Dave (4)

I can furnish certain exact phrases, even sentences, from what Dr. Tenley said, because for weeks afterward, at times chose my no logic I could ever figure out, odd bits would play back. Finally I wrote down what I was hearing, and they ceased coming.

“David is afflicted with a tumor about the size of a pea, located on the pineal gland [sketching rapidly on the chalkboard], which is …”

“The paralysis and vision-blurring he experienced were due to the pressure exerted on the brain by the growing tumor, pus fluid which has been building up in the area. We have drained the fluid and removed the pressure for the moment …”

“… whether there is a high degree of malignancy. Quite possibly it may prove to be benign. However …”

“… inserted a tube which will ease the pressure by allowing the fluid to drain. This is, however, only a staying process.”

“Due to the position of the tumor, it is inoperable [inoperable, inoperable, inoperable] and must eventually prove terminal.” (Memory says that this statement was followed by a long blank silence, but I don’t think it was, really.)

“It could be two days, or two years, or possibly longer, but the tumor must eventually grow to the point that it will fatally affect the operation of the brain …”

“The tube which we have inserted to drain the fluid and thus to relieve the pressure on the brain will give David some time. He will probably walk out of the hospital in two or three weeks. But I must caution you against any sort of optimism. There is no hope of ultimate recovery….”

And that was that. The efficient, impersonal doctor (so he seemed to me) said, “I am very sorry,” the first and only crack in the professional façade that we were allowed to see. Mrs. Schlachter was crying, silent devastated tears. The rest of us were stony-faced. Dennis met my eyes once and then we each looked somewhere else. I realized that my teeth were clenched. David was going to die? Like hell he was!

 

Somebody would have to tell the house, and Dennis didn’t want to be the one. I decided it might as well be me. I thought I could get through it okay. But I was supposed to go to work at four, and it was already nearly 3:30. I called the house and told one of the brothers that I was calling a special house meeting in half an hour and asked him to post a notice on the bulletin board and otherwise pass the word.  I called Mr. Berkeley, the store manager, and told him I’d be an hour late to work and I’d tell him why when I got there. Then we left the hospital, and I wondered if  the Schlachters were sorry or relieved to be by themselves awhile. I could feel the pain it gave them, seeing ordinary life going on around them.

Ordinary life going on. Walking down G Street, we found ourselves in the middle of crowds of students changing classes. It was hard to realize that for them it had been just a normal Monday. It was still considerably less than 24 hours since we had returned from the Jersey shore.

Ordinarily I would have no business calling a house meeting, not being one of the officers, but the brothers knew it had to concern Dave’s operation. When I walked into the house, .it looked like a real house meeting, only quieter. Every seat was taken, and several brothers were sitting on the floor or leaning on the wall around the entryway.

I thought it would be easy, and at first it was. I used my tough-guy, man-of-the-world voice, my great stone face.  I told them I’d make it short.

“You know they operated on Dave today. It was a success in one sense: They removed the pressure and that removed the paralysis. But he has a tumor, a damned little thing the size of a green pea, they say, and it’s in a place they can’t get at. So, they can’t take it out.”

The brothers were silent.

“The doctor said it could start growing again at any time, and when it does” (I paused to steady my voice) “he’s dead. A couple of days, a couple of months, a couple of years. And there isn’t anything anybody can do about it.” Sudden tears, unexpected, blinding me. I walked out of the room, ashamed to let them see me cry.

 

Fortunately, we all had immediate problems to tend to. The Schlachters needed to rent a place nearer the hospital, and Dale and Bill offered to help them find it. Dennis and I would concentrate on getting Dave graduated. He’d take three of Dave’s professors and I would take the other two, professors I had had classes with.

Dave (3)

We were tired before the waiting even began. We had gotten up at 7 a.m. Sunday, had driven five hours to arrive at 11 p.m.,  and hadn’t gotten out of the hospital till after 1 a.m. Monday. It was close to 2 a.m. before I escaped into sleep, and it was only a little after 7 a.m. when my alarm woke me up. And Dale had spent the night sleeping in his clothes on one of the couches in the living room.

