Till My Computer Broke Down

Pew survey: Americans uninformed about major faith traditions, despite being worlds most religious people

For all the talk about America being the spiritual shining city on a hill, a new national survey reveals that a large number of Americans are uninformed about major faith traditions, including their own. And, ironically, agnostics and atheists — individuals who dont believe in God or simply say they dont know– were more in tune with aspects of faith than traditional believers and worshipers. The U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, conducted May 19 through June 6, 2010 by the Pew Forum on Religion

via Pew survey: Americans uninformed about major faith traditions, despite being worlds most religious people.

Full Circle

The Things That Remain – Parkinson’s Disease, my father and me

About eleven years ago my father called me in Nashville to tell me he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.  Later, the diagnosis would be expanded to include Lewy Body Dementia.  He choked up a little when he told me, something I’d rarely heard him do.  I understood that the diagnosis was life-changing, for him and for the family.  But I didn’t know how.  Nor did I realize how continual the changes would be.

My father has been transformed in many ways over the past eleven years.  There are the obvious physical differences—slumped head and shoulders, shuffling gait, drawn face, faded voice.  He no longer can control his bowels, and he often drools.  The disease has changed his personality in some ways as well.  He’s more somber, and periodically agitated.  On several occasions he’s fought off caregivers.  To whatever extent my father is aware of his worsening condition, I’m sure he must fight tremendous frustration and despair, and the only way he can effectively communicate his emotions is to act out.  One of the kinder aspects of his disease, I guess, is that the more it progresses the less aware of his decline he becomes.

We do what we can to preserve what remains of his health, to slow the disease’s progression, but at this point we hold little hope for a cure or a reversal of symptoms.  Our goal now is really to make the transition into the unknown as painless as possible.  We are like flight attendants who have little knowledge of where their clients are going; they simply try to keep their guests comfortable in whatever ways they can for the duration of the trip.

Despite the changes in my father, the deepest grooves in his personality and character are still there—his thoughtfulness, his mischievous grin and dry wit, his politeness to strangers.  He has always been and remains a true gentleman.  He is also still a runner.  In his late thirties my dad took up jogging, began entering road races, and ran seriously throughout his 40’s and 50’s—mostly 10K races, though he once worked up to a marathon.  These days he periodically impresses, and worries, the caregivers by running up and down the long hallway of the assisted living home.  His love of music also remains.  A good vaudeville or swing tune can get his feet tapping.  My mother often says she fell in love with him largely because he was a good dancer, and at times when he’s barely been able to walk, I’ve seen him dance with surprising agility.

But his response to music is less and less pronounced, and I know that sometime soon he will no longer be able to jog the halls.  These are the realities of the disease, which are the realities of aging magnified and accelerated.

My father now lives in the “Reminiscence” wing (i.e. the lock-down wing) of an assisted living community.  An ironic name, since most of the residents there can’t remember anything to reminisce about.  It can be a hard place to visit at first, but now that Dad has made his peace there and we’ve gotten to know the residents and caregivers, it has become a warm and familiar environment.  My mother visits him every day, usually at dinner time so she can help him eat.  She tends to stay on site when visiting him, and now that she’s gotten to know the other residents and the caregivers, she’s a valuable volunteer to the caregiver team, helping clean, feed and entertain them all with hymns and old standards.

I have made friends at the home as well.  Being a forgetful person by nature, I’m relieved to be in a place where I don’t have to worry about forgetting anyone’s name.  I hold hands with an old Spanish woman, Lucia, who has one cloudy blind eye and likes to put her face to my hand or kiss my cheek as she says things in broken Spanish  that I can’t understand.  Kathryn, a former doctor who survives somehow on a diet of cheese and desserts, loves to sing with me when I bring my guitar, which I don’t do much but probably should.  One day she requested “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” three times, back to back.  Since my repertoire is a little limited these days, I gratefully obliged, and each time her eyes smiled just as the song describes.  Aneita, the head caregiver on duty during the week, has a crush on Dad and calls him “Sparky,” a nickname most of the other caregivers have now adopted as well.  He probably would have found the cutesy name annoying in his pre-dementia years, but he seems to like it now.  Aneita can almost always put a grin on his face, for which I love her.  People like her are gold and should be paid much more than they are.

As long as Dad can still walk and climb in and out of my car, I like to spring him from the joint as often as possible.  He loves smoothies, and the occasional beer.  Taking him out into the world always boosts his alertness and responsiveness; his eyes sharpen and he talks more.  He talks with subtle inflection as if he’s saying something perfectly coherent, which it may be.  But his broken syntax, cognitive pauses, and low volume make it nearly impossible for me to decipher his meaning.  The breakdown of verbal communication has been painful for me.  I want badly to give him feedback, to make him feel that he is connecting with someone.  But he never seems too bothered by it.  Most of our time together is quiet, which is as it’s always been.  On the several father-son trips we took when I was an adolescent, Dad and I would drive or hike or paddle for long periods of time without saying a word.  I think he was taking me on a retreat from the noise and artifice of modern culture.  He taught me how to appreciate silence and the sounds of nature.

He was quiet himself a lot of the time, but he was a wordsmith when he wanted to be.  His most imaginative achievements were the “Edward and Melanie” stories he used to tell my sister and me at bedtime, stories about a family that bore a strong resemblance to our own.  There was often a moral, but there was humor and adventure, too.  Despite our urging, he never wrote any of these stories down.  It used to bother me that he let them slip away, but now I don’t mind.  I love that he composed them more or less spontaneously and then let them go.  I’m sure he thought about committing them to paper, but it never happened.   My mom boasts about the toasts he gave on occasion.  He didn’t labor over them; he’d jot a few notes down on a napkin moments before he stood up.  His toasts were never long—he had a gift for brevity I wish I’d inherited—but they were typically wry, good-natured, and on the mark.

