Author: Frank DeMarco

I went through the gate with dozens of others. We walked down the long asphalted driveway past the great oppressive brick buildings. Groups peeled off to enter the doors nearest their time clocks; just another workday. I didn’t recognize anybody, and walked in silence, falling back into reacting to the remembered surroundings.

I knew what door to enter, I knew how to find my time clock, I knew what part of the wire rack to search for my time card. Cards for new hires were always several cards to a slot, in the upper lefthand corner. I paged through them, and took the card with my name inked in. (Next cycle, my name would be included in the typed cards.) I knew to punch in at once, eight minutes before the shift began. The company wouldn’t pay for minutes before the shift began, but it would dock you for punching in even a minute after the hour. Along with others, but alone, I waited for midnight, wondering how long it would take me to re-accustom myself to the peculiarities of the factory: what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, felt like. I stood there metaphorically on the brink, and then at midnight, I walked down to the three lehrs assigned to me for the shift. For the next eight hours – minus two ten minute breaks on either side of a twenty-minute “lunch” break – I’d be coupled to those three production lines.

In the glass house hundreds of feet away, the great gas-fed furnaces had turned sand and additives into a pool of molten glass. That molten glass came flowing out of its container, high above the work floor, like white-hot toothpaste squeezed from a tube, flashing down red-hot metal tracks toward the molds below. The glass began to cool even as it traveled, changing from white glowing orange to dull red. As it fell, the tube was snipped into precise lengths, and shunted into alternate tracks, each length falling into a metal mold. Behind it, a hollow rod blew compressed air into the mold’s center, forcing the molten glass against the sides and bottom of the mold. Thus the container’s exterior was shaped by the mold and its interior was shaped by the compressed air forcing it evenly against the mold. Then the two sides of the mold sprang apart, and the tube was withdrawn from the top.

Sometimes incomplete bottles were formed, or sometimes they stuck to the mold, or perhaps the reaching mechanical fingers missed the neck and shattered the bottle, or knocked it over. Whatever the mess, it was fixed remotely. Nobody was going to fool with that mechanism at those temperatures, not even with asbestos gloves.

All this happened mechanically, in staccato movements at quick-time. Forming the bottle was the work of an instant. A pair of clamps descended, grasped the new bottle at the neck, picked it up, and placed it onto a metal conveyor belt for its long cool-down journey.

If you were to expose a newly created glass container to normal room temperatures, it would become uselessly brittle, if it didn’t shatter outright. Instead, you need to anneal it. The line that carried the new container from the mold conveyed it directly into a lehr, or cooling oven. At the furnace end, the lehr matched the temperature that had created the container. As the ware traveled, it moved into cooler temperatures. By the time it arrived at the far end, several hundred feet and perhaps 10 hours later, it was only slightly warm to the touch.

At that far end, humans again formed links in the chain. Employees, mostly women, lined up at either side of the conveyer belt, standing with cardboard cartons ready. As the ware came out, they plucked up the good bottles and packed them. As they filled the boxes, they slid them onto roller trays beside them, and the boxes slid the few feet to a dead end at a lower level. Three of those dead ends would be my station for the shift. Usually you got two fast lehrs — lines running large bottles that quickly filled the boxes – and one slow lehr, perhaps medicine bottles packed a gross to a carton.

As the boxes came down, I’d load them onto pallets according to the stacking diagram for that particular kind of box. When I had packed the boxes to the indicated height – six to eight rows, usually – I’d wrap two cardboard sheets around opposite sides and corners, and would strap it up with plastic strapping tape and metal clips. Forklift trucks would come by, drop an empty pallet, and take away the full one. I’d drag the empty pallet into place and start again. Rinse and repeat, for eight hours.

As I got to my station this first night, I saw that as usual the man I was relieving had let things stack up a little. By the end of your shift, you’re counting minutes, and you know that for the guy just starting his shift, a little catch-up activity gets him into the rhythm of it. Familiar territory.