We got up, washed our faces, had a tense, silent breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee at the People’s Drug Store counter, and were reassembled in the fourth floor waiting room – still outside of visiting hours – by 7:30. Dannis was there when we arrived. The Schlachters were in with David.

Three orderlies came by with a bed on wheels. They came back with Dave lying on it. I got the merest glimpse of him. They had shaved his head.

The Schlachters came out to the waiting room, because another patient was being admitted to Dave’s semi-private room. Now the little waiting room held six of us, two in their sixties, four in their twenties. And now we really began to wait.

Silence wasn’t very comfortable. Neither was speech. Long spells in which nobody said anything, then someone would make a comment and someone would seize on it, and someone would extend it, and extract a reply. When it could no longer be maintained, the painful silence would resume as if it had never been interrupted, as in fact it hadn’t.

At nine, we asked the nurse at the desk if the operation had started. She didn’t know and said she couldn’t find out.

It didn’t take long for the chairs to become very uncomfortable. “Of course you couldn’t expect the chairs to be comfortable,” Dale said, getting up to stretch. “This is a waiting room, nobody could have expected that people might have to wait in them.” It earned him some feeble smiles, which is pretty much what all our attempts at gallows humor met that day.

Was it ten-thirty? Possibly later. No word.

“The décor isn’t much,” Toutant said, “but you have to admit, at least we don’t have to pretend to be awake while somebody is lecturing.”

Eleven. I started to pace, then thought it might annoy the others. Stopped. Started again, unconsciously. Stopped. Made myself sit down.

“You boys are missing a lot of class.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Isn’t it great?”

Andrews said this was the closest thing to a legitimate excuse for cutting classes we had ever had.

I suddenly realized that I was scheduled to work at the Safeway Jr. from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. I wondered how I would manage to stay awake.

Eleven thirty. Dennis stretched, and looked at his watch for the thousandth time.

Noon. Mr. Schlachter straightened out of his chair and announced that he and “the boys” were going to have lunch across the street.

Breakfast at People’s. Lunch at People’s. a monumentally joyless lunch. We stretched it out as long as we could, and still we were back in 40 minutes. No word.

Mrs. Schlachter said she was going to get something to eat downstairs. She was back in 15 minutes. She smiled wanly and said she’d found she wasn’t very hungry.

More waiting. By now I hated the walls, the chairs, the public-address system.

One-thirty. Dennis got up abruptly, left the room. He was back a moment later. “I know that nurse,” he said. “She’s in one of my classes. I asked her to find out how long now.”

Andrews snorted. “That figures. The amazing thing, when you come to think of it, is that it has taken this long for Crabb to find a woman here he knows.”

We all grinned at that, tired, half-hearted grins.

Dennis got up again when he saw her coming, and went out to meet her. He returned looking a little less tense. “She’s an O.R. nurse,” he said, “so she could go on in. She said they’re finishing up now. ” Mrs. Schlachter redoubled her attack on her handkerchief, but I thought, maybe this was good news. Hadn’t they said it was life or death? And he wasn’t dead. And they had been working on him for a long time, long enough to find the problem and get rid of it.

More waiting.

Finally at 2:30, Dr. Tenley entered the room and asked to see the Schlachters in the consultation room. When we all rose to accompany them, he said this was for family members only. Mr. Schlachter said, “After last night and today, they’re family,” and Dr. Tenley gave in, and we all filed into the little consultation room with its blackboard, and its grey walls, four incongruous red plastic chairs. Bill and I stood against the wall as the doctor explained. It wasn’t good news.

Dave (2)

As soon as the elevator doors closed and I had had time to count to 30, I walked over to the nurses. “My name is Frank Schlachter, and this is my cousin Bill Toutant. My brother David is in 406. Our parents are flying in from Iowa and should have landed at National just about now. The doctor said it would be all right for us to wait until they get here.”