It’s hard to know what shape his thoughts take now, how detailed they are.  How strange to be so cognitively removed from a man who once taught me algebra and table manners and football strategy.  Yet our emotional connection is stronger than ever.  We show our love for each other more freely.  Not long ago while we were hanging out he looked at me clearly and said, “You’re my pal.”  I can’t think of anything I’d rather hear.

My father’s ability to find humor in his struggles is a blessing to him and those of us caring for him.  A while before he entered assisted living, I took Dad with me to a shopping mall and stepped onto the down escalator before he did.  This was before I’d learned that Parkinson’s patients often freeze at thresholds, so I didn’t I fully appreciate how daunting an escalator might seem to him.  As I started going down, I turned to see him standing bewildered at the top.  I motioned for him to step forward onto the escalator, but then I thought he might stumble and so I tried to climb back up to him, casually, so as not to draw too much attention to him or myself. But I wasn’t making much progress, essentially walking in place.  So I had to forget courtesy and start running to get to the top.  After helping him onto the escalator and arriving safely on the lower level, we had a good laugh about the whole situation.

We don’t go to malls anymore, but I still take him to the lake in the neighborhood where I grew up, and where my mother still lives.  As we pass by the house he lived in for over thirty years, I look at Dad to see if he recognizes it.  If he does, he makes no overt sign of acknowledgement.  A little farther on, the road takes a steep dive as it winds around the lake and down to the beach and picnic area.  I remind him of the times that he, my sister, and I ventured out in the early morning onto the virgin snow and trudged to the top of the “lake hill,” towing our Flexi Flyer sled behind us.  We’d lie on the sled in triple-decker fashion, Dad on bottom, me in the middle, and my sister on top, and speed down the hill, the crunching snow and our excited laughter the only sounds in the pre-dawn quiet.  Dad grins as I remind him of these times.

We park by the beach area and I help him out of the car.  His right leg doesn’t want to move and I have to lift it and turn him sideways to get him started on his dismount.  Once out of the car, though, he does very well.  We walk to the edge of the lake and sit in plastic chairs.  A soft breeze ripples the surface of the lake, and we both gaze at the patterns of light and texture that move across the water.  It makes me happy that all these years later, the lake is still here to bring us pleasure, though we will never again swim across it to the O’Gara’s dock the way we used to.  It was a great place to grow up, and it is a great place to come back to.  Every now and then I offer a comment or a memory, and Dad mumbles a response I can’t quite understand.  But mostly we sit silently and let the water and the breeze take us to a place beyond consciousness, a place that always reminds me of a phrase I used to hear every Sunday, “the peace which passes all understanding.”

After a while I suggest we take a walk.  I hold onto his arm as we make our way through the sand and the pine straw back to the road.  Once on the road, I let go of his arm and we walk toward the base of the lake hill, Dad shuffling along the pavement at a decent pace.  I stake out a telephone pole about halfway up the hill and suggest we try to make it that far before turning around.  He agrees.  But when we reach the pole, he shows no signs of flagging, apparently not recalling the goal I’d just set.  So we continue up the hill.  As my own breathing gets shallow and my legs begin to burn a little, I start to worry we’re pushing it too far.  I ask him if he wants to turn around, but he doesn’t respond; he just keeps shuffling on until we reach the top of the hill.

Going back down the hill is almost as difficult, and by the time we get back to the car he can barely keep his feet under him.  But I cheer him on, amazed at what he’s just accomplished.  As we drive back to his place, I feel as proud of him as I did when, as a child, I watched him cross the finish line after having run twenty-six miles.

When I’m with my father, I feel very close to the mystery of life.  I let go of my acquisitiveness, my plans for the future, my intellectual puzzles.  My overriding desire is simply to serve him in whatever way I can—feed him, dress him, walk with him, laugh with him.  Sometimes it’s effortless, other times it’s challenging and distressing.  But I’m still learning from him, or through him.  I know my father was no saint, and I don’t want to over-sentimentalize his character, but he still serves as an example to me, long after my childhood heroes have faded from the pantheon in my mind.  Witnessing my father slip away from this life by degrees has been a strong antidote to the vanity of ego.  As I watch him and support him on his long, tough journey through this illness, I look for signs of the disease’s progress, but mostly I watch his spirit which, for the most part, remains calm, forebearing, and generous.  Without knowing it, he is still shaping who I am, and who I hope to become.

No Return

Calvin pulled his 1990 gold Corolla into the back lot of the warehouse earlier than usual that Monday morning.  He parked on the far side of the dumpster, next to the litter-strewn woods.  Joel and Travis wouldn’t be there to open up for at least another half hour.  A rare moment to himself—no little boy crying, no woman complaining, no boss telling him what he was doing wrong.

He needed time to get his anger under control, time to think about things from a different perspective.  He had two more weeks of work at CMG, and they weren’t going to be easy.  Kill em with kindness, his grandmother had advised him that weekend.  The expression made his skin crawl; it felt so Uncle Tom.  But she was right.  He needed Joel as a reference to get another job.

Joel had never given him the alarm code, even though they’d known each other for over five years, ever since he’d worked part-time for Joel’s mow-and-blow company.  Meanwhile Travis, a friend of Joel’s from college who’d worked at CMG for about the same amount of time, could come and go as he pleased.  Calvin liked Travis all right, but he couldn’t help taking the unequal treatment personally.

