Working. Part 37

I worked at an H-bomb plant in South Carolina. My work was building forms. I don't think the end product bothered me so much, 'cause Judgment Day is not a thing . . . (Trails off.) It doesn't hang heavy on my heart. It might be that I should be persuaded it was inappropriate . . .

They got that big old reactor works with the heavy water and all that. This heavy equipment runs there day and night, just one right after another, going forty miles an hour, digging that big old hole halfway to h.e.l.l. They build themselves a highway down there, just to dig that hole.

Now you're gonna have to build you a building, concrete and steel. You s.h.i.+p in a ready-mixed plant just for that building. A pump on the hill. It starts pumping concrete into the hole. It's near about time for the carpenters. We're building forms for the first floor of that thing. I was the twenty-four-hundredth-and-some-odd carpenter hired at the beginning. That's how big it was. There was three thousand laborers. Each time we built one of these reactors there would be a whole town to support it. We built a dozen or so towns in this one county.

We all understood we were making H-bombs and tried to get it done before the Russians built theirs, see? That's what everybody thought. It was one of those great secret jobs where you had guards at the gates, barbed wire around the place, spies, and all that kind of foolishness.

Some people call it the hard lard belt, some call it the Bible belt. Mostly just farmers who stepped from behind the plow, who had tenants or were tenants themselves. It was a living wage in that part of the country for the first time since the boll weevil had been through. And boy, you can't downrate that. It seems like the vast comedy of things when a Yankee come and got us to build their H-bomb, part of the fine comedy that she should come and give us the first living wage since the War of Northern Aggression-for this.

In Bloomington, Indiana, I saw a lot of women make their living making bombs. They had a grand picnic when they built the millionth bomb. Bombs they're dropping on people. And the students came to demonstrate against the bombs. Maybe these women see no sense in what they're doing, but they see their wages in what they're doing . . .

Some people will say, "I'm a poet. I'm better than you. I'm different. I'm a separate kind of species." It doesn't seem to me poetry is that way. It seems to me like mockin'birds sing and there's hardly ever a mockingbird that doesn't sing. It's the same way with poetry. It just comes natural to 'em, part of what we're made for. It's the natural utterance of living language. I say my calling is to be a carpenter and a poet. No contradiction.

(Chants) Work's quite a territory. Real work and fake work. There's fake work, which is the prost.i.tution. There is the magic of payday, though. You'll say, "Well, if you get paid for your work, is that prost.i.tution?" No indeed. But how are you gonna prove it's not? A real struggle there. Real work, fake work, and prost.i.tution. The magic of payday. The groceries now heaped on the table and the new-crop wine and store-bought s.h.i.+rts. That's what it says, yes.

IN SEARCH OF A CALLING.

NORA WATSON.

Jobs are not big enough for people. It's not just the a.s.sembly line worker whose job is too small for his spirit, you know? A job like mine, if you really put your spirit into it, you would sabotage immediately. You don't dare. So you absent your spirit from it. My mind has been so divorced from my job, except as a source of income, it's really absurd.

As I work in the business world, I am more and more shocked. You throw yourself into things because you feel that important questions-self-discipline, goals, a meaning of your life-are carried out in your work. You invest a job with a lot of values that the society doesn't allow you to put into a job. You find yourself like a pacemaker that's gone crazy or something. You want it to be a million things that it's not and you want to give it a million parts of yourself that n.o.body else wants there. So you end up wrecking the curve or else settling down and conforming. I'm really in a funny place right now. I'm so calm about what I'm doing and what's coming . . .

She is twenty-eight. She is a staff writer for an Inst.i.tution publis.h.i.+ng health care literature. Previously she had worked as an editor for a corporation publis.h.i.+ng national magazines.

She came from a small mountain town in western Pennsylvania. "My father was a preacher. I didn't like what he was doing, but it was his vocation. That was the good part of it. It wasn't just: go to work in the morning and punch a time clock. It was a profession of himself. I expected work to be like that. All my life, I planned to be a teacher. It wasn't until late in college, my senior year, that I realized what the public school system was like. A little town in the mountains is one thing . . .

