I don't like reading my old posts, not at all. They sound whiny and glib and inauthentic. This is a different time than all the times before it, however. For me blogging is chiefly about developing a voice and learning to see in clear, genuine ways. Capture details. Be in the moment with experience. If I ever write about a woman/love interest again, please shoot me. That's tedious.
At the bakery where I work the pan line forms the beating heart of the make-up department. The pans come together on a conveyor under the roller with a steady tap. Tap. Tap. Tap Tap Tap.
Jack and Mario run the divider, the section of the work that includes the dough divider, a lift that carries balls of bread overhead, the roller, and then an electronic eye that drops the formed loaves into pans.
Names are changed here to prevent me getting nabbed for an immediate trip to HR.
Jack's the veteran of the group, the steady hand who commands the middle. He watches the bread line with his thumbs under his armpits and his legs spread wide, calmly until something goes wrong. He's serious, a man of average height with a Lincoln-shaped beard who used to work on a sub tender in the Navy. "Know what Navy stands for?" he asks, quickly providing the answer, "Never Again Volunteer Yourself."
Jack's an iconoclast and a skeptic. At the shift meeting he piped up, "It's my Friday. I've got my sarcasm face on so don't mess with me today."
I asked Jack about the tap, tap, tap, that it sounded like a heartbeat. He said, "When I first got this position I learned to listen for the sounds the pan line makes. If it's not making them I know something is wrong." I suspect working on the sub tender was the same way. Men who are good at working with machinery understand the beating heart of it.
I came to the bakery at the end of the summer. I'd been driving for Uber for two years until one Saturday morning a young woman with no insurance backed blindly out of her driveway and plowed into the side of my car, missing my face, shoulder and ribs by about five inches. The passenger door collapsed but held, and my passenger wasn't hurt. I'd picked her up from the airport and we were about two blocks from her house. She was lovely about it.
Just like that, I had smashed car and no job. Uber insurance only covered a third of the cost to fix it after a $1000 deductible and a cynical lowball of the claim, so I was stuck. My sister lent me a thousand dollars that got me through September. I didn't even ask her. "Pay it forward," she said.
I starting temping to keep afloat, until one day I got an assignment at the bakery shipping depot with a team from production. It was a great night. We worked in a sweat and plowed through 20 pallets of frozen bread, dating it and loading it into trays. It was like football practice. The positivity and teamwork were infectious. Three people, supervisors at the plant, said to me, "You're doing great. Are you looking for a job?"
I applied online the minute I got home, working four more times as a temp while I went through the screening and interview process. For the first time in ages I had a home, a place where the standard was simple, just work as hard as everybody else and be appreciated. They feed us lunch every day, steel-cut oatmeal at the steam table before shift. An army travels on its stomach.
When the worst possible thing happens, or what we think is the worst possible thing, it can be very liberating. Disaster reorders our lives in marvelous ways. It got me a home and a place to work, good money to travel to Idaho for Christmas and spend too much on presents. I have dreams now. I could get my master's in counseling, or buy a motorcycle and take a cross-country trip with my brothers (be a hell of a book) or get my own apartment, my own kitchen to dance in, my own reading corner with three bookcases. Money is opportunity and choices, beginning with the opportunity to pay it forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment