Those First Steps

FROM the moment Maggie stepped into the grassy wedding aisle until we crossed back over the same place, those were the happiest, most blissful moments of my life right up until our daughter was born. No doubt could stand in our glory, no fear dared to look at us. You could have seen our joy from space, shooting through the atmosphere like a rocket shooting miles of silly string behind it. There was such a happy tractor beam from her eyes to mine it’s a wonder that anyone lived through the ceremony without being torn apart. Armageddon could have come and gone and a holy bubble would have kept us safe. There is a moment just before the cocoon breaks open and releases its prize in which the shell is almost as beautiful as the contents within. Maggie walking up the grass, down the row made by pretty folding chairs, our eyes locked, had the gods made war on a nearby grassy knoll they would have laid down their weapons in awe and respect at the great good thing happening between us. Beauty in all the languages of every tongue rested on her like a raiment of light, and I know that in her eyes I was a prince. I felt like one. I heard my father, my best man, sniffing behind me, and I would have cried if the tears hadn’t been so afraid of being seared away instantly. Maggie’s father lumbered like a wounded elephant, ponderous and proud but knowing that his most precious treasure would soon be departed, would soon be gone, would soon be lost to him forever. Maggie’s smile never faltered. God cocooned the area around us and our guests to shield us from the July Georgia heat, and the temperature dropped ten degrees, a breeze stirred the long fingers of the willows behind us, and the names of all our children were written in their flittering. We grinned like idiots, like fools, like two people who have no right to be so lucky. When my faith in God trembles, I remember that moment, and I know. I just know. There isn’t that much luck in the world to deliver so good and right a woman to so undeserving a man as myself. So I pray and almost always start with thanks. Thank you for my wife, and now thank you for my daughter. I understand the heavy steps of my father-in-law, now. After my daughter was born, I loved him more than I could have thought possible. My own steps… The day is too far away. Our daughter was in those vows, our whole life was in our eyes, in those words, in those first steps through the grass as man and woman, wife and husband, sealed and spoken for and blessed more than could ever be dreamed of. And I thank you, and I thank you, and I thank you some more Lord. I will never be done thanking you. 

The Hindsight Periscope

WHEN I didn’t have a job and claimed I was writing but was really just sleeping a lot and drinking a few nights a week, all I could talk about was college football and basketball. When my team lost, I lost. An entire day at the very least was shot. When my team won? Well, the day was not lost, but I didn’t win anything other than a reprieve until the next week. One of the blessings of Mississippi has been distance from Georgia Tech, being unable to watch them on a weekly basis because I was too busy, or working, or they weren’t on TV out here, or I simply didn’t want to watch them. I feel like a recovering addict. There is magic in college sports, but I don’t know if it’s not dark magic. The feelings are not positive enough, the results do not seem good enough, to justify a downfall. 

       Watching college football now and getting upset about college football in particular, reminds me of that time before we moved to Mississippi. There is a varying scale of self-loathing when I think back on that person that is manifested in the question I ask my wife from time to time, “Why did you ever stick with me?”

            “You were pursuing a dream,” she’ll say sometimes.

            “No I wasn’t, I was getting wasted at the Brick Store half the time.”

            She doesn’t refute this truth, but she’ll stop folding a shirt or typing a paper or look up from nursing our daughter, and then she’ll say, “I saw the good in you that you wouldn’t let yourself see.” To which I usually get teary and she says, “Rich, it’s fine, can you go start dinner while I put her down?” and we eat soon after and watch an episode of a favorite show. Maybe we haven’t been doing this domestic life long enough to be overcome by existential ennui or some such bullshit, or maybe being in this place where we simply have it so much better than so many other people and we are reminded of that daily, me in my job at the yard, Maggie in her internship in a local school working with kids in need, that we simply feel grateful. If I come home and a neighbor is in their yard working, we say hey and wave, and sometimes we’ll walk over and talk with each other, “How are you? How are the kids? Keeping busy? That’s good, that’s good.” And I’m not sure why this type of life is consistently lampooned as a false façade for happiness. Happiness is where it is. It may be in a suburb thirty miles outside Atlanta, despite an hour commute each way. It may be in a trailer park, despite the earth shattering fear of strong storms. It may be in a little college town in Mississippi that revolves around that college the way Mercury runs around the sun. 