I don’t know if they believed me, but they didn’t make us leave. Maybe we looked shocked enough, strained enough, that they thought I might be telling the truth. So we began to wait.

Dennis and Mr. and Mrs. Schlachter got to the hospital about 40 minutes later. They were both shorter than Dave. Mr. Schlachter looked very tired, very old. Dave’s mother’s face was very set and determined, rigidly composed.

“Frank DeMarco and Bill Toutant,” Dennis said, introducing us.

“Hello, boys,” Mr. Schlachter said, making an effort to smile and shake hands. “It is very good of you to be here.”

“David has talked to us about you,” Mrs. Schlachter said as I shook her hand. But she didn’t seme able to say anything else. The formalities accomplished, we stood there. It was awkward. “The doctor is on the way up,” Dennis said. “Mr. Schlachter had him notified when we arrived. I have to go move the damned car again.” He left.

I was avoiding the nurses who had just heard me introduced to my “parents.” They suggested to the Schlachters that we wait in the waiting room, tastefully decorated with a few hard red molded-plastic chairs and a table and some magazines of no interest. We sat. Mr. Schlachter tried to make conversation. Mrs. Schlachter did too, glancing at us and at the corners of the room and at the ceiling, and all the while twisting a handkerchief in her hands. Every time we heard a noise that might be an elevator or the door from the stairs, we all looked up.

Mr. Schlachter roused himself. “But where did Dennis go?”

“He had to move the car,” I said. “He didn’t want to get it towed.”

“Why didn’t he just put it in a lot?” He started to reach for his wallet, I think..” It can’t be so much.” I told him Dennis would park the car behind the fraternity house and wouldn’t notice the few blocks he would have to walk back to the hospital. “Well, the next time, he can put it in the lot here. All that walking it isn’t necessary.” I realize now that he was grasping for something  practical to occupy his mind. After a few minutes: “This close to exams, you shouldn’t be studying?”

“Oh, I’ve gotten through four years this way,” I said. “Too late to change now.”

“But this is important for your future. And you, Bill Toutant, the music maker. David says you are going to be our new Beethoven. You shouldn’t be studying?”

“I’m all right,” Bill said, uncharacteristically serious. “Music isn’t something you can cram for. You know it or you don’t.”

“Still, I hope you boys aren’t using up time here that you should be using to study.”

Silence again. Bill asked about their flight, and Mr. Schlachter outlined their route in detail. Neither Bill nor I nor Mrs. Schlachter nor he himself, really, absorbed a word he said.

The doctor arrived. He didn’t say Bill and I had to leave, so we stayed. He and David’s parents went off toward David’s room.

“We got up at seven in Avalon,” I said, “and here we are.” Bill nodded unhappily. Dennis arrived, and we told him that the doctor was in with Dave’s parents. Andrews arrived, all the way form their apartment on a D.C. Transit bus in the middle of the night. We filled him in on the little we knew, and we waited, and waited some more.

The doctor came out of Dave’s room with Dave’s parents, said a final few words, and disappeared into the elevator again. We introduced the Schlachters to Dale.

Nobody sat down. “Boys,” Mr. Schlachter said without preamble, “it is time you should get to bed. Dr. Tenley is planning to do exploratory surgery tomorrow morning.” Absently, almost off-handedly, he said, “He thinks there is some kind of growth pressing on David’s brain. He said the operation could not possibly be more critical.”

“He said it is life or death,” Mrs. Schlachter said, almost choking it out.

Dennis said he would go get the car, and would be sure to get them back to the hospital by eight.

“Seven thirty,” Mrs. Schlachter said.

“Tell you what,” Andrews said, thinking quickly. “I’ll stay at the fraternity house. That way, you’ll have two beds at the apartment. Dennis, just remember to bring me a change of clothes and my toothbrush, will you?”

