How long did it take, really, to clean off a roller, even when it was full? A minute of double-time? Forty seconds? Not long. I cleared off the backlog and had time enough to stack three boxes from the slow line, the medicine bottles. By the time the towmotor had removed the full pallet and had left an empty,, that line was backed up a little, but it was just a matter of keeping an eye on things.
I’d never realized how different our backgrounds were till I saw Dave see the house I’d grown up in. I couldn’t envision his home, but I could nee what it must not have looked like. It brought me back to the Thanksgiving when I had invited Dennis home for the holiday, and he had driven us up. On the Friday night, I had brought him to the factory I’d worked at we had gotten in and out without being challenged, and in a few minutes it had shown him a world he’d never seen. “Puts a whole new light on my Thanksgiving,” he had said. Like me, he was working his way through college, but his father was paying his tuition, and he had no factories in his background.
The boxes came down the lines. I stacked them according to the posted patterns; tied up the completed stacks; began again. I was fully into an easy rhythm now, swinging from line to line, almost enjoying the newly familiar strain on muscles that had gotten unused to that kind of workout. By the end of the first shift, I’d be tired. For the first couple of days, maybe a week, I’d be sore. Then it would be as before.
No factories in their backgrounds. No farms, either. What Dave had said was true, I was different in dress and action and attitude. No wonder I was struggling. But it was hard to see what could be done about it. Should I make my life into a long Halloween, with me always in costume?
I had been working about an hour and a half when my relief came. “Break time,” he said. “Ten minutes.” I nodded, knowing the drill. Every night one man spent the night going from man to man, relieving each in turn. I didn’t know this guy, and he clearly considered me just another college boy home for the summer, nobody worth exchanging a friendly word with. I went off to the rest room, and when I got back, he was gone and all three lines were stacked up. He hadn’t bothered to clean off the slow line even once. Nothing new there. I had never come back to find my lines cleaned off. It took about three and a half minutes of quick work to clear things.
“But if I don’t fit in at college, I don’t fit in at home anymore either.” Said silently, part of a long night’s argument.
I’d seen it on my first day home. Dad had had work to do at the farm, and had asked me – which amounted to telling me – to go along. So I had put on some old clothes and had ridden shotgun in his old GMC truck to the farm, which was a few miles away. We didn’t have much to say to each other. What could I have talked about? Hearing “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in Dave Segal’s apartment? Our fraternity house winning Most Improved House trophy? The irritating difference between life as my own man and life as a dependent in dad’s household?
Naturally, we first stopped in to see grandmom. Her eyes lit up behind her glasses, and I was hugged and kissed and fed with home-baked cookies from her pantry, and a glass of milk, just as if I were still a kid. She asked how school was going, and I gave the best non-answer I could think of. I had been so depressed that Spring that I had felt like dropping out, so depressed that for days on end it had become too great a bother to go to class. How could have had told her, or told dad, any of that? They’d have asked why, and I didn’t know why. Or, more likely, they would have said it was silly to be depressed at my age, with no family, no responsibilities to worry me. Think of all the people with real problems, they would have said. And at that, can’t say they would have been wrong to say it. The only thing is, it didn’t help.
Only two hours down, six to go, an eternity. And this only the first night of elven weeks of this. I reached for the cardboard to box up another stack.
I liked grandmom, and admired her. She had received little formal education, but she understood the world she lived in much better than I did mine. Years later, I would read of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s old age, connected to neighbors, town, family and countryside, and I would recognize grandmom’s life. But liking was one thing, relating was another. My new world of classes and fraternity and big-city life was something far from her experience, and I had no confidence in my ability to bring it to her, or to dad. Only decades later would I realize, I never made the attempt.