Calvin knew Joel didn’t trust him entirely, and it burned him up.  Sure Joel let him drive his car around town on errands, and he’d leave Calvin alone in the warehouse sometimes for an hour or two during the day, but he still hadn’t given him a key.

It didn’t matter now, though.  Now he just needed a job, maybe even a place to live, since he and his children’s mother, Denise, had just broken their lease.  They’d decided to move to a nicer apartment complex, one with a washer/dryer hookup and a nice pool for the kids.  Denise had found the place and had been pushing for it, despite Calvin’s financial worries.  Now the management company at the new apartments probably wouldn’t rent to them, since no longer Calvin had any steady income.

Raindrops splattered and slid down the windshield, making the gray woods in front of him look liquid and animated.  The effect was heightened by the drag he’d just taken off the tail end of a joint.  His cousin had left it at his place after they’d gone clubbing on Saturday night.  It was cheap Mexican dirt-weed, but it would do.  He’d sworn off pot two years ago when his second child was born, and made it about a month.  Then he’d given it up again when Joel had hired him part-time at Ceramic, Marble & Granite.  But things kept going the wrong way and pissing him off too bad for him to stick with his resolutions.

The Corolla’s upholstery was soiled and pockmarked with cigarette holes put there by his buddy Terry, who’d sold him the car for $700.  Calvin didn’t smoke, at least not cigarettes.

The radio played low, a Tupac song.  Calvin kept time on the brake pedal and steering wheel.  He took another small drag, then dabbed out the ash with his fingers and put the stub back in the crinkled piece of foil and tucked it beneath the seat.

In his twenties he’d smoked his share of good weed, back when the small hip-hop label he’d started with Terry looked like it might take off.  Lots of wild nights at the Cashbar, hanging with the big names on the Atlanta rap scene.  Black mafia even showed up some nights.  Calvin had managed to live through that time without getting into any trouble he couldn’t get out of.  Terry hadn’t been as fortunate.  The only thing that had kept him from getting shot was getting arrested.

But Calvin didn’t feel fortunate.  He was about to be unemployed, again.  The warnings of the talk radio blowhards that blared in the warehouse each morning mocked him now:

…Go ahead, vote Obama into the White House.  But if he becomes president and raises taxes on small business owners, and your boss lets you go, don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The Friday before, Joel had stopped Calvin as he was leaving the front office to pick up his daughter from her elementary school.

“We got some bad news yesterday,” Joel said.  His voice was collected, but practiced and tense.  “The loan we thought we were going to get fell through.”

Calvin guessed the punch line, and he was right.

“We’re going to have to cut every expense we can just to keep our doors open.  Stuart says we’ve got to use temp workers in the warehouse for now.  We can’t afford the liability insurance.  So, the long and the short of it is, CMG can pay you for two more weeks, and then we have to let you go.”

Calvin bit his upper lip and fixed his eyes on some dismal point in space.  “I knew something like this was comin.”

“Man, I hate this,” Joel added.  “But it isn’t up to me.  I’m sorry.”

Calvin nodded as if his entire vision of the world had just been confirmed, his eyes still disengaged from Joel’s.

“Like I said, we can give you another two weeks of work.  After that, you could still work with us through the temp agency, but I know you probably won’t want to do that.”

Calvin finally looked at Joel with sullen eyes.  “Aaight.”  He picked up his sweat jacket and bumped the door open with his shoulder.  “I’ll have to get back to you on the two weeks.”

“That’s fine,” Joel replied to Calvin’s back.

Later that afternoon Calvin had called the office to ask Joel if was eligible for unemployment benefits.  Joel said he should try, but since he’d been a contract worker, he might not be eligible.  Then he’d almost rung Joel again to call bullshit on the whole insurance excuse, seeing as how CMG had never given him a damn bit of insurance.  But then he remembered Joel saying liability insurance, not health.  He didn’t know what the regulations were on that, or how expensive it was, so he gave up the argument.  But the whole thing rang false to him.

Now, three days later, as he sat in his car and stared bleary-eyed into the Monday morning rain, it still didn’t add up.

That’s just the way it is / Some things will never change… sang Tupac.  A white dude may have written the song, Calvin said to himself, but Tupac made it real.  He stuffed the rest of his McDonald’s sausage biscuit into his mouth and started the engine, then pulled around to the front of the warehouse and waited for Joel or Travis to show.

When Travis pulled into the CMG lot, he was surprised to see Calvin’s car beside Joel’s.  He’d figured Calvin’s pride would get the best of him, and that he’d decide not to finish out the two weeks.  Travis was glad to see that wasn’t the case.  He knew Calvin needed the work.  He liked him, despite his moodiness and lack of attention to his work.   But he wasn’t looking forward to the awkwardness he knew was in store.

Travis generally split his time between the office and the warehouse, though now that Calvin was leaving, he knew he’d be working the warehouse more.

“Well, he showed up,” Travis said after exchanging a sober greeting with Joel.

“Yeah, he’s back there putting together orders.  He apologized for blowing up on the phone yesterday.”

“That’s good,” Travis agreed, waiting for his computer screen to come to life.  When it did he opened up his email and began vetting the morning’s messages.  “It really could turn out to be a good thing for Calvin.  As long as he’s here, he’s not going to go find something more substantial; he’s never going to take a pay cut and bust his butt when he can slide by here.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” Joel replied, clearly tired from days of worry over the decision.  “He’ll be alright,” Joel added.  “His family will help him out.  He won’t starve.”