After my year in unskilled-labor limbo, I did finally go off to college, and those years did change my life. But in the middle of that transformation, I spent the summer before my junior year back in South Jersey, doing shift-work at the glass factory I had left two years earlier. Two years earlier, I had watched the college boys come into the factory for the summer to make money for the next year’s expenses. Now I was one of them, and yet I wasn’t at all sure that this, or something like it, would not be my future.

You might think that someone already halfway through his college years would know that upon graduation he was going to move into another world. But I had no way to imagine life post-college. I was going through college the way I had gone through all my schooling, following arbitrary and inescapable rules, being carried along in a current: drifting. I didn’t have sense enough or initiative enough to seek counseling. Instead, I sleepwalked. So I couldn’t imagine what might follow college.

Years later, in a never-to-be-completed nonfiction novel I was going to title Graduation, I wrote up my state of mind that long solitary transitional summer, and I offer it here as a window into the mind of that boy, who was on the verge of so many changes in the summer he turned 21.

&&&

1. First Shift

During the two years that I’d been away from the glass factory, the external mechanism – the vast compound of human beings and machinery and brick and glass that was the factory – had continued to function as it had long before I’d first arrived. I’d expected that it would. What surprised me was that a corresponding internal mechanism had remained in existence when I had left for school. Apparently it had slept, unnoticed, within me, biding its time.

That internal mechanism began to awaken at quarter past 11 p.m., as I put on the dungarees, the flannel shirt, the old shoes, that was my uniform for a summer of throwing boxes. It stretched, limbered up, as I found a spot and parked mom’s car in the second of the  three sprawling parking lots – full, as always a shift-change time — and stepped out of the car at 11:45 and looked across the street at the glass plant.

There it was, a great clump of interconnected one- and two-story buildings, dominated by the 40- or 50-foot high glass house that was the heart of the place. The office-building windows were dark, of course, at midnight, and those of the mold shop. But the packing house windows were lighted, and light came from the doors open to the night. Spotlights lighting the asphalt driveways showed me a towmotor truck carrying a full pallet to the great barn-like room where loads accumulated before being shipped out in tractor-trailers or railroad boxcars. Mainly, I saw the orange glow – 40 or 50 feet in the air – as seen through the windows far above the glasshouse floor.

I hadn’t even yet gotten inside the fence, and it was all coming back. I could hear the muted roar of the furnaces, could sense the pervasive presence of dirt. could hear the whining hum and electrical clicks of the battery-powered forklift trucks, and the clatter and rattle of glass jars and bottle being packed into boxes, and the jouncing of fully-packed boxes sliding down metal roller trays. I could hear snatches of half-shouted conversation among human pieces of the vast machine. It all came back, so clearly. Reason for dismay.

The midnight-to-eight shift would be my first since I had quit to go to college two years earlier. The good thing was, it would be the first in only a limited number of shifts before I would quit again and return to college. I was only summer help. I would be getting out of here again. Surely that would make a difference.

Surely it would, but that assurance did not make it any easier to walk across the parking lot and across the street and through the open gate in the eight-foot-high iron fence. I knew hat I was returning to, and I wasn’t entirely sure I would ever really escape. Escape was what college supposedly was all about, but when all was said and done and attended and paid for, would it really make the difference? Or would I gravitate, from lack of better opportunities, back into this constricted world?

I had had that question on my mind the week before, as I had been driven home by my friend Dave Schlachter, but I hadn’t talked about it. Dave would have dismissed the fear out of hand, finding the idea inconceivable. But he hadn’t come out of the world of manual labor, and managerial disdain and short paychecks. You don’t fear returning to something you never knew.

I had wondered: Was I going back for a final look at a life I was about to leave forever? Or was it a reminder that what I was trying to leave behind would be waiting for me when escape came to an end? I felt like T.E. Lawrence, pacing up and down in front of the recruiter’s station, nerving himself up to sell himself into uniformed slavery for a term of years.

But, it had to be done. To return to school, I had to have money. To get it, I had to save as much as I could. That meant living at home and working fulltime, with as much overtime as I could handle. So here I was, re-entering Armstrong Glass Company at a few minutes to midnight on the Thursday after my return from D.C.

It wasn’t unheard of for college-bound kids to spend the summer after high school doing factory work. What was unusual was for one to remain there after the new school year began.