     There is happiness even at the lumber yard. When the planer is humming, running some of our better stock, when the stacker is flying through one truck of wood after another, when it’s just been a damn good week in late autumn and the weather hasn’t been scorching or freezing and not too many people missed to necessitate we run too much overtime, and we sit around the break room or smoker’s hut and drink a beer or two (or if you’re Nate, you drink three before anyone has finished their first and I have to tell him to save some for everyone else, and he quits shoveling spares into his pockets). Those are good times. Those are nuggets of happiness. Despite what ole Dick would keep trying to have me believe, there are some places or times where the mantra of “happiness is a choice” is harder to follow than others. Some soil is harder to work and produce a good bounty than others.  What does crops up in that rocky earth is more beloved than it is in a place where the soil gives up food and beauty more willingly, with little abandon. 

            One of the last times I bought beer for the guys, we were sitting in the break room, enjoying a 'cold beer' as people say here. That was before Laron left, the guy I was planning on training up to take my spot so I could go into purchasing, selling, something other than managing all those damn morons. It was before Lane left, claiming we didn’t appreciate him enough, which looking back on it, we didn’t. Mitch didn’t believe in giving pay bumps unless there was no denying a guy deserved it. I’ve always been a bit more lax, or at least I was until I worked under Mitch for so long. It was before Jeff left to take a fabrication job at the steel mill, where he only lasted about a month before he got laid off. One of those times looking back that was fairly momentous, or at least it looks that way through my Hindsight Periscope, which I imagine is like one of those sets of pewter-looking binoculars on a solid metal post you find at the Empire State building, Niagra Falls, Vic Falls in Zimbabwe or Table Mountain in Cape Town for long distance viewing. These sorts of memory sojourns require a quarter or more of emotional toll, an indulgence, payment to see far back and remember. The memory of that hour, that break room, is purer for this. So many people still there who made the plant run well, getting ready to leave because for some reason Mitch believed you can pay someone $12 an hour to manage seven other people and expect them to stay when his old job comes knocking offering five bucks more. It didn’t matter how many times I told him I thought we needed to give Laron more money, I was told that throwing money at the problem doesn’t fix it. But Laron wasn’t the problem, he was the solution. I wanted to give him more money to entice him to stay, because he was good at what he did, and he was damn smart. Yet through the Hindsight Periscope, I can see that I didn’t fight as hard as I want to remember. I argued my case, I made my point, but I didn’t do everything I could to make it happen. That is when I feel the muscles around my heart tighten, knowing that I didn’t get it done because I was basically scared of Mitch, who wasn't scared to raise his voice, get in your face, imply that you don’t know what you’re talking about if you are suggesting something he doesn’t want to hear.

            There was a time when we were still in Atlanta that I talked about taking lessons in Krav Maga, the Israeli Defense Force invented style of martial arts. If I knew how to fight hand to hand, I wouldn’t be so easily intimidated. I never took a lesson. I swing the Hindsight Periscope to the left and look back to when I was fifteen, and in the thralls of being an asshole of a teenager to both my dad and my mom, and my dad pulled me aside in the kitchen one night and told me that if I kept upsetting my mother, he was going to take me outside and we could settle things like men. When I told a friend this story years later, he said, “Jesus, what did that do to your psyche?” I scoffed at him, but knew what he meant. I just want to make sure that in the future if I have a son who is making his mother, my wife, cry, that I ground his ass for eternity before I threaten to beat him up.

        Sitting in the break room after that great week of production, Scott asked me if I went to college. What he actually said was, “I bet you went to college, didn’t ya?” I have grown used to direct questions of this sort from the guys who work the line.

            “I did,” I said, then tried to play down the privilege of my higher education by saying, “Mostly just drank a lot of beer.”

            I was not ready for his reply. “Yeah, that’s what rich people do,” he said. “They go to college and drink a lot of beer.”

            I looked into my nearly empty can of Bud Light, shrugged, and said, “It was a good time, I learned a lot.”

            “I bet,” said Scott. A month later I’d promote him to Planer lead when Laron left.

            Raising the can to my mouth, I polished off my second. I walked over to the case to grab another one, but found it was empty. “You need one, Rich?”  Nate asks, starting to pull a beer out of his the big pocket in his cargo pants.

            I put up a hand like a stop sign. I’m not driving close to drunk anymore, not after last time. “I’m good,” I say. I’m ready to get home to my wife and baby girl. “See y’all Monday.” See you on Monday, they say. Hasta lunes, the Mexicans say.

“Hasta lunes.”

            

Leave Your Troubles At the Gate

            BEFORE Josh called and told me that he had nearly run the semi off the road to avoid a head-on collision with an anesthesiologist texting away while behind the wheel of her brand new Camero , I was sitting at my desk, head in both hands, sweat soaking through my first winter layer, brought on by my most recent employee confrontation. I thought about what I was trying to convey to Beau that morning as I chewed him out, steam pouring out of my mouth against the cold in the air and the cold emanating from him towards me. I told him to leave his troubles at the gate and pretend that nothing was more important inside this fence than work.

