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.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
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.”
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