( This is an excerpt from a book I am currently writing )
I grew up on a tobacco farm in eastern North Carolina and before we became middles class (those people that used a piece of aluminum foil only one time) I realized we were poor. It was my mother’s Sunbeam mixer that gave me my first clue.
You’d go through the kitchen while she was mixing batter for a cake and hear the old mixer groan and slow down when she put the metal beaters into the bowl. You’d find yourself quietly willing it to keep going while mother wished out loud for a new one. She would lift the mixer out of the batter and it would whir like crazy then back into the batter and it would sound like something drowning.
I also knew we were poor because Ronnie Scales told me so. His father owned, according to my dad ---“the entire free world”-- and Ronnie asked me one day how much money my dad earned. The largest sounding number I could think of right then was five hundred so I told him 500 dollars. “HA!” he said,” You’re dirt poor!” and he rode off on his bicycle.
Well, that explained the mixer.
When you’re poor you try to compensate by being smart—read books, write stories—but that amounted to zilch if you worked for Mel, the supervisor of a local logging outfit, as I did one summer. I was sixteen.
Mel looked to be just under six feet tall and though retired from the military he still maintained a look of fitness, there was just more of him. His middle had begun to bulge from beer and he kept a cigar in his mouth that seemed to offset his slightly pugged nose. Mel hated smart and said so-- “Don’t get smart with me, boy” he’d say and puff on his fat green cigar and glare at you, his huge bushy black eyebrows coming together for emphasis.
Mel said you could get my kind for a dime a dozen---that I should be glad to have a job and live in a land that was saved years ago on the beaches of Normandy by men like himself who fought so trash like me could cut down trees and not worry about German soldiers shooting my hiney off (Mel never used the word “hiney”). Then he’d spit.
Work is serious business and everybody should do hard work said Mel-- unless you thought you were too good for it in which case you could take your “hiney” straight to Where-They’ll-Never-Have-Ice-Water ( Mel only used one word for that phrase). Mel’s wife, according to Mel, wanted him to retire but everybody he knew that retired turned stiff and waxy within six months while their friends stood around and remarked how natural the person looked. Mel believed when you stopped moving on the beach of life you died---that Normandy thing again.
One day he told me to come with him and I found myself grabbing one end of a twenty foot steel crane pole while Mel grabbed the other. He said “Lift!”
Right then I went from a 32 to a 34 inch sleeve.
“Too much?” sneered Mel. Oh, Noooo.
We set the pole down where he wanted it and I realized my angle of vision had changed, I saw more ground—no skyline. I wondered if I would ever be able to straighten up again. Joe Quasimodo. I never grew an inch taller after that day and now all my bones are slightly out of plumb and they squeak when I walk. “Lift with your legs, kid.” Mel muttered, spit and walked away.
I’m glad I knew people like Mel. Now I’m not afraid of hard work or think it is something that only people from another country are suppose to do. Hard work taught me how to tackle things in life—you learn how to lift.
You also learn the fruits of hard work are better shared. I remember the year I saved up and gave my mother a brand new Sunbeam mixer. She loved it and told me that I was a good and very smart boy. I’d liked to have seen Mel’s face.
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