I imagine what it would look like if we could leave all our troubles at the gate when we arrive at work each morning, at varying times before the production lines start up at 6:00am. Children and wives and grandparents and girlfriends and mistresses and at least one self-proclaimed baby mama hop out of trucks, cars, vehicles that can only be described as jalopies, where they take their places behind the chain link fence, twining their fingers like ivy through the cold thin metal. “Can’t take ya with me, baby,” the guys say, and the concerns hop out of their vehicles with a “Pick me up when you get off?” Everyone, myself included, offer some kind of affirmative- nods, smiles through pain, a chipper ‘you know it’. Each passenger door slams closed and we blow a kiss to the fight we had last night about soggy meatloaf, or the light bill that’s two months late, or the affair that won’t die, or the bottles hidden at the bottom of the trash can again, the surgery our daughter needs that this job’s wages won’t come close to covering.

With a clear head and a clear conscience each man works like a bandit. A ten-hour day knocked out clean and true, one swift strike to the workday’s jaw. We power machines down. There’s not much about life work anyone talks about on the way back to the time clock, because inside these gates we're all pretending that work is all there is. Everyone’s an actor giving a flawless performance as a dedicated lumber stacker, lumber grader, truck driver or maintenance man, even the boss’ son starring as planer mill manager, a steadfast pillar of commitment that assures the community that this plant is here to stay. They clock out and I lock up.

We start up our cars and trucks and pull down to the gate to find our worries and troubles and concerns right where we left them. A few of the lesser concerns talk amongst themselves, but the big ones- Is my wife going to leave me? Is my girlfriend pregnant again? Am I about to lose my job? Am I going to be a good daddy?- they are silent against the fence, fingers like ice cold vices glued to the fence. The greetings are much different than the partings. Each man sighs as his biggest Worry slips in the vehicle. Each Worry leans over as if to stroke her hard-working man’s face and give him a kiss. Instead, her frigid hand slips through his chest, as if the flesh was an unbuttoned shirt in July, waiting for one cool breeze. Worry slips her fingers around her man’s heart and squeezes, infrequently, but enough so he doesn’t breath like he did at work today, after he left this worry down by the gate, put on his work face and began to act his part. Each man tries to breath, but a full and satisfyingly deep breath is just out of reach. “I missed you,” each Worry coos, looking deep into her man’s eyes. The costumes are off, the play is over, and the lights are now going up. The lighting reveals more worries, more concerns. possibly pebbles of happiness if they could focus. But today the worries are like a broken tooth he can’t stop tonguing. It’s broken and it’s hurt, but it’s his. “Missed you too, baby,” he says, and they hit the dusty trail. 

Daniel's First Day

Wrote this a good while ago...

THE S382 planer screams like a Tai-fighter each time a board flies through. The top and bottom head, two cylinders covered with eight rows of spiraling knives, scour the rough lumber until it shoots out, like slow motion laser beams. In the line of fire of the outfeed, where the boards are spat out of the machine, is the stacker operator. I imagine he’s a member of the Rebel Alliance, and the bad guys can’t hit him. The boards are eaten one by one, their screams filling my head with imaginary starships, and I’m gone.

            Yesterday morning will not get out of my head. The new employee’s first day, he’s waiting by the front door, holding the new hard hat I just gave him in one hand, an insulated lunch box in the other. It’s full of bottles of water. Safeguard against the Mississippi heat. Then he lurches. His left leg juts out like a spider’s looking for a perch, then his hips sink. His head seems to have filled with solid lead, because it’s tilting out over his knee. His eyes are unfocused, his jaw slack as useless chain. “This mother fucker is still drunk from last night,” is the thought the crawls across my eyes, and I almost instantly regret it. His ponderous head has become magnetic, and he crashes into the ground, on the biggest rock within 50 feet, left temple first. Right arm springs to his body, and one leg stiffens straight out while the other struggles to find a fetal home. He’s shaking. Convulsing. Seizure. “Somebody call 9-1-1,” I say, jumping into a kneel beside him. I hear the words, “I don’t have no service,” and I say, “Go inside and call 9-1-1!”

            He goes limp, and I almost piss my pants. Then his eyes come to life, but like a drugged-up patient waking up from surgery. He starts trying to stand, and begins to fall over. This time I catch him. I try to sit him down, but he wants to get up. I try to help him stand, but his legs won’t hold him. His face was already pockmarked, but now he’s pouring blood out of a gumball-sized hole in his cheekbone. Not the temple, the temple is still sacred.

