My Little Book of Work.
Work Chapter 1.
I was a kid with a rake. In the sun in the autumn.
I would rake and then stand around. Rake a little, stand around.
Is it noon yet?
I had a stick thrust into the scrappy leafy Ohio dirt. When the shadow of the stick got short and thin, it’s noon. Almost done!
While I’m making an attempt at yard work, Mr Reynold’s calico cat, Samantha, walks by with an actual mouse from the Ohio woods out back.
She is going to put that mouse, as she does every mouse-and there were many- on the Reynold’s back step.
Sam walks by with her mouse and casts a glance in my direction.
I’m a standing-still, moody teenager.
I get the hint and get back to raking. The sun high above, the leaves drifting down all about me.
Morning and afternoon, the first day.
Work Chapter 2.
Bud’s Cup and Saucer
A little place with a slant roof, like a Dairy Queen.
My first job!
Washing dishes. So cool!
All the townspeople (and there weren’t many) went to Bud’s for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.
I don’t remember the work part at all, mainly because doing/being a dishwasher is so much a part of my soul.
And later drugs interfered with memory function and the processes involving the left/right hemispheres.
-But not in the Eden of those early days.
My most exciting memory was when my piano teacher, Miss Snow, came in (as she did every afternoon at exactly the same time) for coffee and a piece of pie.
She didn’t recognize me, I don’t think, in my dishwasher regalia of apron and rag.
Or maybe the social divisions of society- some quite arbitrary, it would seem- and some instilled over the centuries since the guilds and crusades- demanded a compliance from workers and a humble demeanor that one understands instantly as ones’ role.
It was a shock to see people in an entirely new context. Worker, student, teacher, citizen!
I figured it out myself.
A tip in those days was probably 35 cents.
Work Chapter 3.
The glue line.
American factories are all the same.
They have flat roofs and cold floors and machinery and mountains of dust that begin as little golden flecks in the dead air.
I worked for a summer in Dad’s box shop. That cardboard box company was part of a pulp and paper company that was part of an older company, recently bought and then owned by a Texas oiI corporation.
Now both are defunct. Time. Buy and Sell. The three components of Life in America.
Anyway, I worked with a printer at a huge press. He looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln, this printer.
Except: he was only five feet tall.
He had the same nut-brown complexion, the same squinched-up wrinkly face. The same dull expression which would suddenly change to sunshine and mischief.
He would always talk about how, if anyone crossed him, he would get him back. I believed him. And he would give a crinkly grin. With malice for all. He was full of wiles, from West Virginia.
He was concerned that Black people were going to take all the jobs.
There were no Black people anywhere in sight.
When working he would often admonish me. “Whoa, slow down, there.”
He didn’t want the Front Office to think the job was too easy.
There were mumblings around the factory, too, that people from West Virginia were migrating to Ohio, to take all the jobs.
And there were rumblings around the plant that since the energy corporation from Texas took over, the future of the company was at risk.
Most of the factory workers were young family people. I had a crush on the woman way over on the glue line.
So that’s the social organization, as far as I could see.
The only reason I got that job was my dad worked for the company. I’m grateful.
It was tough for him because his young son, just starting out in the world, was a complete clueless nerd.
And that’s ok.
But the guys around would just shake their heads. Sometimes with spontaneous chuckles.
I can take it. I can see how work changed me.
I made $1100 dollars- a fortune at that time- and moved to California. 1977.
I can’t remember doing any work at the box shop, my dad’s place of business, but one day the roof flooded, so they sent me up to check it out. I went up and found the drains and brushed the leaves and crap aside and saved the company from the roof caving in.
Perhaps.
So that was morning and afternoon, another day.
Work Chapter 4.
I don’t get to work with a diverse population until UPS. High school senior.
Cleveland had huge population of African Americans as well as people from Eastern Europe.
So we were all there loading trucks in the middle of the night.
After all the late sixties/early seventies build-up about race, nothing happened. We just worked and got shit done and went home in the darkness. Shift ended at 2 am.
Teamsters Union too. Four hour shifts as loaders. Good money.
Off to Howard Johnson’s for huge plates of eggs.
So in sum:
Dad retired and got a watch. Miss Snow had coffee and pie everyday for twenty more years in the town in which she was born and raised, a short walk from her house on the hill across from the library overlooking the cemetery by the water tower. I made a fortune and moved to the West Coast. And the energy corporations took over everything.
So, happily ever after, am I right?
Labor Day, and all my fellow citizens are on the bus with me on the way to work. All the essential workers are here, driving, serving, healing, answering the call.
And here am I leaning on my rake, seeing it’s almost noon.
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