"My father, to my mind, is a weird person, but whatever he is, he is. Being a preacher was so important to him he would call it the Call of the Lord. He was willing to make his family live in very poor conditions. He was willing to strain his relations.h.i.+p to my mother, not to mention his children. He put us through an awful lot of things, including just bare survival, in order to stay being a preacher. His evenings, his weekends, and his days, he was out calling on people. Going out with healing oil and anointing the sick, listening to their troubles. The fact that he didn't do the same for his family is another thing. But he saw himself as the core resource in the community-at a great price to himself. He really believed that was what he was supposed to be doing. It was his life.

Most of the night he wouldn't go to bed. He'd pull out sermons by Wesley or Spurgeon or somebody, and he'd sit down until he fell asleep, maybe at three ' in the morning. Reading sermons. He just never stopped. (Laughs.) I paper the walls of my office with posters and bring in flowers, bring in an FM radio, bring down my favorite ceramic lamp. I'm the only person in the whole d.a.m.n building with a desk facing the window instead of the door. I just turn myself around from all that I can. I ration my time so that I'll spend two hours working for the Inst.i.tution and the rest of the time I'll browse. (Laughs.) I function better if they leave me alone more. My boss will come in and say, "I know you're overloaded, but would you mind getting this done, it's urgent. I need it in three weeks." I can do it in two hours. So I put it on the back burner and produce it on time. When I first went there, I came in early and stayed late. I read everything I could on the subject at hand. I would work a project to the wall and get it really done right, and then ask for more. I found out I was wrecking the curve, I was out of line.

The people, just as capable as I and just as ready to produce, had realized it was pointless, and had cut back. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, was rationing his time. Playing cards at lunch time for three hours, going sun bathing, or less obvious ways of blowing it. I realized: Okay, the road to ruin is doing a good job. The amazing, absurd thing was that once I decided to stop doing a good job, people recognized a kind of authority in me. Now I'm just moving ahead like blazes.

I have my own office. I have a secretary. If I want a book case, I get a book case. If I want a file, I get a file. If I want to stay home, I stay home. If I want to go shopping, I go shopping. This is the first comfortable job I've ever had in my life and it is absolutely despicable.

I've been a waitress and done secretarial work. I knew, in those cases, I wasn't going to work at near capacity. It's one thing to work to your limits as a waitress because you end up with a bad back. It's another thing to work to your limits doing writing and editing because you end up with a sharper mind. It's a joy. Here, of all places, where I had expected to put the energy and enthusiasm and the gifts that I may have to work-it isn't happening. They expect less than you can offer. Token labor. What writing you do is writing to order. When I go for a job interview-I must leave this place!-I say, "Sure, I can bring you samples, but the ones I'm proud of are the ones the Inst.i.tution never published."

It's so demeaning to be there and not be challenged. It's humiliation, because I feel I'm being forced into doing something I would never do of my own free will-which is simply waste itself. It's really not a Puritan hang-up. It's not that I want to be persecuted. It's simply that I know I'm vegetating and being paid to do exactly that. It's possible for me to sit here and read my books. But then you walk out with no sense of satisfaction, with no sense of legitimacy! I'm being had. Somebody has bought the right to you for eight hours a day. The manner in which they use you is completely at their discretion. You know what I mean?

I feel like I'm being pimped for and it's not my style. The level of bitterness in this department is stunning. They take days off quite a bit. They don't show up. They don't even call in. They've adjusted a lot better than I have. They see the Inst.i.tution as a free ride as long as it lasts. I don't want to be party to it, so I've gone my own way. It's like being on welfare. Not that that's a shameful thing. It's the surprise of this enforced idleness. It makes you feel not at home with yourself. I'm furious. It's a feeling that I will not be humiliated. I will not be dis-used.

For all that was bad about my father's vocation, he showed me it was possible to fuse your life to your work. His home was also his work. A parish is no different from an office, because it's the whole countryside. There's nothing I would enjoy more than a job that was so meaningful to me that I brought it home.

The people I work with are not buffoons. I think they're part of a culture, like me, who've been sold on a dum-dum idea of human nature. It's frightening. I've made the best compromise available. If I were free, economically free, I would go back to school. It galls me that in our culture we have to pay for the privilege of learning.