            The local fire department arrives, and I sigh in my heart because I don’t have to take care of him anymore. The Mexicans have already walked down to the line to begin work. They’ve seen some shit. They know there’s no point watching shit get worse if you can’t do anything about it. The American blacks and whites stop watching because everything is going to be fine. The entertainment is over. He’s put on a stretcher, strapped down, and the real EMT’s from the nearest big town, 30 minutes away, arrive. It’s amazing how smug driving 30 minutes to take care of a bad concussion victim can make a Deep South paramedic unit. They rotate the victim to his side four times so he can spew vomit onto the slag. Spew. Vomit. Ralph. Upchuck. He done? Think so. They slide that poor bastard in the ambulance and off he goes.

            Is there anything you need from me? Is there anything I can do? His wife is here and in the ambulance now, no one seems quite sure what to do with his car. “We’ll come get it later,” she says, then adds “He was so excited about having a job.”

            Inside I look over his application. He was a big rig driver. Drove big forklifts, too. What if he’d had a seizure on the road? How come the comparable blessing, having a seizure and busting his face open and sustaining a concussion that came from a blow loud enough to sound like someone hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat, why did that blessing have to come to me? In front of me? It’s like a homeless angel came and bestowed a shopping cart full of spit filled cans to me to clean and turn in for scrap.

            The boss and his boss (my dad), pull up a couple hours later. “Quite a morning, huh?” my dad says, shaking my hand. I understand. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Don’t give him anything else to freak out about. No big deal, no freak out. “Get any trucks in this morning?” The worst part is it works. Their tactics work like a box of fucking Lucky Charms. “Four,” I answer. We go to the local meat and three, and I have fried catfish and three vegetables.

            His dad comes and picks up the car later that day. He says the same thing as the wife. “He was so excited about this job. Hadn’t had a seizure in nine years. Doctor always told him that nerves’ll do it, but that never had happened.” I nod. “Doctor put ‘im on some good med’cine, shouldn’t have no more problems now.” I wish him the best. His time card was punched in at 6:55AM. I write in 7:05AM as the time out.

            I saw him at a different meat and three about six months later. Face still pockmarked, steps and handshake hauntingly jerky. Everything all good? I ask. Everything’s great, he says. He wouldn’t have lasted for us. Too much stress at our yard.

            I wonder what a seizure feels like. I know it’s not letting go, but I want it to be. I want to have a letting go seizure, where I seize up and say, What can I do? I’m sorry, but I’m going to be completely out of commission for the next 30 seconds. Not going to check the numbers. Not going to enter data. Not going to analyze the problem and figure out why the guys are working so poorly in this blissful 105 degree, 100 percent humidity, 120 heat index weather. No, my body is doing what my mind refuses to do, it is saying no to all this bullshit and shutting down for a minute. I’m going to rest by not resting, it says. I’m going to relax by tensing up everywhere. Wait until I’m done. Then you’ll know peace. Then you’ll know serenity. Sit up and wake up and puke up your breakfast, young man. You just lost your job five minutes into your first day. 

Famous Friends

ON the way to the eye doctor for my annual checkup, I started wondering what it would be like once my wife and I were best friends with Beyonce and Jayzee. I’ll learn how to correctly spell my new best friend’s name soon after we start hanging out I’m sure. This daydream came about for fairly obvious reasons. One, I was going to pick out new glasses, that day. As everyone knows, in my mind at least, the fate of the free world rests not so much on who is elected the president of the United States, or whether or not Iran obtains nukes, or the euro fails and western Europe descends into another world war, albeit economic and boring as hell (from afar). No, the fate of the free worlds rests upon what glasses I choose. Upon picking said marvelous glasses, a ripple of approving murmurs will spill out from our little town of Starkville, MS, and gather steam, momentum, the power of the people of our great nation itself, and people everywhere will begin with a whisper and finish with a shout, “What amazing glasses, Jim!” Hunger a thing of the past, poverty eradicated, all weapons of mass destruction fired into space and destroyed… as long as I make the right decision. The wrong decision, and the whispering to shouting motif rings real again in my imagination, but with anger and consternation and pure, joyous schedenfraud at my ridiculous glasses that channels into the earth, straight to every fault line on the planet, the derision of all mankind roughly grabbing those plates and cracking them in their bitter hands like old, tasteless chocolate.

            I have not been diagnosed with narcissism, but I fear its only because I usally keep these thoughts to myself. Usually.