In the weeks when I was unloading trucks, I hadn’t really seen the factory beyond the room adjacent to the loading docks, where we cleaned the machinery after the last of the trucks were unloaded. But when I went from temporary to full time, I moved into yet another world. The factory floor was dark, one huge two-story room, with adjoining locker rooms, relatively dimly lit by overhead fluorescent lighting. The walls, which had no windows, were concrete block. The floors, also concrete, were grimy from the tracks left by the forklifts, and often wet after being hosed down to remove that grime.

I was as out of place among the factory workers as I had been in high school. Within the factory there was a rigid if unspoken class distinction. The offices, housed in a separate building, were the civilian equivalent of Officers Country, populated by the executive and secretarial staff, coat-and-tie people, white and apparently educated, whose day’s work left them clean. You would think I belonged among them, and perhaps I did, but I certainly didn’t identify with them.

The people I worked among were Negroes, and Puerto Ricans, and poor whites from exotic places like West Virginia and rural Virginia or Kentucky.  They were a long way from the bottom of the heap: They were holding down steady jobs, and had a stable place in the world they knew. But in those days, TV never portrayed Negroes or Puerto Ricans nor poor whites.  I had known some migrant farm laborers, and some of my father’s tenants. But this was the first time I saw how the other half lived.

Any class structure is more clearly seen when looking upward from the lower decks. It was as though something wanted me to see the world from that angle, before I left home. It was a far cry from anything I knew, and a far cry from anything I would see in college.

I try to remember that time and I have only a few memories.

• Old Bob, at least he seemed old to me, a grizzled black man, entertaining those around him in the locker rook with his unending series of humorous, R-rated stories and sayings.
• The very slight casual friendships I struck up with a couple of boys more or less my age, Harold and Doug, brothers from someplace out of state. I wonder sometimes what happened to them.
• Continually playing over my head, trying to do the simple jobs I was assigned as the newest and least skilled person there.
• Mostly, the paddles. How I ached! Certain kinds of soup could not be stirred by electric mixer, but still required continuous stirring while they cooked. I was given a six- or seven-foot long aluminum paddle, and set on a metal platform, and assigned to do the stirring as they cooked. Half an hour at a time, perhaps, 1200 gallons at a time, and then another kettle, same thing., all night with only a break for a meal. Toward the end of the night, I would need to throw my weight on the paddle to keep on stirring, because my arm muscles by themselves wouldn’t do it any more. By the end of that long winter, I had developed considerable upper-body strength, and I never lost it. But I had paid for those muscles!

It was a bleak time. I had nothing I wanted to do, beyond getting through week after week I would go to work in the afternoon, get home sometime after midnight, sleep for a while, waste the few hours of the solitary day, and go back to work. In March came a big layoff, for reasons management never bothered to explain.  (I remember taking a certain pleasure in finding a pencil and correcting the ungrammatical misspelled notice they posted on the bulletin board, but I was still laid off.) A couple of months later, i hired on at  a nearby glass factory, employed at casual labor, doing the odd jobs that had to be done, but weren’t worth detailing shift-workers to do. After a while, a few college boys came in to work for the summer, visitors from a world I hadn’t yet seen.

I can’t remember which factory i was referring to, but years later, my mother reminded me that at some point i had said to her,  “Mom, these poor people! i don’t know how they can stand it.”

i still don’t.

People without marketable skills and without education basically sold their lives, one shift at a time, to keep body and soul together. “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” notwithstanding, the work was repetitious, their labor interchangeable,  their job satisfaction mainly their endurance and competence. Their function was to be cogs in a vast machine. there was satisfaction in not causing the machine to jam up, but that’s about it. Not much job satisfaction there.

Oh, did I mention that management tended to treat them like children? Did I mention that this is a great temptation to live down to expectations? Experiencing this world, not as a college boy working a summer job but as a high school graduate with few social or mechanical skills and no self-confidence, was the best preparation for college I could have received.  A couple of years later, a friend drove me home for Thanksgiving and I showed him the factory floor as it looked to the factory worker. It was an eye-opener to this son of a music teacher. “It puts a new light on my Thanksgiving,” he said.