A guy was in the office next to mine. He's sixty-two and he's done. He came to the Inst.i.tution in the forties. He saw the scene and said, "Yes, I'll play drone to you. I'll do all the piddley things you want. I won't upset the apple cart by suggesting anything else." With a change of regimes in our department, somebody came across him and said, "Gee, he hasn't contributed anything here. His mind is set in old att.i.tudes. So we'll throw him out." They fired him unceremoniously, with no pension, no severance pay, no nothing. Just out on your ear, sixty-two. He gets back zero from having invested so many years playing the game.

The drone has his nose to the content of the job. The politicker has his nose to the style. And the politicker is what I think our society values. The politicker, when it's apparent he's a winner, is helped. Everyone who has a stake in being on the side of the winner gives him a boost. The minute I finally realized the way to exist at the Inst.i.tution-for the short time I'll be here-was not to break my back but to use it for my own ends, I was a winner.

Granted, there were choices this guy could have made initially. He might have decided on a more independent way of life. But there were all sorts of forces keeping him from that decision. The Depression, for one thing. You took the job, whatever the terms were. It was a straight negotiation. The drone would get his dole. The Inst.i.tution broke the contract. He was fired for being dull, which is what he was hired to be.

I resist strongly the mystique of youth that says these kids are gonna come up with the answers. One good thing a lot of the kids are doing, though, is not getting themselves tied up to artificial responsibilities. That includes marriage, which some may or may not call an artificial responsibility. I have chosen to stay unmarried, to not get enc.u.mbered with husband and children. But the guy with three kids and a mortgage doesn't have many choices. He wouldn't be able to work two days a week instead of five.

I'm coming to a less moralistic att.i.tude toward work. I know very few people who feel secure with their right just to be-or comfortable. Just you being you and me being me with my mini-talents may be enough. Maybe just making a career of being and finding out what that's about is enough. I don't think I have a calling-at this moment-except to be me. But n.o.body pays you for being you, so I'm at the Inst.i.tution-for the moment . . .

When you ask most people who they are, they define themselves by their jobs. "I'm a doctor." "I'm a radio announcer." "I'm a carpenter." If somebody asks me, I say, "I'm Nora Watson." At certain points in time I do things for a living. Right now I'm working for the Inst.i.tution. But not for long. I'd be lying to you if I told you I wasn't scared.

I have a few options. Given the market, I'm going to take the best job I can find. I really tried to play the game by the rules, and I think it's a hundred percent unadulterated bulls.h.i.+t. So I'm not likely to go back downtown and say, "Here I am. I'm very good, hire me."

You recognize yourself as a marginal person. As a person who can give only minimal a.s.sent to anything that is going on in this society: "I'm glad the electricity works." That's about it. What you have to find is your own niche that will allow you to keep feeding and clothing and sheltering yourself without getting downtown. (Laughs.) Because that's death. That's really where death is.

WALTER LUNDQUIST.

He's fifty; a commercial artist, designer. "I deplore the whole idea of commercialism. I find it degrading."

I was a kid in 1942 when I got out of art school. I wanted to make a lot of money and become famous. In five years I'll own the world. I'll be in New York driving a Cadillac and owning my own plane. I want gold cuff links and babes and the big house in the country. The whole bit. The American Dream. (Laughs.) That beautiful, ugly, vicious dream that we all, in some way, have. I wanted to be a key man in the industry. Over the years I realized there isn't any key man-that every man, every human is a commodity to be exploited. And destroyed and cast aside. For thirty years I've been a commercial hack.

The problem isn't the work itself. Does it have a real meaning or is it a piece of commercial pap? The question gets down to who the h.e.l.l pays for it. Okay. You want a living, you want to eat. Say you're a bookkeeper. Are you counting something of human value or are you counting for the Syndicate or the Pentagon? Are you a bookkeeper counting dead bodies or children at school? What kind of an individual are you? Do you feel you're something because you create a cute commercial spot that sells a product that has no human value? Is it all purely style? Is there no content?

I had my own organization, fifteen people. "Let's go out and do a job for the client. Yes, sir. Let's lick his boots." Who's the man with the checkbook? What does he want from you? Now you take nice things and make them into some dumb package. Some plastic thing which is not biodegrade-able, which will not decompose, which fills the society where you want to scream, "We're drowning in plastics!"