            The other reason Jay-Z and Beyonce will obviously want to become besties with my wife and I is because we have a daughter born within a month of their daughter. I worried we wouldn’t have much to talk about when we go to visit them in Neeeew Yoooork, or when they come see us in Mississippi, but by then we’ll also be billionaires, because the fantasy series that’s been kicking around in my head for a year is going to be pretty darn successful. J.K. Rowling will keep calling my assistant saying, “One lunch, Damien, a single hour long lunch with Mr. Hunt,” to which Damien will patiently sigh and say, “J.K., I told you, Mr. and Mrs. Hunt are still with Mr. and Mrs. Jay-Z. They’re having a month long play date. He’ll text you when he gets back in town.” So why wouldn’t Jay-Z and Beyonce want to hang out with us? Probably for fear that they’ll wish their daughter was as sweet, playful, and full of baby charm as ours, I’d imagine. If imagining was something I did.

            It used to be, back when I was 12 and I first got a TV in my room, and I was watching Jay Leno on Friday nights, I’d imagine myself sitting on that couch, just joshing, just cracking Jay Leno up so bad he’d really want me to come back all the time. I’d initially be invited on because I was such an amazing football/basketball player, a white Deion Sanders. I was doing upwards of 50 push ups a day when I wasn’t tired from playing a couple hours of Nintendo (Secret of Mana) every day after school, or better yet, getting up early in the mornings to get in some RPG time. I’m not sure how many people really admit to wanting to be famous; that phrasing itself sounds horrible. I simply want to be invited to fabulous Hollywood parties, attend them when able, decline when not, and still get invited back. To be on friendly terms with Tom Brady or Drew Brees, Beyonce or Jay-Z, to call up M. Night Shamalan and say, “Come on M., the Village? I didn’t even see the whole thing through to the “climax” on the sci-fy channel and I know it was dumb. Sure, come over around 7 and we’ll kick around some ideas over some scotch.”

            It’s not so much that as thinking you are someone more special than you really are. That someone will stop you as you’re walking back to the truck after the bi-weekly writer’s group that meets on Saturday mornings and say, “Hey, you’re an amazing writer, aren’t you! Not bad looking either, I must say, not bad looking at all!” Why does this person look like Heidi Klum in her youth and talk like Yukon Cornelius? I don’t know. Childhood plus adolescence pretty much equals adulthood, and the math never checks out. It is also, for me, a way to avoid the real work of writing, which is my self-professed dream. I can’t believe those people, however, who say, “If you don’t love it, it’s just another job you’re going to hate.” When did George Walker Bush start giving out shitty life advise to Redbook? Anyone who has truly had a passion for any avocation and not been a savant at said passion will at some point or other loath that dream, right? Why this dream, you ask? Why is it so hard? Why won’t it come easier? I push and I push and I push, but the rock doesn’t even get close to the top of the hill. It moves a few inches. I give Sisyphus comparative comfort.

            

To Understand the World...

...You must first understand a place like Mississippi. William Faulkner said that. Or wrote it. I don't know which, but they're his words, and the first time I saw them, on a poster in our town's annual arts fair, I about jumped out of my shoes it seemed so apt. "I have to get that poster," I told my wife, thinking that $40 was not too much to spend for such a piece of wisdom. "We can print it out and tape it above your desk if you really want," she said, and this did seem much wiser. I never did print it out, but I figured I'd start a site to talk about this crazy place and our little family's time here.

My wife and I moved here from Atlanta, GA (as opposed to all the other Atlantas out there in the good ole U.S. of A.) almost three years ago, in September of 2009. We had been married for less than two months. I was hired to work in the family company, a planer mill and concentration yard, and I took the job because after five years of spotty, irregular employment, nailing down full time work somewhere where they didn't know I was a fairly smart and hard working guy seemed like a formidable task, at best. We had a plan. She'd go to law school at Ole Miss, I'd work at the plant, and in four years, we'd accelerate to ludicrous speed and get the hell out of this place. We felt like this was a good plan. God laughed, though not unkindly. We revise our plans as he hides giggles behind an omniscient grin.

Today, we find ourselves in Starkville, MS. I am still working at the family company. She is in school at Mississippi State University. We both struggle with living in this state, at times, but there are ways in which we know it has been good for us. Today my wife wore a cute hairband that she usually never would have before; friends would have said, "That's not you!" I wear cowboy boots now, at least when it's not summer.

And at work on Friday, I witnessed my first ever encounter with... we'll have to call them superpowers, I guess. I'm not sure how else to describe a one ton dumpster bouncing off the back of one of my employees and him being able to shake it off like a pesky horse fly, but that's what I saw. He didn't see me see this; at least I hope he didn't. And in light of this new information, I am holding off on firing Kostack for the time being.