Time & Perspective Quote by Hector Elizondo

Elizondo’s line lands like a half-laugh and a small indictment. He starts with the deceptively casual setup - “I used to work, part time, in a deli” - a job specific enough to smell like cold cuts and fluorescent lights, not the romanticized “I had a hustle” origin story. The real punch is the generational aside: “in those days when your parents made you work just so you should know what work was like.” It’s not nostalgia; it’s a portrait of a social norm that treated labor as character education, not just income.

The subtext is about discipline, yes, but also about class and belonging. A deli job is public-facing, repetitive, humbling. It teaches you how to take instruction, how to deal with customers, how to clock out tired and still show up the next day. Elizondo frames it as a rite of passage that parents enforced because they didn’t trust comfort to teach anything on its own.

Then he drops the numbers: “4, 5, 6, ten dollars.” The uneven climb mimics memory - not a clean wage figure, but scraps of paydays. It’s also a subtle reminder of how small money once was and how big it felt. In 2026 ears, those amounts read as almost absurd, which is the point: the line invites you to measure inflation, but also to measure distance from an ethic where work was less about branding yourself and more about being introduced, early, to the reality that time has a price.