You think of the advertiser and his influence on our s.e.xual climate. v.a.g.i.n.al sprays are now on the market. Why is a woman spraying her v.a.g.i.n.a? Because she's tastier? Who's going down there sniffing? You see two young girls on TV talking about a date. One tells the other she's using a v.a.g.i.n.al spray. Why doesn't her girl friend do it? G.o.d! What a c.u.n.t-lapping society we've become!

I wanted to be at the drawing board, creative, doing something I believed in. But I became a pimp. I didn't start drinking until I was thirty. I surprised myself. I found I could outdrink any of my clients. They got drunk and I didn't. What an absurd way to live! To make money because you could booze it up and cater to someone else's frailty. His need for a boot licker's comrades.h.i.+p, listening to his cheap jokes at some expensive bar. I got the work all right, but it made me sick. I couldn't stand it.

We had a client who was providing additives to meats and food preparations. My job was to make it into a trade publication ad. I'm sitting at these meetings with the president of the company and the sales manager. We're out to provide a service to the meat packers so they can cheat government a.n.a.lysts who are going to inspect the sausages. They don't see it as cheating. I say, "Why are we doing this ad for mustard?" They say, "Mustard acts as a binder." It holds together the globules of fat the client is putting in. So we make a living selling mustard because the guy wants to put fat instead of meat protein in there. So the public's been cheated and these sons of b.i.t.c.hes are out there playing golf . . .

We were doing a beautiful job for a big brewer. They'd just bought a new brewery and found out the beer was too nutritious. It had a lot of food value. They did market research and found out that psychologically inadequate young men consumed beer as a way of competing with one another-the kids in college. "Can you drink fourteen bottles of beer while I drink fourteen bottles of beer?" How many can you drink before you puke? The beer that sells the best is the weakest and the thinnest and doesn't fight you. The first thing they did was to take the richness out of it. They got it down to alcohol and water.

My role was to create a fun-filled image, an exciting boy-girl gaiety in the compet.i.tive market of light beer. "Light beer"-that's the ad phrase for watered and thin beer. So the schmucky kid thinks he's a stud fighting for the babe by consuming all that alcohol.

You begin to say, "What the f.u.c.k am I doing? I'm sitting here destroying my country." The feeling gets stronger and stronger and suddenly your father dies.

The turning point in my life was the death of my father. It was a funny thing. Here you're watching a beautiful guy with white hair lying in his bed, dying of a heart attack. You hear him ramble and wander and talk about his life: "I was never anything. I didn't do a job even in raising my children. I didn't mean anything . . ." You watch death. Then you say, "Wait a minute. What's going on with him is going to hit me. What am I doing between now and my death? If you take actuarial tables of insurance companies, I'm running on borrowed time." You begin to a.s.sess yourself and that's a shock. I didn't come up smelling like a rose. "Am I going to go on forever being a G.o.dd.a.m.n pimp? What's the alternative? Is there another way of earning a living?"

I had a client who was my best friend. I'd known him twenty years. We'd been sitting together talking casually. I was telling him my feelings. He was shocked. "For Chrissake," he says, "you're my enemy. From now on I'm never going to deal with you again." I haven't seen this poor guy in four years.

At this moment I have a job on the drawing board that's pretty good. This one client has some degree of conscience. It's an ecology poster for children, given away as a premium. It's a beautiful thing to hang on the wall, acquainting a child with the cycle of life. I'm working on two film strips for education. One's on Luther Burbank and the other's on Franz Boas. But-t.i.ttle dough.

Now fifty percent of my time is taken up with antiwar work. Of course, n.o.body pays for this kind of message. The big problem I'm facing is how to support my family. I'm straddling two worlds and I'm trying to move over into the sane one. But I can't make a living out of it.

I have a very small office. As soon as I come in, the phone starts ringing. All free jobs. Usually my paying jobs get done later. (Laughs.) They're the ones I take home with me. My family watches TV and I sit down beside them and work through the evening to turn out the paying job, so I can get my bread and spend the rest of the day doing what I think is important. I put in a sixteen-hour day. It's a crazy cycle. It's been a trying experience for my wife. She thinks I'm psychologically sick. She goes one way and I go the other. My kids pay a terrible penalty for me . . .