Sure,” Dennis said softly. We were uncommonly thoughtful and kind to each other that week.

Dave (1)

Dave

It was Sunday nigh, late.t May, 1969, the final month of my college career at George Washington. I was standing in the empty living room of the fraternity house when Dennis came in. “Yo, Crabb,” I said. “What happened to you guys?” He and Dave Schlachter had been expected to join us – Dale, my roommate Bill, me, my fiancé, and my brother Paul and sister Margaret – for a weekend at my uncle’s place on the Jersey shore. But they hadn’t come.

I expected a casual apology, or sincere regrets, or a good-natured insult, any or all.  Instead, he came to a dead halt and chilled me with a sober question. “Nobody told you?”

“We just got in three minutes ago,” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody. We dropped Dale off at the apartment. We were going to tell Dave and you what you’d missed, but you weren’t there.” I could hear the words rattling out, and I made myself stop. “Dennis, what’s wrong?”

He was looking at me steadily, almost without blinking. “Dave is in the hospital. I just came over here to get his car. I have to pick up his parents at National, their flight comes in at 11:25.”

Flying in from Iowa? “What the hell happened?”

“He started seeing double.”

I said, “I suppose that explains the headaches, but what’s he doing in the hospital? Why not the eye doctor?”

“Frank, when people start seeing double, doctors think brain tumors.” He started down the hall toward the back door. “I took us to the hospital in Dave’s car, but I had to leave it here or I would have had to move it every couple of hours.”

Apparently Dave had gone to bed without supper on Friday night, plagued by another of the monster headaches that had haunted him all semester. Saturday morning, he had awakened seeing double, and had had Dennis dial the phone so he could talk to his parents, who of course had told him to get seen right away. Dennis had helped him get trousers and a sweater over his pajamas, and had put socks and loafers on his feet, and had driven him to the emergency room at GW Hospital, a mile or two from their apartment, though only a few blocks from campus. After an endless wait in the emergency room, the doctors had admitted Dave “for observation.”

I said, “So why are his parents coming? Why aren’t they waiting for something definite?”

His mouth was a harsh expressionless line. “Because I called them and told them that now Dave can’t even move.”

“Jesus.” That was all I seemed able to say. Dennis got into Dave’s car. “You want company?”

He hesitated. “Yeah, I guess I do, but it would be nice to have somebody at the hospital until I get his parents there.”

“You mean Dave’s alone? Where are all our beloved brothers? Do they even know?”

He turned the key in the ignition. “Of c—. I don’t know. It seems like I told somebody, but I couldn’t absolutely swear to it.”

“Okay, I’ll get the word out, and I’ll get over to the hospital. Got to tell Bill and Dale, for sure.”

“I left Andrews a voice-mail message. He’s probably on his way.” He started to back the car.

“Hey Dennis, what room? And will they even let me in, do you think?”

“They might, if you think up a good enough story. Room 406.”

“406, okay. Dennis –” It embarrassed me, but I said it anyway. “Be careful, okay? We don’t need any more complications.”

“Yeah,” he said, and he was gone.

Visiting hours were long over, of course, so when Bill and I walked into the lobby, we went right for the stairs instead of standing waiting for the elevator. If anybody noticed us, they didn’t say anything.  We stepped out onto the fourth floor hallway, entirely too close to the nurses’ station. There were two nurses sitting there, one writing, one filing. We walked off in the other direction. I concentrated on trying to make my footsteps sound authoritative and confident.

Fortunately, 406 was just two doors down, its door half open. It could just as easily have been  on the far side of the nurses’ station. Carefully, quietly, we entered the darkened room. A figure standing beside the near bed looked up.. a doctor. Sharply: “Yes?”

“Th- that’s my brother,” I said. Well, he was, wasn’t he?

“Wait outside, please,” the doctor said firmly. When he came out, he was looking tired. “Now then, how did you boys get in here?”

