It is cloudy but I see a small break where the sun is coming up. Maybe I will get some exercise today. Maybe I will shower. I feel myself a shut-in, a recluse. The cat likes it, though, likes me here with her, likes my funk. She keeps rubbing her very rough tongue over me. Hers is the roughest cat tongue I've ever felt. If she licks twice in the same place, it is painful.
My father was a tool an dye maker. After the war, he had the G.I. Bill and a choice to make--trade school or college. He chose a year of training in what was then a lucrative field, but he told me that he should have gone to college.
He worked shaping metal his entire life and came home home with metal shavings in his gum soled shoes each night. He was thirty-three when I was born and fifty when he got divorced. He had always been thick boned and strong, remnants of growing up on a farm during the depression. Over the years, though, working had left him tired in the evenings, and he came home and ate dinner and fell into a chair to drink a beer or two and watch T.V. like the other fathers in our neighborhood, and like them, too, he had grown a belly, the sort you could not see from behind, one of those hard, round bellies that makes a man look rough.
Now, though, he had been crushed, his chest broken like a jigsaw puzzle, his once-famous breadth of chest shrunken. He was suddenly aged, no longer the fellow you called when there was trouble in the night, and that was the greater injury. He never said anything about it, and he wouldn't admit to any weakness, but I could see the story in his eyes.
It had been months since the accident, the first ones spent in the hospital and the last one spent with my aunt and uncle in a wheel chair, but now he was on crutches and ready to drive. He was liked at work, and though he could not stand all day at machines shaping metal, they brought him back as a supervisor. He was, after all, the man they called on to shape the housing for the seismograph left on the moon by the astronauts on the first moon mission. He was a tool and dye hero.
And so we lived together now, two men. I would have to work.
Donny's father had gotten a job in the Labor Union, the first real union in our state, and he was working on the construction of the big theme park that was being built so improbably on thousands and thousands of acres of cattle ranches and wetlands nearby. The companies were hiring, but you could not simply walk in and join the union. You had to be sponsored. Tommy asked me if I wanted in. Donny's father was sponsoring him, and he would get me in, too, if I wanted.
School was over. I was now something else. I would join the union. I would enter the working world.
I joined the working world before I graduated from high school and graduation meant nothing to me. I was already gone...my first job was in an office and I was so impressed by the men in suits...little did I know...
ReplyDeleteOh it is good to be back reading your stories.
ReplyDeleteWhere have you been?
ReplyDelete