I'm struggling to survive. I'm running out of funds. I may have to pimp again for survival's sake. But I'll not give up the sane work. I'm scurrying about. If it doesn't work, I may do somewhat what young people do and drop out. I'll stop existing in this society. I'll work on a road crew. I'll cut lumber or whatever the h.e.l.l it'll be. But I'll never again play the full-time lying dishonest role I've done most of my life.

Once you wake up the human animal you can't put it back to sleep again. I guess I'm pretty schizophrenic. Obviously all the schizophrenics are not locked up in asylums. (Laughs.) REBECCA SWEENEY.

"I never felt that I'd been searching for a calling. Circ.u.mstances made me look around and keep right on looking. Over the last years I've been fired sixteen times. (Laughs.) I'd have to dig up all my records to tell you all the jobs I was fired from." She is thirty-five.

I grew up in a devout Irish Catholic family. By the time I was eighteen I decided to be a nun. I wanted to be a doctor too. So I found a religious order, the Medical Mission Sisters. I was never a.s.signed to a hospital. I did farm work and office work and I cooked. I took care of the property too. I enjoyed it. But after six years I was asked to leave. I didn't know why. I think it was a personality difference between myself and the Superior. I was hurt because I had been rejected. All I did was cry about it. As soon as I walked out my spirits picked up. I was looking for something new and adventurous.

I was twenty-four and too old to study medicine. So I just went ahead for my degree in sociology. I attended the university at night and got a job as a bank teller. I realized there were no black people employed at the bank. So I went in and talked to the personnel man and the president. Before I knew it, people were no longer talking to me. I used to come in all smiles and people'd say, "Hi." Now I was getting the cold shoulder.

One young woman-I had talked religion with her, she was a Lutheran -said she agreed with me but didn't want to lose her job. She warned me to be careful. I said no, the president had a nice Irish Catholic name and everything. (Laughs.) I called the Labor Board. They said they could only protect me if I was organizing a union. So I immediately began talking union. The president called me in. "First you talk about this integration stuff and now you're talking union. If you're not careful, we'll let you go."

One day a Negro girl applied for a job. As soon as I saw her leave the bank I followed her. I told them I was going on my pa.s.s. Caught her on the street. She thought I was nuts. I told her if she wasn't hired, to go to the FEPC and keep in touch with me. A few days later she called me. And a few days after that I was fired.

I got a job in a girls' detention home. The girls were coming to me with their problems instead of going to the nuns, 'cause I was younger and wasn't in a habit and joked around with them a little. I was asked to leave.

Then I got a job in a hospital as an aide and surgical technician, scrubbing operations. There was a group organizing the hospital help. I wasn't able to do much because I was going to school and active in the peace movement and knocking myself out. But I was talking it up. I put the laundry people in touch with the union. The personnel director called me in. My work reports were excellent but he did fire me.

I was pumping gas in a Standard station because I was tired of working indoors. I knew something about cars. I was fired from that job because I wouldn't sleep with the boss. That job lasted only a couple of months.

When I finished my education I knew I wanted to get into union work. So I started doing work in different factories, making contacts-nonunion shops. I worked in one plant as a machine operator, makin' nuts and bolts and drill press work. I've always liked mechanical work, work with my hands. Work you can put your energy into.

I just went around and got different jobs in other plants and got regularly fired. In the meantime, to pick up money, I was driving a cab. I've always liked to drive a car. I didn't really like that so much. It was hard on my eyes and my neck. I had fun. Since I was white, they'd say, "I suppose there's some places in this city you don't like to drive." I'd say, "Yeah, there's one place." They'd say, "What?" They'd be expecting me to say the South Side. I'd say, "The Loop. I tell you driving there is terrible." (Laughs.) They'd stop all conversation. That job I quit, believe it or not.

I took some census work in '70. It's such a bureaucracy. They keep bringing up different supervisors and firing people and transferring them and everything. Rather than come out and say it's a temporary job-two, three months-they pick on you and lay you off. When you're fired it goes on your record. People were mad about it. I got fired for using vulgar language. (Laughs.) I called a supervisor a G.o.dd.a.m.n motherf.u.c.ker. That was it.

I was doing automatic lathes in another plant. The Steel Workers Union was there. I went to meetings right away and would give my opinion. The plant had about five thousand people. Maybe thirty would come to meetings. I was raising issues all the time, mostly health and safety in the plants. The local president was a company man but about half a dozen people told him, "We'd like you to a.s.sign Becky to the Health and Safety Committee. She's really good." I'd go to the local fire department and find out about regulations. Some doors were blocked off because they stacked materials there. I'd raise the issue.