“Doctor, that’s my brother in there,” I said again. “His – our parents live in Iowa. They’re are on the way in, but I don’t want him to have to wait for them alone. We won’t make any noise, and we won’t disturb him.”

He looked at me from the height of 40 or 50 years. “His brother?”

“Yessir. I’m visiting him this week.”

One side of his mouth turned up, just a bit, skeptically. “And I suppose this is another brother?”

“Cousin, sir,” Bill said promptly, all sincerity and humility.

“No doubt. Well, boys, listen to me. Your – ah – relative is very sick. He is much too sick to have visitors at the moment. He needs all his strength. Your seeing him can’t do him any good and might easily do harm. Do your understand? Your wanting to be here with him does you credit, very commendable – but you cannot see him. I suggest you go home.”

He had been walking toward the nurses station, us following. I said, “Thank you, doctor,” for the nurses benefit. “We understand.”

“Yes, well, nurse, just so there is no question about it, the patient in 406 is not to receive visitors. Good night, boys.” He stabbed the elevator’s “down” button and did not insist that we accompany him. Later, thinking about it, I took that to be an extraordinarily kind gesture, but maybe he wasn’t going to the ground floor, or maybe he figured it wasn’t his business to act as policeman, so long as we stayed out of Dave’s room.

First Shift (7)

The women on the lines were getting tired too. I could tell by the way they pulled the boxes off onto the slide. There was a jerky impatience in their motions that hadn’t been there a few hours before. Awareness of the fact that the sift was coming to an end had brought them out of the comforting lull of monotony without freeing them.  When we got into the final hour – when the end was clearly at hand – we would feel our fatigue less. The shift’s seventh hour was the hardest.

Is this why Dave says I am too old? Because I saw this world before I went to college?

The light outside is pretty bright now, bright enough to dim the lights in here. Morning, out there.

That stupid sociology course I had taken, dividing America into classes: upper, middle, lower, and subdividing each of them into upper, middle, lower. “America doesn’t have classes,” I had said. My books had taught me that class was a European concept, and in America everybody is equal, everybody can get ahead. But when the teacher had passed out an anonymous questionnaire asking, among other things, what class we had been born into and what class we expected to die in, I had filled it in like everyone else.

She told us later that most students said they started “lower middle” and expected to end “upper middle.” I had said “upper lower” and “lower upper.” They wanted mobility? I’d give them mobility. But even as I filled in the questionnaire, I knew that the possible answers were too simple to be meaningful.

Farmers, for example, never had much money, but could anybody seriously compare a farmer to a wage earner? Farmers were labor and management in one. They weren’t the masters of their own fates (given the vagaries of weather, markets, shippers and governments), but they didn’t punch time cards, and they didn’t have to obey other people. Could you really consider my father “upper lower class” merely because he didn’t see $5,000 in any given year?

Plus, one thing the Catholic schools did was teach middle-class values, manners and habits. Could a product of the Catholic schools be considered upper lower class?

My mother’s father, my dead grandfather, the painter and Republican politician, and his staunchly Republican family, not a Democrat in the lot until John F. Kennedy lured me over. Did any of this fit with “upper lower”?

But if I was a product of the middle class, what was I doing in a glass factory? Why was I different from all my friends and classmates at college?  I could see, now, that if I was going to fit in, it would require conscious mimicry. Maybe going to GWU had stretched me farther than I had realized. Segal certainly wasn’t spending his summer throwing boxes.

Here came my relief. The eight o’clock shift had just punched in. I nodded to him – someone else I didn’t know – and made my way down to the punch clock, behind a long line of people who had been less absorbed in their inner world, more aware of the ticking of the clock. The line moved as quickly as people could punch their cards. When you’re paid by the hour and are docked for being a minute late going in, you don’t give them an extra minute on the other end.

