muttered insults from older laborers and the mangled plasterer we found at the bottom of a 21-story plunge. But I built the foundation of my graduate education with concrete.

Near the end of the second summer of that, a giant laborer named Asi asked if I would be his foreman after I got my degree. We had worked shoulder to shoulder shoveling concrete on top of a rising, 40-story building. For fun, he sometimes grabbed me by the T-shirt and shook me.

Asi was crestfallen when I said no, thank you. But he never grabbed my shirt again. Instead, he shook my hand.

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.