But Travis knew that without a college level degree, or even rudimentary computer skills, Calvin’s prospects were slim, especially given the bleak economic news blaring at them over the office radio as they spoke.  If things got much worse, Travis knew he could be out of a job, too.  He knew what it felt like to be let go.  But he’d been single then, with a college degree under his belt.  Calvin had talked about going back to school, but he couldn’t afford it on his part-time pay at the warehouse.  His “woman” Denise already carried more than her share of their expenses.  Any full-time job he took would probably pay less per hour than CMG, hardly worth the daycare expense he and Denise would take on.  The work environment would be stiffer, too.  Calvin would probably have to take a drug test, and he’d have to stomach someone new telling him what to do.  Pride wasn’t Calvin’s only problem, thought Travis, but it was a big one.

That morning he lingered in the office with Joel, checking his email and shuffling through files, wondering what exactly he’d say to Calvin when he went back to the warehouse.  CMG had hung Calvin out to dry.  But what choice did they have?

He and Joel worked quietly, listening to the morning news on the radio.  Travis knew that Joel, despite his matter-of -fact resolve about firing Calvin, felt as uncomfortable as he did.

When Travis finally entered the warehouse and walked back to the shipping station, Calvin was on the far side of the warehouse loading a pallet.  Travis turned on the radio to drown out the baritone buzz that emanated from the hundred or so fluorescent lights high above, and also to avoid any awkward silence between himself and Calvin.  He booted up the dusty computer and began sorting through the few small orders that had come in over the weekend.

A few minutes later Calvin came around the corner on the forklift.  Travis nodded to him, but Calvin avoided eye contact.  He laid a pallet of ceramic floor tiles down and stepped off the forklift.

“Hey, Calvin.”

Calvin grunted in reply.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.”  Calvin’s tone was sullen but not hostile.

“You know you can use me as a reference.  You’ve got my cell phone number.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

Calvin picked up the roll of stretch wrap from the shipping table and began wrapping the pallet of tiles.  Travis stuck his face back in the computer screen.  Silence was okay with him.

Then about halfway through his wrapping job, Calvin stopped.

“They’d rather hire temp workers up in here than me,” he said indignantly.  “You believe that, shit?  I’ve known Joel for damn near six years.  He didn’t put up much of a fight with Stuart, don’t seem like.”

Here it is, thought Travis.  He searched for a way around Calvin’s remark about Joel.  “Man, I…I don’t know what to say.  Hell, the way the economy’s going, I might be right behind you.”

“Nah, you don’t have to worry,” Calvin said with a dismissive wave.  “They won’t cut you.  They need you too much.  Me, shit, I’m just a warehouse nigger.”

“Come on, it’s not a racial thing,” Travis said, immediately wishing he hadn’t.  There was a fragile camaraderie between them, and he didn’t want to shatter it by starting the wrong conversation.

“The hell it ain’t,” Calvin said.  “Look at all the people round here working on the docks, taking out the trash, cleaning the bathrooms.  They all black.  Warehouse niggers, that’s what we are.”  He laughed as if to let Travis know he wasn’t getting all uppity about it, just stating a fact.

Travis shrugged.  What was he supposed to say?  He’d worked the dock too, and he’d taken out the trash and cleaned the bathroom more often than Calvin had, though he’d done these things without being asked.  He knew that made a big difference.  If only Calvin would do things without being asked, take more initiative…

“I’m just speaking my mind, you know,” Calvin continued.  “That’s the way I am.  I say what I think.  Some people sit there and think all sorts of things and never say em, cause they afraid what other people will think.  I ain’t like that.”

“I respect that,” Travis said.

He knew Calvin probably thought of him as one of those people who hid their thoughts.  If so, he was right.  What good would it do for Travis to say what he thought?  Maybe you should keep more of your thoughts to yourself, Calvin.  Focus more on your job.  Sometimes you do good work.  But a lot of the time you just don’t give a shit.  You complain about not having enough hours, but then you leave early every other day.  I know you’ve got family responsibilities, and it’s hard to care when you’re doing this kind of work, but it’s the only way to get ahead.  We have to recheck every pallet you pack and every count you take.  And getting high before work doesn’t help the math skills.

The only thing that would come from Travis speaking his mind would be a fight.  If anyone were going to say these things, it would have to be Joel.  And he’d already opted not to.  Joel hadn’t exactly lied; Stuart really had suggested they use only temp workers to save money.  But Joel had been complicit in the decision.

Travis turned back to the shipping computer, hoping to let the conversation lie, but Calvin ignored the hint.  Standing there with a roll of stretch wrap in his hands and a half-wrapped pallet in front of him, he held forth.

“Even a lot of folks who say they ain’t racist still are,” he continued.  “They may not even know they are.  They act like they cool with you on the job, cut up with you and all.  But when it’s closin time, they go hang out with they white friends.  And you ain’t invited.”

“Do you ever ask them to hang with you?” Travis asked, directly but without accusation.

“Hell, yeah.  If a white dude’s hanging around me and my boys, and we got somewhere to go, we’ll say, ‘Hey, come party with us.  Gonna be some booze and some fine women.’  And if he go with us, even if he’s the only white dude in the room, we gonna act the same way we always do.  We cool as long as he is.”

“That’s good.  I know a lot of white people who would do the same, though.”

“Well, a lot of em wouldn’t.  More than you’d think.  All I’m sayin is there’s still a lot more racism out there than some folks think they is.”

Travis nodded.  “Maybe so.  But you’ve got to admit things have gotten a lot better in the last few decades.  I mean, we’ve got a black president now.  Half black, anyway.”  He and Calvin had talked a lot about the election that fall in the weeks leading up to it.  Calvin had come in excited the day after.  Travis had never seen him so happy.