I had made note of the slot where I had left my card., knowing better than to slow down the line fumbling. I plucked it out as I came opposite the “in” rack, hit the clock, heard the bell of freedom, and put the card in a slot in the “out” rack. Then I was among the knots of workers headed up the driveway toward the gate, blinking a bit in the morning sunshine.

One down.

 

First Shift (6)

I walked up to the little cafeteria at one end of the building, ordered two sausage sandwiches and a coffee. Too dark, too small, to be attractive as a place to eat. I took my food outside, and ate it sitting on a loading dock at 4:15 a.m., looking at the moon, thinking of nothing in particular.

This summer wouldn’t much resemble the one before. There was all the difference in the world between living on your own and living in your father’s house. Also between working in a congressman’s office – no matter how trivial the work – and working in a glass factory. Between nights spent slinging the bull on the steps of the fraternity house and nights spent throwing boxes. Between being in a city with all its opportunities, and being nowhere doing nothing.

volunteer congressional assistant !

I looked around at the lamplit stone and asphalt, and remembered the night at Dave Segal’s apartment, the first (and, as it turned out, the only) time he had invited me over . “I’ve got a new Beatles album you have got to hear,” he had said, with great emphasis. I hadn’t been a big Beatles fan. I had loathed their early teeny-bopper music, and had been quite surprised to find that most people in college were crazy about them. Also, I couldn’t remember ever talking about music to Dave. Why did he choose me?

The album was “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” not yet a cultural sensation. (Leave it to Seagal to get in on the ground floor.)  Dave had lit up a couple of candles and a stick of incense, and we sat in the darkened room and drank his wine and listened. As he had forewarned, one cut faded directly into the next without the customary pause. We listened to the entire side, and Dave got up to flip the record and we listened to the other side. An hour, call it. Not much time.

Break time was over. I walked back into the building, stuffing the coffee container and the papers form the sandwich into a trash can. As usual, all the lines were backed up, and it took several minutes to clear them.

“To tell the truth, Dave, a lot of it I couldn’t understand. I liked it, pretty much, but some of it was pretty strange.”

Segal had smiled. “That’s because you don’t have the key.” (And that was Segal, always ready to demonstrate how much of a man of the world he was. Well, compared to me, to what I knew of the world, it was easy enough.) I said, “So what’s the key? It isn’t in the liner notes.”

He had laughed his slightly mocking (and self-mocking) laugh. “No, it isn’t in the liner notes.” After I waited him out, he said, “Acid. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, get it? LSD. ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ It’s as plain as anything, once you have the key.”

And, as soon as he said it, it was clear. And then he had leaned forward earnestly. “The point is, I’ve got some, and it’s dynamite. Want to try it?”

I shook my head, remembering, and moved on to another lehr. I remember being unsurprised that Dave used drugs. It fit with his somewhat self-consciously bohemian lifestyle. And I suppose I was flattered that he thought I might an interesting person to get high with. But then, maybe he merely thought my reactions would be amusing. In any case, I told him, I didn’t think it was for me.

Segal, all energy and sweet reason, was sitting forward now. The candles made little highlights on his eyeglasses. “But if you haven’t tried it, how can you know? Frank, I’m telling you, this stuff is tremendous.”

“It’s also illegal.”

He brushed that aside. “So is off-track betting. So is speeding. So was drinking, during prohibition. So what?” I wasn’t about to say I didn’t want to risk getting arrested. And anyway, that wasn’t it. The fact was, the stuff scared me. I told Segal that doing drugs “wasn’t my thing,” and doing one’s own thing was as close to a universal commandment as college kids recognized.  But it didn’t stop Segal, or even slow him down. He was always different, even in his non-conformity. “Frank, you don’t believe the stuff you read, do you? Believe me, if I didn’t think it was safe, I wouldn’t fool with it.”