I really liked doing that work. I studied chess while I was working. People would laugh at me 'cause I would buy a paperback chess book, tear a page out, and stick it up on the machine. When I'd have a three-minute pause, while the pieces were running through, I'd be reading that thing over. They'd say, "You read all your books that way? A page at a time?" They got a kick out of it.

I got along fine with 'em. We had good friends.h.i.+ps. One woman, May, was a lathe operator. Only the men had the bigger lathes and they got more dough. She knew the company wouldn't give it to her, so she never applied. I got mad at her. I really gave it to her. I went and applied for the job myself. I got another young girl to do it too. Just to make an issue. Then May went in and applied. The personnel guy called the three of us in. He started telling us how hard it was. So I reached in my back pocket and pulled out a brochure from the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, with t.i.tle Seven of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I laid that on the table. He didn't stop to catch his breath. He said, "Of course, May, if you want this job you're welcome to it. You're the most qualified." She got the job.

Eventually they did fire me. For falsifying my application. I had left off that I worked in the bank. I knew they wouldn't give me good references and I'd never get the job. And I didn't put down that I had a college degree. That was suspicious-somebody that is too smart to be doing this dumb work.

I filed a grievance and the union had to take it to arbitration. Oh, I'm telling you. Something else they brought up-I was involved with CORE and the civil rights thing around the bank. They had really dug. Anything written about me, they dug up. HUAC82 had investigated me 'cause I was involved in the Students' Mobilization Committee.

So the arbitrator ruled in favor of the company. The workers felt bad about it. They said they'd like to help me, but they were afraid to make statements on my behalf. They were really scared.

"My health was running down quite a bit. I had arthritis. I was thrown from a horse. I had broken bones. I was wearing a neck brace. I had pimples all over my face. The specialist said, "Don't strain yourself." But I started taking karate. I had been raped and I was interested in self-defense. I went to a naprapath. He agreed with my doing karate. He changed my eating habits and my health improved completely."

I got on the staff of UE.83 My union work transferred me to Ohio. I joined a karate club down in the hills. I dropped out because I was. .h.i.t a couple of times and it hurt. So I decided to do some yoga. I found that more to my liking. While I was doing organizing I would do yoga every day. I made it a way of life. I teach it.

I was very busy in union work in Ohio. I was organizing a plant of thirteen hundred, mostly women. It was an electrical plant and they had lightweight stuff. I would get so wound up in the work and be running around so much that the only way I could unwind was yoga.

I was fired from UE. It was not political. It had more to do with the fact that I'm an outspoken woman, that I have been involved with Women's Liberation, and that I'm unmarried. There has also been a development in the openness of lesbians. Some men lumped all these together. So . . .

My way of dealing with this question is the same way I deal with communism. Any time anyone was challenging me, "Are you a communist?" I'd say, "What is the issue?" It's the same way in dealing with Women's Liberation. Only instead of calling it communism, they call it lesbianism. I think that's why I was fired. The innuendoes.

Many people have suffered because of this. Not because of the loss of me. Lord knows I can be replaced very easily. But this plant in Ohio is going to cost the union. It was a very difficult campaign. People tried five times before to organize it. The company would hire high-school girls and they could care less about the union. They always voted it down. I was in touch weekly with about sixty desperate people who wanted the union. They were behind me. But one of the factory workers in the plant was dead set against me. He didn't want any "broad" telling him what to do. The other people didn't care about him, but he reached the union's higher-ups.

Some of the best people at the plant were furious when I was fired. "If they do this to Becky, what are they gonna do to us?" Even one of the better union officials refused to stand up for me. He said, "It's one thing to fight for the working cla.s.s, but it's another thing to take a fight on for lesbianism."

I'm collecting unemployment while I'm teaching yoga once a week at a Catholic girls' high school. So now I've enrolled in a college to study naprapthy, which is a form of drugless healing. I'd like to show people how to cure themselves while letting nature cure. I'm also studying colon therapy. Our system isn't clean.