“Yeah,” Calvin conceded.  “I’ll give you that.”  His tone suddenly changed, and his scowl faded.  “My grandmother came over and cooked us a big fat dinner that weekend after the election.  She was smiling like I ain’t seen her do in a long time.  Says we got to understand how important this moment is.  Goin on and on about Jack Johnson and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.  Hell, she didn’t have to tell me bout all that.”

“I guess she thought she’d never see it.”

“Naw.  Never thought I’d see it.  Now I can tell my kids ‘you can be the president if you want’ and mean it.  They gonna get a college education.  I ain’t gonna let em end up like me.  My days are pretty much over now.  I got to make sure they get the chances I didn’t.”

“You’re only twenty-nine, Calvin.  You can’t give up on yourself yet.  Lots of people start new careers in their thirties or even their forties.  Hell, I’m one of them.”

Calvin made no reply but seemed to at least consider the advice as he finished wrapping the pallet of tile.  He returned to the forklift without saying anything more and drove off to pick another order.  Travis was relieved to have ended the conversation in relative harmony.  The worst was over, he thought.  It seemed Calvin was resigned to riding out the next two weeks without causing trouble.  Travis wondered if he might be able to dig up a couple of leads for Calvin before he left.  There had to be something he could do to help.  If he were in Calvin’s shoes, and skin, he might not be so different.  Calvin’s capacity for self-delusion was no greater than his own when he was Calvin’s age, which was only seven years ago.  They’d both had to give up their aspirations to a musical career.  It was just that he, Travis, had had more options to work with, a fact that had little or nothing to do with his innate talent or character.  So much in life was circumstance, he thought.  True, a person creates his own circumstances to some extent, but to create you have to start with some materials, and some people were given more materials than others.  That didn’t excuse Calvin’s apathy and erratic behavior, but it was a fact nonetheless.

After processing the day’s orders, he checked the pallets Calvin had packed so far.  The count was off on one of them, but he decided to fix it himself after Calvin left.  Then he headed back to the office in front to work on the stack of unpaid invoices on his desk.

“How’s it going back there with Calvin?” Joel asked.

“He’s okay, I think.  He did some venting, but nothing too bad.”

“Good.  Listen, Stuart’ll be here in a few minutes.  He and I have that lunch meeting with the guy from The Kitchen Store.  Then I have to take David to his soccer game.  You mind holding down the fort for the rest of the day?  I’ll return the favor later this week.”

“Sure.  No problem.”

Joel lowered his voice a little.  “And, um, when you’re closing up, will you check to make sure that far warehouse door is locked.  I don’t think Calvin would do anything stupid, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful.  I know he’s pretty pissed right now, and it’s not inconceivable that he could unlock that door.  A couple of packages of tile or slabs of marble would be worth a nice little chunk of change.”

“I’ll check it.”

“I hate to think that way, but I’ve got to.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Calvin should be out of here in another hour, if he doesn’t decide to leave early.  If anything gets weird, call me on my cell.  I’ll come back down.”

“It’ll be fine.”

When Joel had gone, Travis looked out the office window into the warehouse.  The near perfect columns of product, the tall steel scaffold racks, the stacks of pallets arranged along the walls gave him a strange sense of comfort.  After years of resistance, he’d finally come down from his ivory tower and joined the modern economic machine.  Its impersonal grandeur was impressive.  It was everything he’d detested and feared as a dreamy, idealistic youth, but those dreams and ideals had gotten him nowhere, he’d finally had to admit.  It felt good to be a small part of a giant system, at least for now.  It was a means to an end.  He wondered if Calvin had ever felt that way about a job, or ever would.

Calvin left the forklift and walked toward the bathroom next to the office.  He stopped at the full-length windows that overlooked the parking lot and watched as Joel climbed into shiny new Lexus SUV, the dealer tag still in place.  As the car backed out of the parking space, he saw that Stuart was in the driver’s seat.

Calvin ducked into the bathroom before Stuart saw him.  He couldn’t believe it.  He remembered Joel telling him that Stuart was trying to sell his 2003 BMW.

“Son of a bitch,” he said out loud, but not loud enough to be heard through the wall.  “Says he can’t afford me; then he pull up in a new ride like that.  Bet that shit cost thirty-five grand, at least!”  His voice was getting louder, “I ain’t got enough hours hardly to feed my kid and pay my half of the rent.  They can’t afford to pay me $300 bucks a week?!  It ain’t like they givin me benefits or nothin.  Hell, they ain’t even thinkin about that.”

When he got back to the forklift he was still talking to himself.  He hoisted one end of a four-foot red granite countertop and laid it on the padded forks.  Normally Travis helped him lift the heavy pieces, but Calvin didn’t feel like asking for his help.  As he pulled backwards to slide the rest of it onto the forks, he tripped over the second fork.   The hand he’d had on the bottom edge of the granite slipped, and the slab came down on his foot.

“Motherfucker!” he barked out, the call reverberating against the concrete and metal.  The pain shot through his body and into his brain, splitting open his thoughts and releasing a burst of omni-directional anger.

“Motherfucker-motherfucker-motherfucker,” he chanted and hopped around in a circle.  Then he struck the marble slab with the heel of his hand.  This caused new pain, which at least took some of the sting out of his foot.

In the office Travis had just printed out a new order and was about to return to the shipping station when heard the faint cursing coming from the warehouse.  He crossed the office and opened the warehouse door.

“You okay?” he called in the direction of Calvin’s voice, which came from one of the aisles to his left.

“Fuckin granite fell on my foot!”

“Shit.  Did it break any bones?”

“Naw.  Just hurts like hell.”

“Well, take a break and get some ice on it.  I’ll grab a towel or something for you to wrap the ice in.”