I was getting tired now. Maybe the sausage was slowing me down, but more likely it was the time of night. The hour before dawn was always hard. The boundaries between world blurred. I knew full well where I was, but the inner stage was a little more brightly lit, the outer a little less so. I saw boxes and strapping tape and the day’s first pale light coming through the distant windows. But mentally, I saw Segal and me in his apartment, discussing the pros and cons of drugs in general and acid in particular. And how much separated the two scenes? A few weeks, a few hours on the road, and certain incommunicable differences in background, income, prospects, outlooks, desires….

Maybe if I had understood that when I first went to college, I would have gotten along better.

 

First Shift (5)

The summers I turned 16 and 17, I had loaded and unloaded trucks and tractor trailers at the produce auction, half a mile from grandmom’s house. I would walk there every day after work, waiting for dad to pick me up. One memorable sunny August afternoon in 1963 and I had sat in her living room watching President Kennedy announce that “yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness,” referring to the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

Other times, I had come in for cookies and milk after plowing or discing or cultivating, and had sat and told grandmom of things I had been reading about. Earlier yet, I had been one of the 15 grandchildren who filled her house with noise and motion on her birthday and on some holidays. And before even that, back in the early fifties, my older brother and sister and I would sometimes come in, cold and wet from picking daffodils for the cut-flower trade, and grandmom would fix us hot chocolate. And cookies. She always urged cookies on you as if they were something good for you that you ate too infrequently.

Several lehrs down, a couple of people were arguing about something. I could see the hostile postures, could hear the angry sound, if not the words. I watched them for a moment, mildly curious, then turned back to my work.

I’d almost killed myself, one day, plowing. The plow had a three-point hitch, meaning that it hooked two chains to the hydraulic lifts at the back of the tractor, while the tongue attached directly below the seat, held in place by a pin, which was secured in turn by a cotter pin. One day, as I was plowing, the cotter pin got out, the pin worked loose, the tongue dropped and dug itself into the ground, and the rear end of the plow came flying up and forward toward my head. The tongue dug itself almost vertically into the ground, stopping the plow from going forward the few inches it would have needed to brain me. The tractor was shivering and bucking, its wheels still churning, until I put in the clutch. I backed it out, and the plow tongue came out of the ground undamaged. Walking back, I found the pin lying atop the furrow, rather than being buried beneath the earth, as I had feared. I never did find the cotter pin, but no harm, no foul, and I had a story to tell about the hazards of farming. But who would I have told? My fraternity brothers, coming out of their suburban backgrounds?

It occurred to me, rhythmically throwing boxes, that what I was doing wasn’t so different from most jobs where you worked with your hands. Most jobs had a groove, and the hardest part was finding it and settling into it. Like mixing mud, which I had been doing for the past few days.

Dad was renovating one of the farm buildings, and one aspect of the job was plastering the two-story exterior. He hired a couple of men, and he conscripted my cousin Warren and me as free labor. The three men did the plastering. Warren and I mixed the plaster (which everybody called mud) and kept it coming to them as they were ready for it.

There’s nothing particularly difficult about mixing mud: so much cement, so much sand, so much water from the hose. Dad’s cement-mixer had died long ago, so Warren and I  mixed by hand, pouring the materials into a six-foot by four-foot by one-foot slope-sided metal box, raking the stuff forward and back forward and back, using an oversized hoe with two large holes in the blade. We would mix and get a batch ready, then put it in a bucked tied to a rope attached to a pulley at roof level. We would swing the bucket of mud up to the men on the scaffold and they would empty it into a tray and we’d lover the bucket and refill it. Nothing fancy, but there was a rhythm to it. We had to mix the mud soon enough that they would have it when they needed it, but not too soon, or it would begin to harden. Since mixing took a good while, we had to start the next batch before the previous batch was used up. That meant piling the available mud at one end and the new materials at the other, trying to keep the water from flowing into the old batch so it wouldn’t’ get soupy.

My relief man arrived again, chatty as ever. “Lunch. Twenty minutes.”

One day drinking with my friends to celebrate the end of finals. The next day, starting a three-day job mixing mud at the farm. Two days after that, back at the factory.