I was 14,, sitting on the school bus next to Ormie House, a slightly older neighbor. He was looking at a full-page photo of a tiger in a book titled Danger Is My Business, in which author John D. Craig described (very entertainingly) the adventurous life he had led in the 1920s and 1930s as a very young man. For some reason, Ormie lent me the book, and in it I read of the time in India when Craig met a sadhu, a holy man, who spent an afternoon talking to him.

“You have come a long way,” he said, “but you have a longer way to go. In your last incarnation you were cooped up in a London countinghouse, as a clerk. In this life you will do all the things of which you dreamed then. Before that you had many lives, but this one is more important. That is, it can be. You have a long way yet to go before you reach The Silence.”

I settled myself more comfortably in the grass and asked him what he meant by The Silence. For a while he looked at me meditatively, probably wondering whether I was worth his time. Then he spoke.

He must have talked for a long time, because Miss Naylor said afterward that she spent several hours in the village …. When she found me the sadhu was still talking, and I was lying full length on the grass, drinking it in.

What he told me is to be found in many book: the theory of reincarnation; the teaching that the cosmic  consciousness, or God, is composed of all matter, all thought, all soul. From the highest element, the creative, has emanated all forms of substance; earth, water, fire, air, ether–the highest and the lowest–each having varying degrees of vibrations; varying wave lengths of different intensities of the same primary substance. Thus substance goes through a series of creative evolutions, rising from grosser to finer, through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms to man. When it reaches man, it contains a portion of the finer vibrations, called soul, and is close to the primary essence itself–God.

The soul of man is, then, a divine vibration caught within the body and mind of man.

But man must go through different planes of existence until he becomes conscious of such a divine vibration. Therefore you may compare his life to a cycle. He evolves through different lives until he reaches that state of being…a consciousness of his very essence, called Zat…which means silent, motionless life–the center–the source of all. In that state of Silence we rise above time and space; thought flows in a stream of quiet power, and knowledge of life is complete. Thus, the sadhu pointed out, in this interpretation of life all philosophies are included and explained: pantheism, which makes all nature God; monotheism, which calls for a single personal God; evolution, which teaches that man arose from lesser beings; Christianity, which prescribes a superhuman, or God-man; and all the other isms and schisms which snatch at a fragment of truth and build a structure of unreason about it.

The sadhu had for some time been an emancipated soul, not bound to continue life. But he was engaged in voluntary service on earth, as were, he said, many others.

“I have been in this body now well over a hundred years,” he said. “I have known others who remained in the same body over three hundred years. It is a matter of mind, as you Occidentals say. It is a matter of knowledge, as some others say. To us it is a state of being which has been achieved. The last life before this, when I died–as you call it–for the last time, I was spiritual advisor to Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal. I remember that life, of course, as I remember all the others, and as I know yours, from reading the record in your soul. Nowadays you have psychologists who call it your subconscious mind, and try to make you think all those things are remembered from childhood.

…

I was afraid of the sadhu’s philosophy for two reasons: it explained everything, and it solved the problem which had been annoying me. My religious training, such as it had been, and my Scottish Presbyterian blood, revolted against that. The world and the universe should be a mystery, and my personal problems should continue to bother me. But should they?

That night I sat on my bed looking with glazed eyes at the floor….

&&&

When I read this little passage, something within went “Click!” and I instantly knew that this is how things work. That’s the only mention of reincarnation in the entire book — scarcely a shot across the bow, so to speak — yet it helped determine my life, for it helped determine what I believe, and hence what would be important to me, and hence what I would act on. Eventually.

Probably Danger Is My Business was merely the excuse “someone within” used to bring my conscious mind to pay attention to an idea it had heard before, though not recently. From time to time, as years passed, I would get glimpses of what seemed to be past lives. (I have since learned that receiving such glimpses is normal and frequent, but is usually dismissed as “only imagination.”) But it was a long time before I found any effective way to do any exploration. Meanwhile there was live to be lived. To be endured.

I find it hard to explain how completely isolated I was.