After a beat of silence Calvin answered, “I’m aaight.  Just need to walk it off.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Travis shrugged and walked back to the shipping station.

Calvin’s anger, augmented by the shooting pain, boiled over.  He let it take control of him.  He wouldn’t be told when to take a break, not by Travis, and not by Joel.  Not anymore.  I’m gonna give em my resignation, effective immediately.  Gonna hand-deliver the motherfucker.

He grabbed the granite top and slid it onto the forks, then hopped onto the forklift, raised the forks off the ground a foot or so, and throttled forward.   He navigated out of the pick lane and into the main aisle, then brought the forklift to full speed.  His eyes were red and hot.  The granite countertop pounded against the forks each time the wheels hit a divet in the warehouse floor.  Travis heard the noise and looked up from the shipping station computer.

“He’s gonna run into…” Travis said out loud, before disbelief stole his speech.  The forklift made a sudden jerk to the right and the countertop slid sideways on the pallet about a foot.  He was now headed directly toward Travis.

“Jesus!”  Travis backpedaled away from the computer and started toward his left.  But Calvin adjusted his course away from the shipping station and toward the wall that separated the office from the warehouse, his eyes wide and unblinking.

“Calvin!” Travis shouted as the forklift neared the wall.  Twenty feet, fifteen, ten…  Travis cringed and turned away in anticipation of the crash.  Then he heard the brakes of the forklift seethe and hiss, and felt the floor beneath him shake as the granite slab shot forward off the pallet and crashed to the ground at the base of the wall.

Travis lowered his arms and opened his eyes to see Calvin slumped over the steering lever, his head in his hands. He could hear Calvin whispering a prayer of some sort, though he couldn’t distinguish the words.

He walked quietly toward the office to survey the damage.  The granite had torn a foot-long gash in the drywall and peeled off a length of rubber molding at the base, but there was no real structural damage done.  The forklift, which had tipped onto its forks when Calvin braked and then righted itself, slam, back down onto all four wheels, seemed okay as well.  The countertop had broken, but only into three pieces, two of reusable size.  It would cost Calvin, but not as much as replacing a wall, and God knows what else.  Stuart could press charges, of course, but Travis didn’t think he would.  It wouldn’t be worth the money, time and bad feelings.

But if Calvin wasn’t in his right mind, then Travis wanted to get him the hell out of there, or get himself out.  Should he call Joel?  No, he didn’t think he needed to.

“You okay?”  Travis asked, almost whispering.  It was the first thing that came to him, though clearly Calvin was not, in a holistic sense, okay.

Calvin kept praying with his head down and didn’t answer.  When he’d finally finished, he raised up and looked toward the ceiling.

“Guess that’s the end of this job for me,” he said after a while.

“Listen, I know you’re dealing with a lot right now, but…”

“No, you listen.  I can’t explain to you what I was thinkin, cause it wouldn’t make sense to you.  Yall ack like you know me.  You think I’m not as smart as you cause I don’t know about computers and shit.  But I know a lotta things you don’t, like about growin up in the projects.  You ain’t ever had to worry bout getting killed walking down your street, or bout whether your mamma’d be able to pay the heat bill in the winter.  Never had dudes you didn’t know call you nigger when you was in school, or the cops shake you down just cause you smiled at em the wrong way.  You never been thrown in jail, or slept up under a bridge.  Yall don’t know bout all that.”

“You’re right, I don’t.  But I know that if I were you, I’d leave here as soon as possible, before someone decides to come by, or Joel comes back.  This was an accident, and you got upset and left.  Okay?  Joel will call you, I’m sure.  But right now you should just leave.”

Calvin stared at Travis sharp-eyed for a moment, then looked away.  “No returns.  Ain’t that the policy round here?”

Travis made no response.  There was nothing else to say.  He wished he could give Calvin some word of encouragement, or at least shake his hand, but under the circumstances neither seemed appropriate.  Calvin climbed down from the lift, walked slowly toward the office door, and left the warehouse without looking back.

Fisherman Jack

Gentlemen

Ray Tuller picked me up on Saturday afternoon to go fishing.  Uncle Ray, as I called him then, was a friend of my father’s, a drinking buddy who knew how to control himself.  My father could not.  It wasn’t the first time he’d drunk himself out of a Saturday fishing trip.  Still, Ray had insisted on taking me with him.

I met him at the front door while Dad sat in the kitchen with a day-old newspaper and a mug of coffee and whiskey.  I went to the basement to get my rod and tackle box and to give Ray and my father a minute to say whatever they needed to say to each other.  When I came back upstairs, Ray was sitting across from my father at the laminated table, neither looking at the other.

“Sure you won’t come with us?” Ray asked Dad as he got up to leave.  My father declined with weary wave.

“Catch a couple of good ones, Frank,” Dad said to me as we headed out the front door.  “I’ll clean em and grill em for us tonight.”  He was smiling but his eyes were sad.

“Okay,” I said.  The dinner offer did little to soften my disappointment, though he did have a special way of seasoning and grilling fish that I loved and, unfortunately, never learned.

I climbed into the passenger side of Ray’s red 1947 Chevy truck, tackle box between my feet and fishing rod sticking out the window.  I bounced up and down on the springy bench seat as the truck pulled onto McPherson Street and then onto Highway 29, which led to the Sagasaw River.

“What part of the river we gonna fish today?”

“Oh, I thought we’d go to your spot below Cedar Mill Bridge.”  Ray smiled but kept his eye on the road.  “What do you think?”

“All right,” I said and thought of the fifteen inch trout I’d caught there two weeks earlier.  It was a record for our part of the Sagasaw River as far as the two of us knew, which was far enough for me.

