Another victim of the ZZZZ monster that is what I was. Through my bleary eyes and while rubbing the rug burns I had incurred from drooling in my prone position on the carpet beneath this huge panel of banality what I saw was an anti-hero making a series of convoluted deductions. Next thing I remember I woke up again at about midnight while a late night talk show host was engaging in weird shtick.
At that point I shuffled/shambled off to bed. I didn’t even both to use my iphone to go to Huffington Post to look at today’s best side-boob photos. (I am old but I am lecherous in a circumspect way.) When it first commenced as an online media source I would read the Huffington Post because it was akin to an e-media version of Mother Jones. Now Huffington Post has gotten just plain weird. It is the Fox News of the left. All HuffPo seems good for is ranting and demonizing conservatives and showing celebrity lifestyles (oh and side-boobs). Meh. Mother Jones is still okay and I would recommend it to you if you really like muckraking journalism.
The earlier part of the evening I had been at a groundbreaking ceremony for the addition of a 6th grade wing to our middle school. It took a long time to get to this point but we have commenced. The idea is that the 6th graders will be slowly merged into a middle school transition. They will have a wing of their own but they will share lunch facilities and the like with the older and clearly more tormented kids. The worst two years of American life are 7th and 8th grade, really. Studies go both ways as to the best models for the elementary to high school transition years. We tried 5-6, 7-8 buildings for the last ten years. But nobody got connected with the schools due to the short stays of their students in the buildings. Me I went to a 1-8 Building and I thought it was the way to go. DINOSAUR ALERT!!!!!
At the end of the groundbreaking I got my fourth bit of remuneration/graft for taking on the task of being a school board member. I got a hard hat. The other pieces of “compensation” I have gotten are an annual pass to the school’s sporting events, a briefcase with the school district’s name on it, and a series of Jimmie Johns sandwiches and cookies when the board meets so close to the end of my business day that I cannot grab a healthy meal in between the office and the start of the meeting.
My kids made fun of the hardhat. I didn’t say anything negative to them but it was a hardhat that got me to where I am today. My father worked in what was if not the largest at the time, one of the largest chemical manufacturing plants in the world. He worked at the Chambers Works located along the Delaware River in southern New Jersey for DuPont. From 1965 on (that is the year he bought the little white Mustang that he loved) I would l often climb into the passenger seat of that care to see a hard hat in the back seat. He also had steel toed safety shoes. As I remember he had protective safety glasses that had protective vented hard plastic wrap on the edges of the lenses that came flush up with his skin. This is the stuff that you wore in a factory to help keep yourself safe.
Back then there was nothing dishonorable about working hard in a factory. It was a way that offered a path to a good living. With the current skewing of the wealth in this country there isn’t the same value put on that kind of work. We are heading back to an era when the worker is nothing more than a body being used as a tool, to be discarded when it is bent or broker. But this is a digression.
The hard hat reminded me of my father and his hard work. It reminded me of his aspirations for each of his children. He expected us to want a better life and to work for it. He expected us to give honest measure. He believed a good life had the potential to be rewarded.
Thirty years slips by in the wink of an eye. On October 5, 1983 my father passed away at the age of 72 years old. He had a heart attack. It was relatively quick. Based on some reports the symptoms may have been occurring over several hours, but he fell dead at home in a manner that seemed sudden and at the same time unequivocal. I can remember the ripping and tearing of my soul on the day I learned of his death. I was 27.
Yeah the hard hat took me back to that day, that time. Seeing that construction wear brought back to me an image of my father. Wearing that trinket from the construction company (who was happy to get the work), reminded me of a time when there was a greater commonality of values across this country. My father believed in acting together with others as a community for the greater good of all. My father believed you should expect the best of your family and of the people you lived with and worked with. He did not let cynicism pervade his every thought. Yeah, I was raised in a different time.
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