Posts in Chronological Order

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…

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…

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…

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…

I could vaguely remember how hectic my days had been, my first week on this job two years before. But as soon as I began to throw boxes, I was back in the groove. The job wasn’t pleasant, exactly – too much noise, too much dust, too many echoes of last time – but within…

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…

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…

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…