We drove without speaking.  I listened to the hum of the road.  It was hard to make small talk when both of us were thinking about why my father wasn’t with us.  I didn’t want to talk about that; I just wanted to get to the river.  I knew once I smelled the damp, mossy air and stepped into the bracing water, my mind would begin to clear.  My worries would slip away on the current, little by little, until all I thought about were stones, trees, water, and fish.  It worked almost every time.

As we turned onto the highway, we saw a man ahead of us on the shoulder of the road, his thumb in the air.  Ray drove slowly as we passed the man, getting a brief but good look at him, and then pulled off the road.  He was an older black man, maybe sixty, with a tweed cap in his hand and a soiled white apron draped across his arm.  The red lettering on the apron was upside down, but I could still read it.  Melvin’s Cafeteria.  Melvin’s was known for their meatloaf and their chicken “cordon bleu,” which was good by default, since no one else in town served it.

“Where you headed?” Ray asked.

“Bout three miles down the way.  My car’s broke down right now.  Some days I walk, but a day like today,” the cook took a labored breath and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve.

“Climb on in.  Frank, put your rod and tackle in the back with mine.”

I did, then climbed back into the cab and slid over close to Ray.  The man got in after me and gave us both a polite nod.

“Sure appreciate it,” the man said, removing his cap and nodding.  His apron and clothes smelled strong but good, once you got used to it.  Fried chicken, meatloaf, red sauce, turnip greens and baked bread, all mixed together.  He told us his car needed a new starter, which he couldn’t afford it until his next paycheck.

“I don’t mind walking in the morning,” he explained, “when it’s cooler and there ain’t many cars out.  But the highway’s hot and loud in the afternoon, just like the kitchen I been in for eight hours.”  He laughed.

“I got a buddy named Wayne Harlan,” Ray said.  “Works at Benney’s Gulf Station in town.  Great mechanic, and he’s cheap.”

The cook nodded, considering the information.  “Wayne Harlan, you say?”

“Mhm.  If you call down there, ask for him, and tell him Ray told you to call.”

“Thank you.  I might just do that.”

Ray and the cook exchanged a few further remarks about the weather, then baseball.  I listened with interest, easily impressed by adult conversation of any sort.  There was a knowing in the tone of voice and the phrasing that attracted me.  I didn’t want to talk, just listen.  As the cook spoke, he saw me staring at him and winked at me.  He asked where we planned to fish and I told him.

“Frank caught a winner there a couple weeks ago,” Ray said.  “Tell him about your trout, Frank.”

I was a little shy to speak at first, but I was also glad to have the opportunity to tell about it again.

The pool in which I’d caught the trout was just beyond the downstream bend from Cedar Mill Bridge.  The creek bed there was lined with rocks and pebbles, very little silt, leaving the water clear for me to spot a fish, and for it to spot me.  A thick cluster of rhododendron hung over the water and cast a deep green shadow across half the pool.  Just above and below the pool were two small falls.  A large fish would have had trouble entering or leaving the pool when the water level was low, and with the summer drought the pool had become somewhat partitioned from the rest of the river.

The trout hit my line on the first cast.  I couldn’t see it right away, but as soon as I set the hook, I knew it was a good-sized fish.  It swam the circumference of the pool twice before breaking the water.  When its silver and black speckled body slapped against the surface of the pool, I could see that I had the largest fish I’d ever caught on the line.  But I hadn’t finished catching him.

Jittery with excitement as I reeled him in, I stepped carefully across the slick rocks that lined the pool, cutting the distance between us as I reeled him in.  Once I got him out of the water, I wrangled with the spinner bait in his mouth, but the lure was set deep in his throat and didn’t want to come out.  As I adjusted my grip on the fish, he gave a sudden desperate flap,  slipping from my hands.  I lunged to catch him and lost my footing on the rocks.  Somehow as I teetered and spun to regain balance, I managed to jerk the line loose of the spinner bait.  The fish splashed into the shallow water and darted back into the pool.

It was like getting a toy on Christmas Day that you’ve wanted all year, only to have it break within moments after taking it out of the box.  Crouching behind a large rock, I scanned the pool, hoping my prize trout hadn’t found a way out.

Soon enough, he drifted out of the shadows of the rhododendron and into the middle of the pool, the spinner hanging from the side of his mouth.  I could see his mouth opening and closing as he tried to eject the lure from it.  I quickly tied another lure onto my line, cast across the pool, and reeled it right past his mouth, but he’d apparently wised up.  Not only was he not interested in the new lure, he moved to another part of the pool to avoid it.

As I watched him float there with the spinner hanging from his mouth, I began to feel sorry for him.  I didn’t know at the time that a fish will eventually work a lure out of its mouth.  As far as I knew, this fish would live the rest of his life with this burden I’d inflicted on him.  I remained determined to catch him again, but now my motivation was twofold.  I wanted someone to see my prize catch, but I also wanted to spare him the misery of living with that lure in his mouth.

I crouched down low and moved around the pool until I was behind him.  Then I let out my line about three feet, dropped the new lure in the water directly in front of him, and jerked it toward me.  The treble hook grazed his head but didn’t catch, and the fish moved again to another part of the pool.  I repeated the strategy, and again missed.  I knew my father had a net in the truck, but I was too far away from where we’d parked to go get it.  With dwindling hopes, I sat beside the pool and watched the fish.  I remember feeling a momentary dread as I looked into his black, expressionless eyes.  It felt to me as if they knew something I couldn’t know, and didn’t want to.  But that wasn’t part of the story as I told it that day to the cook.