The first few times I was fired, I cried because my feelings were hurt. When I was fired from UE, the first thing I did was to call the doctor and ask him if I could get into college right away. He said yes. So everything's fine. When I was in high school I thought a vocation was a particular calling. Here's a voice: "Come, follow me." My idea of a calling now is not: "Come." It's what I'm doing right now, not what I'm going to be. Life is a calling.

I pretty well flow with the tide. You know what I'd like to do someday? I would like to be a heavy equipment operator. These big earth movers . . . If I don't get it done in this life, maybe I'll get it done in my next life.

SECOND CHANCE.

FRED RINGLEY.

We have a small farm in Arkansas. It's a mile and a half off the highway on a dirt road on top of a hill. It's thirteen and a half acres. We call it Lucky Thirteen. We are in the process of building a cattle herd, because you can't make a living as a farmer unless you have thousands of acres.

We have five children, six to eleven. Three girls and two boys. The eleven-year-old boy takes care of the cattle. The ten-year-old girl takes care of the chickens. The nine-year-old boy takes care of the two hogs. And the youngest girls take care of the dog.

We purchased a dairy bar-a combination ice cream parlor and hamburger joint. My wife and I alternate from ten in the morning until ten at night. This is a carry-out joint. It's a mama-and-papa operation. A Benedictine abbey sits on top of the hill. It's a boarding school for boys. They don't like the food in their dining room and they furnish our daytime business.

He is forty years old. Until a year ago he had lived all his life in the environs of Chicago. He was born in one of its North Sh.o.r.e suburbs; he was raised, reached adulthood, and became a paterfamilias as a "typical suburbanite." His was a bedroom community, middle-cla.s.s, "of struggle for the goods of the world." He had worked in advertising as a copywriter and salesman.

We were caught up in the American Dream. You've gotta have a house. You've gotta have a country club. You've gotta have two cars. Here you are at ten grand and getting nowhere. So I doubled my salary. I also doubled my grief. I now made twenty thousand dollars, had an expense account, a Country Squire-air-conditioned station wagon given by the company-a wonderful boss. We began to acc.u.mulate. We got a house in the suburbs and we got a country club members.h.i.+p and we got two cars and we got higher taxes. We got nervous and we started drinking more and smoking more. Finally, one day we sat down. We have everything and we are poor.

The superhighways were coming through. Ramada Inn moved in and Holiday Inn moved in. We used to sit around until three in the morning, my wife and I, and say, "There's gotta be a better way." We own a travel trailer. We said, "Suppose we hook the trailer up to the car and just went around these United States and tried to figure out where would be a good place to live-where we could make a living and still have the natural background we want. How could we do it? We're only average people. We don't put any money away. Our equity is in our home."

We sold the house, paid off everybody we owe, put our furniture in storage, and started driving. We had everything in the big city and quit while we were still ahead. We had seen what we wanted to see in the East. It's time to go West.

We had two criteria: water and climate. We ruled out the North and the deep South. That left us a straight line from Indianapolis to New Mexico. We decided central Arkansas was the best for environment. They've backed up the river and made these fantastic lakes. We bought this farm.

Our neighbors came over. They're sixty-eight. They're broiler farmers.84 She plays piano in the church, by songbooks written in do-re-mi notes. I brought a record out-hits of the last sixty years. It was from Caruso to Mario Lanza or something. She didn't recognize one piece of music on that record except Eddy Arnold. They didn't get a radio down there until about 1950, because they weren't wired for electricity.85 So we've got one foot in the thirties and one in the seventies.

We have a milk cow, a Jersey. I had never put my hand on a cow. The people we bought the home from taught us how to milk her. We discovered a cow can be contrary and hold her milk up if she wants to tighten certain muscles and doesn't like your cold grip. People would come over and watch us and laugh.

All through this eight-thousand-mile trip, Daddy is thinking, Maybe I haven't done the right thing. Everywhere I went, they said, "You'll never make money." Friends said, "Oh, Fred's lost his beans." We were digging into our backlog money for food. Time was pa.s.sing. It was winter.

I realize there are only two ways to do things: work for somebody else or be an owner. There are two cla.s.ses of people, the haves and the have-nots. The haves own. I went to the local bank and discovered that this dairy bar was for sale. I said, "I can cook a hamburger." But I'd never worked in a restaurant, even as a bus boy or a soda jerk. We borrowed a hundred percent of the money from the bank, fourteen thousand dollars. We revamped the entire place because it hadn't been kept up.