I had no friends, and didn’t know how to go about making friends. My community had always been my family: my brothers and sisters, really. But John was in the Air Force – had been for six years – and in 1960 Margaret had gone off to Catholic University. That left Joe, Barbara, and Paul – respectively, 15, 13, and 11 – not much company for an 18-year-old, and in any case I didn’t see them much. Working nights, I left the house before 4 p.m. and returned sometime after midnight. That meant I was not there for supper, nor was I up when they had breakfast, and during the week they had lunch at school. And both my parents had jobs at that time, my mother having gone back to work the previous year after 23 years of child-rearing, and dad was selling real estate for Uncle Lewie. I scarcely saw anyone except on weekends. At least, that’s the way I remember it.

My life had been reduced to a few aimless midday hours, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. Looking back, I can see that I might have used that time to advantage, if I had had an aim, but I did not.

It’s easy to forget, today, how few were the resources we had in those days. Radio was on a continual downhill slide, declining from the source of local news into an invisible jukebox programmed from far away, prepackaged without local content. Television consisted of the three network stations out of Philadelphia and the educational TV station in Wilmington, Delaware, a UHF station that didn’t seem to have much to offer. It would be nearly 20 years before the personal computer began to enter people’s homes. There was no internet, no social media, no email. In 1964, we were on our own.

Vineland was a small town with a Carnegie library. That library, and whatever books we had in the house, and the Saturday Evening Post and Readers’ Digest, were all the intellectual resources available to me. We did have one bookstore downtown, which I often browsed, but in those days I had to think carefully before spending, even on books. Prices look incredibly cheap by later standards, but that is because inflation progressively eroded the value of the currency. In 1964 an average paperback cost a quarter, maybe 35 cents, an expensive volume like Winston Churchill’s memoirs of World War II $1.25 apiece – but in 1964 I was making $1.50 an hour. Besides, since I had never had money to spend, spending it did not come easily. And, I was giving half my pay to my parents.

Nor was I in any way prepared to make good use of my time. Instead, I spent the few hours between sleep and work reading history and fiction until it was time for me to suit up for work: white pants, white shirt, white bib apron extending nearly to my ankles, rubber boots. Then I would re-enter the world that I had drifted into, a world that otherwise would have remained forever closed to my imagination.

Nothing in my background fits into easy categories.

• Vineland itself was neither city nor suburb nor country. Not quite a farm town, it was very much aware of how different it was from the neighboring cites of Bridgeton and Millville, basically factory towns. Vineland had begun life in 1861 as a planned community. The original one-mile square boro and the surrounding township had merged a few years back, to create a city of 68 square miles, including entire farms, all within a few miles of the central business district. Neither flesh nor fish nor fowl, Vineland had pretensions. Like me, it didn’t quite fit with its surroundings.
• Then there was the matter of class. My father was a farmer, so we were usually cash-strapped, but this didn’t lead us to identify with the working class. Farmers are neither labor nor management, but both. They may be dependent upon weather, market conditions and a thousand other intangibles, but they are no one’s employees; their independence is very real, and don’t think they don’t know it.
• And culturally, was I middle-class or peasant? I was pulled both ways. My parents were not college-educated but they were not ignorant. They were neither rich nor poor, but middle-class in a way that was taken for granted in postwar America. They had grown up in the Depression; they knew what it was like to be unable to find a job, and they were grateful that the world had changed. they shared many values and attitudes, and yet in some ways they were on opposite sides of a cultural divide that they made no effort to bridge.

My mother’s family was solid town-oriented middle class. Her father, having begun life wanting to be an artist, was a successful painting contractor whose children went to the Catholic school and therefore received a first-rate education. (And a lifelong loyalty to the church.) Mom had grown up in a house with genteel manners and wished her children to be refined, cultured. I was bookish, and I had strands within me that apparently remembered upper class life. (As one example, sometimes the shirts I wore to school took French cuffs, and I remember enjoying wearing cufflinks.) But I was well aware of the civil war between my mother and my father, and I had other strands that were on dad’s side.