About the time I was ready to give up and walk away, I heard a splash upriver from me.  I turned and saw my father wading downriver toward me, casting as he went.  I knew that meant he was about ready to pack it in.  I decided to try one more time to gaff the fish.

This time, the treble hook caught him in the gills.  I pulled him close to the rock I was standing on, but I didn’t know how well I’d hooked him and didn’t want to risk trying to pull him out of the pool.  I reached down into the water with my free hand, but there didn’t seem to be any good way to get a hold of him without grabbing the treble hook, too.

“Dad, come quick,” I yelled.  My father reeled in his line and trudged through the water toward me.  The fish pulled hard against my line, but the hook held.

“Damn,” he said when he saw the trout.  “That’s a beauty.”  Then he looked a little closer.  “How the hell’d you do that?” he asked.

But now wasn’t the time to explain.  “Help me get him out of the water,” I said.

Dad thought for a second, then took off his fishing hat.  “Here,” he said, handing it to me.  “Scoop him out with this.  Here, I’ll hold the rod.”

I gave him the rod and lowered the hat into the water, letting it soak all the way through.  Then I moved it under the fish and quickly lifted it out of the water.  The fish was much longer than the diameter of the hat, but I managed to get him onto the rock.  Then I put my foot on him and set about removing the lures.  The one in his gills came out fairly easily.  The spinner in his mouth still proved a challenge, but my father had a pair of pliers on him.  Trying hard not to rip the fish’s throat apart, I pushed and pulled until I finally broke the lure loose from his throat.

My father measured the fish with his arm, declaring it the biggest one he’d ever seen on the Sagasaw.  Then he reached for the stringer dangling from his belt loop.  It held two other modest trout he’d caught upstream.

“I’m going to put him back,” I said.

Dad raised his eyebrows.  “You sure?” he asked.

“Yeah, he’s earned it.”  It was something I’d heard my father say before.  “Plus, now that you’ve seen him, I got a witness.”

Dad gave a resigned nod.  “All right.  I guess we can make a meal out of these two I got here.”

When I’d finished my story, the cook nodded and gave a grunt of approval.  “Everybody gotta have a fishing story or two,” he said.  “You got a good one now.”  Then he pointed to a side road just ahead of us on the right.  “That’s my road.  You can just let me out right there on the corner.”

“We can take you to your house,” said Ray.  “We’re not in a hurry.”

“That’s all right,” the cook said.  “I like to walk on this street.  Nice shady trees, not too many dogs, and the ones it has are friendly.”

Ray nodded and pulled the truck onto the shoulder.  The cook reached into his pocket and pulled out a large silver coin.  He slid it into my palm and winked, then reached over to shake Ray’s hand.  I looked down and saw a shiny fifty-cent piece.

“Good luck with your car,” Ray said.

“Thank you.  I appreciate the lift.”

The cook put on his cap and opened the door.  I looked up, wanting to thank him, but he got out quickly and didn’t look at me again.  He turned toward the side street, waving once as he walked away.  I waved back, though he couldn’t see me.

As we bounced back onto the highway, Ray asked me to open my hand.  I showed him the coin.

“You shouldn’t have taken it,” Ray said.  “That man doesn’t have enough money to be giving any away.”

I looked up at him, half apologetic, half confused.  I hadn’t had time to think about what I should or shouldn’t do, and I wasn’t in the habit of refusing gifts.

“He just slid it in my hand,” I said, respectfully defensive.  “Besides, me and Dad don’t have much money either.”  I waited for a rebuttal, but instead Ray chuckled.

“Well, you got a point,” he said.  “I guess he took a shine to you.  He was a gentleman, I’ll tell you that.”

On the river that afternoon, I thought about the cook, and about what Ray had called him.  My mother had used that word a lot: gentleman.  Although she’d died before I thought to ask her exactly what it meant, I’d learned its meaning through accumulated example.  “I married a real gentleman,” my mother would say whenever my father did something unexpectedly nice for us.  The term suggested, among other things, a certain sharpness of appearance, like the cook’s tweed cap.  But that was not the heart of the word for my mother, at least not as I understood her.  It seemed to indicate an uncommon generosity of spirit, though I couldn’t have explained it that way at the time.

It had begun to look to me, though, like gentlemen didn’t fare too well.  My father had been too gentle to bear the loss of my mother without relying on alcohol.  And the cook, where had being a gentleman gotten him?  A job behind a hot stove and a broken-down car?  Still the word meant something to me, because it had meant something to my mother, and because I liked the people she or my father or Ray referred to as such.  Ray himself was a gentleman, I thought, and his life seemed pretty good, as good as most people I knew, anyway.  Without quite settling the matter in my mind, I turned my thoughts back to fishing.  Every few minutes I’d reach into my pocket and let the weight of the coin rest on the pads of my fingers.  I ran my fingertips back and forth across the tiny raised images on each side.

It was another good day for me below the bridge, though not as noteworthy as the last.  I caught three respectable trout, a good meal for my father and me.  As Ray drove me home and the setting sun glowed orange through the trees along the highway, I thought about how my father would grill the fillets and we’d eat them while watching “Laugh In” on the TV. I reached into my pocket again and flipped the coin in my fingers, then clutched it.

“Or maybe,” I thought, “I’ll go to the movies.”

Oyster

Written and played in Wilson’s basement.  Edited at Park studios (i.e. my house).  Logic rules.

Written and played by Park Ellis and Chris Wilson

Free

Yet another in the Crate basement series.  Park on the vocals.

Written and played by Park Ellis and Chris Wilson

The Journey Begins

Chris Wilson

On a mission….