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.”