His family were farmers. He grew up among animals and farm work; he went to the public schools, with Catholicism being mostly a Sunday thing, I guess. Again, he was not ignorant, not uneducated, and a long way from stupid. But he wasn’t particularly verbal – certainly not like his wife and children – and he didn’t care about using correct grammar. He spoke like the people he had grown up among, even if his mental reach far exceeded theirs. (In that, he was something like Lincoln, and I can see now that in some ways he may have identified with the man on his birthday he had born, and whose surname was his own middle name.) Dad was so habitually contemptuous of things that he considered impractical or highfalutin, and anything that he considered affected would certainly qualify. Yet, so strange, to find a high school book report he had written on Ivanhoe. I try to imagine him fitting it alongside the rest of the life he was leading. Parts of me identified with the manners and expectations of French aristocrats, but other parts identified with pioneers and woodsmen.

So there I was: Some threads encouraged me to adopt my mother’s values; others sided with dad’s, and will others took advantage of my reading to align me with values and attitudes derived from neither one. How else did a middle-class son of Italians parents come to identify with the English? (If Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans agreed on any one thing, it was distrust of England.) Why else would I have been drawn to Winston Churchill, as unerringly as to Lincoln or Kennedy? None of that came from my parents, or my schooling, or from the people around me. If I was not resonating to invisible, unsuspected inner threads, where did it come from?

Maybe from past lives?

Years later, my wife would say, “You are here, now. Even if you were somebody else before, what does it matter now? What difference does it make?” I didn’t know why it mattered. I only knew that it did. It mattered a lot.

It seems clear that it was never in the cards for me to lead a normal life, whatever “normal” means. When external circumstances were normal, my own peculiarities assured that my experience would be different. When external circumstances were unusual, what I took from them would be even more unusual. Many decades later, I would say that when I ceased apologizing for what I believed, particularly about our psychic potential, i “came out of the closet.”” This was true, but I see now that I was in the closet from the time, whenever it was, that I decided to hide what I was feeling. And when was that? If there was a moment of decision, I don’t remember it, which means it was a long way back. By the time I tried to hide what the murder of JFK had done to me, it was already habit.

Where did that habit come from?

Considered as if it was the result of externals, it was my reaction to my parent’s criticisms and the unfathomable expectations and criticisms leveled at me by my school and my schoolmates.

Considered as the result of my internal composition, it followed from my making so little effort to understand myself or my actions or my surroundings or my effect on my surroundings. I lived in a play without knowing the lines or the plot or my role. Everyone around me seemed to me to be part of a closed society, and there I was without the password. I was always being disagreeably surprised.

I see that I had it pretty much backwards. People found me strange because I was a closed society, and they (to the extent that they cared) were without the password. They saw that I was hiding within a shell, and they had no way to get inside. Most people weren’t all that interested, but some were exasperated. Boys, being pack animals, needed to fit me into the established pecking order, but I refused to accept a place, and lived as if in isolation, and some of the boys resented this even more, which resulted in a certain amount of bullying., especially in my first three years of high school. I preferred being semi-outcast to accepting my place in a pecking order determined by others.

That’s how it seemed to me then. Probably it was simpler than that. The boy didn’t know the ropes. He didn’t have the social skills he needed, so it was always hard for him to fit in. He didn’t understand the demands and the expectations. He was judging others by their actions and himself by his intentions, and of course internal and external reports did not agree.

Memory contains so many gaps. I graduated from high school, a ceremony and a milestone that meant literally nothing to me. Once liberated from the imposed structure of high school, I drifted. I had no idea how to connect daydreams to everyday reality. One of my internal strands continued to assume that my career would mimic JFK’s and Churchill’s careers, only now without the war-hero stuff, and it was only a matter of waiting until I would be old enough.

Enter the outside world, in the person of my father, who decided to convert what had been the main farm building into apartments. Since there I was, unemployed again but still eating at his table, I was conscripted as unpaid labor, helping dad and the two men he had hired.

Probably the summer of 1964 should have been pleasant enough, working in the open air, only a couple of hundred feet from my grandmother’s house where we would have lunch. But I was not in a condition to enjoy anything. Instead, I endured, aware mostly of the irksomeness of being under my father’s thumb. The work, meaningless to me, filled the day. At night, I read or watched TV. I was drifting, without motor or rudder. I literally had no idea what could come next, and I had no idea how to choose what would come. Then came intervention, first from Uncle Lew, then from Bub.

Uncle Lew was a self-made man, and he did it without trickery or sharp practice. At age 15 or so, he had gone to work as office boy at Bray and MacGeorge, a real estate office. After the first winter, he took it for granted that he should quit and help the family work the farm. Grandmom DeMarco used to tell the story: “I said, Lewie, you brought home more money than we made from everything else. You stay right there.” And that’s what he did. Working and learning the business year in and year out, he went from office boy to realtor to partner to full owner. In the process he became a rich man and a community presence, twice city councilman, member of uncounted boards of directors, and pillar of the church.

Throughout this slow methodical ascent, he remained natural and unaffected, generous and easy-going. (Years later a prominent lawyer told a group in my presence that when he had been employed by Uncle Lew to collect some debts, he had expected that this was a hard man, who would exact his due. Instead, he said, some of the debts were so far in arrears that “the interest exceeded the principal!”)

I imagine that Uncle Lew saw how lost I was, though I tried hard enough to conceal it. I see now, he believed in me, and stepped in with one of the kindly unpublicized acts that characterized his life. To encourage me to go to college, he gave me as a birthday present the $100 that had to accompany an application to George Washington University, the only school I considered. So, weeks after the deadline, I did apply, and in late August came a letter of acceptance.

But I was in no way ready to go off to college. It was nearly September by the time the acceptance letter arrived. I wasn’t at all sure that I was ready to start another round of classes. For that matter, although my sister Margaret had just gotten her college degree, college was not yet a tradition in our family, and I had no framework in which to imagine the life.  I asked GW to defer my admission, and then I had a year to decide if I wanted to go to college. There seemed to be little point in it, but where was the point in anything else? By now I had been depressed for so many months that it had become my normal.

Besides, college would cost money, a lot of it. I couldn’t attend school without having the money for room, board, tuition, texts, and so forth. I never even thought to ask if my parents could help financially. Money at home was always tight, and I took it for granted that if I went to college, I would have to pay my own way. (And maybe I already sensed that if I paid my own way, I could do as I pleased.) I needed a job.  Enter Bub.

In the summer of 1964, he was working as a line foreman at a local soup-making factory, and he got me a job unloading trucks. Every day from four p.m. to after midnight, our crew unloaded farmers’ truckloads of tomatoes, usually two of us to a truck. After the last truck of the day was unloaded, we moved inside and spent hours cleaning the machinery that had processed the tomatoes as we unloaded them. A wet, sloppy job, working with steam and water. I would come home soaked to the skin, my apron covered with tomato juice.

It was a job, it paid money, it filled the time. It was all right with me. Bub’s impact was that he had gotten me the job. Also, one night when I was out on the trucks, he brought me a takeout coffee in a Styrofoam container. When I tried to tell him that I didn’t drink coffee, he said, incredulously, “You don’t want it?” So I thanked him and took it. Laced with cream and sugar, it tasted pretty good, actually. The first in a long, long line of coffees that would punctuate my days and nights.

But Bub and I didn’t see each other outside of work hours, and when tomato season ended, he was off to do other things.

I had nothing better to do. I stayed. They moved me inside and I became a cook’s helper, which meant several months of unending hours spent using a sort of aluminum canoe paddle to stir 1200-gallon kettles of soup while they cooked. That job built strong arm muscles that I never lost. And, unnoticed, those months of working nights broke me of the television-watching habit.

I was still living on autopilot, but my life had begun to move again, because Bub had gotten me a job. I’m smiling, writing this, remembering that sunny attractive magnetic presence, that meteor that flashed so brightly though my early life. Like a meteor, a good distance from me; brief, fleeting, long-remembered. His effect on me was like JFK’s, in a way, that same easy Irish charm. Forty years later, in my second novel, I created an editor named Charlie Reilly and gave him a few of Bub’s characteristics, an affectionate gesture across so many years. But by that time he was long gone. Meteors flash, they don’t endure.