We don't have car hops. You come to the window. We serve you a to-go meal through the window. Inside we have five tables, and in the alcove a little game room with three pinball machines. We serve hamburger, fried chicken, pizzaburger-we introduced it in the area-chili dogs, Tastee Freeze, candy. Bubble gum's a good seller. We sell a plastic bag of shaved ice for a quarter to tourists, fishermen. c.o.ke, Dr. Pepper, Sprite. Fish sandwiches.

We've had the bar only six months. We're trying to get it to a point where we spend less and less time there. The owner has to be there, 'cause they come in to see you as much as they come in to eat. They come in and say, "How's the cow?" They've never forgotten. They say, "How's the farm and how are the ticks?" And so on. And, "The place looks nice." They get all dressed up for this. The wife puts on her best dress and comes to the dairy bar for dinner. It's a big deal.

If all goes well and we've doubled the business, we'll close when school closes. Maybe we'll close for Easter week. And then close another week when the boys in the abbey have off. So we'll end with a month's vacation. We're only a day's drive from New Orleans. We'll go there this winter.

My wife opens the place at ten. Help comes from eleven to one-high-school girls. At three she comes home and gets me. We traded our Country Squire for a used pickup truck. At about three thirty the boys come from the abbey and play pinball machines and have hamburgers. I stay until ten at night.

I'm a short order cook and bottle washer and everything else-until ten. Shut the lights off, clean the grill. Sometimes I'll stop off at the tavern across the street and shoot the breeze until he closes at eleven. I'll come home and my wife is watching the news or Johnny Carson. That's when we talk. She tells me how the animals are doing and the kids are doing. We go to bed about midnight and it starts all over the next day. Except Monday.

Monday we're closed. Now we begin to reap the benefits of what we went there for. On Monday we put the kids on the bus to school. We get in the truck, we throw the boat in the back. Six minutes from our front door, we put it in one of the world's largest man-made lakes and go fis.h.i.+ng and picnicking and mess around until four ' when the kids come home. We sit out there, where I don't suppose three boats go by us all day long. Sit and watch the copperheads on the sh.o.r.e and the birds overhead. Discussing Nixon and Daley and fis.h.i.+ng and the dairy bar and whatever. What's astonis.h.i.+ng is we can climb a mountain right across from our home. There's a waterfall at the top. And no jets going over. No people. Just a pickup truck down the road now and then.

A man stood on Eden's Highway86 and took a survey of guys driving to work. Their jaw muscles were working. I was one of those guys. I was this guy with his eyes bulging and swearing and saying, "You rotten guy, get out of my way." For what? So I could get to work to get kicked around by a purchasing agent because his job is five minutes late? That forty-five minutes' drive to work. I would usually have about five cigarettes. Constant close calls, jam-ups, running late, tapping the foot on the floor, thumping that wheel, and everything that everybody does.

I would get to the office. You might find the paper hadn't been delivered, the press had broken down, the boss might be in a foul mood. Or you might have a guy on the phone screaming that he had to see you in half an hour or else the whole world would end. They always had to have an estimate first. So you'd do your paper work as fast as you could. Then you'd start your round of daily calls. Then came the ha.s.sle for parking s.p.a.ce. Are you lucky enough to get one of those hour jobs on the street or do you go in the lot? If you go in the lot, what're they gonna do to your car before they give it back to you? How many dents? So you go through that ha.s.sle.

Then it would be lunch time. You'd take a guy to lunch, have two or three drinks. Rich food . . . You come out of the darkened restaurant back into the summer afternoon. At four you'd take whatever jobs you had a.s.sembled or proofs you had to look over. Maybe work until five thirty or six. Then you're fighting the traffic back to the suburb.

I'd be home at a quarter to seven. We would just sit down and eat. We would finish at eight, with dinner and conversation, looking at the kids' report cards and whatever. Then we'd watch TV if something decent was on. If it was daylight saving time, we'd play ball with the kids until nine or ten. Then we'd go to bed. Or else we'd start hacking away at our personal problems. Mostly it was fighting the bills. On weekends we'd go to the country club for dinner. I belonged for three years and never played the course. I never had time.