William Lobb

Author

Author Notes

Truck Shop Boys…

One of my clients is a trucking company. I stop in the shop and bullshit with the wrenches every time I’m there. They break my balls about working on the easy shit, computers and stuff, and ask questions about why Pornhub is blocked in the shop managers PC, but they know I’m one of them, and not one of the ones from the office who give them shit and assignments all day without a clue what life is like in the shop, under or in the cab of a truck.

I just got out, but I never left…This is my turf and my troops. Me, and some of the old guys were talking about ‘real cold’ winters. Zero is pretty cold. A handful of us did some winters up north on the TransCanada Highway. Twenty-Thirty-Forty below zero. Steel is a fluid, truckers and welders know all about this. It’s as fluid as water, it just freezes at 2500 fahrenheit.

“Zero is cold,” this one old guy stated, like it was news, “but it ain’t that cold.”

He was right. Metal seems to be pretty happy from zero to the low hundreds. Under zero, stuff gets weird. You can bang on a piece of iron with a sledge hammer all day at forty above and nothing will happen but some surface dents, hit that same metal with a sledge at forty under zero it will shatter like glass.

We spent a half-hour talking about frozen engine blocks and bad fuel at twenty-below and that waitress I knew up in Saskatoon and how we met; when I asked her for ‘a hard roll with anything hot’ and she slapped me across the face and made my nose bleed. I learned later in Saskatoon they are called ‘Kaisers.’

Yesterday afternoon I’d just come off an aggravating conference call with a room full of suits and ties and people ‘reaching out’ to each other and a woman named Debbie, and I am still baffled why she was even on the call, a position in sales I’m quite sure. Technical sales people are a special breed. They literally sell things with no idea whatsoever they are selling, but I guess she was there to ‘keep things civil,’ when the tie wearing boys started blaming everyone and everything but themselves for the project delays.

Yeah, after an hour with these assholes I need to be around some guys who smell like ninty-weight and know how to shift a duplex Mack and ‘real cold…’

Poverty

Kiss me with your dry and cracked lips; your mouth full of crooked and broken teeth; your breath the sweetness of sour milk and once again, call me your good boy. No one else ever called me that. No one else ever would call me that again. But you found your goodness what was missing in all things, even me.

Sit me down one more time at your old and rickety kitchen table. It seems this piece of furniture discarded from someone else’s life is the centerpiece of my life with you. That and your asparagus patch over on the neighbor’s property.

Offer me coffee and apologize for your poverty once again, as if your poverty was a choice, you regret making a long time ago. Apologize you only have canned milk and not much of that.

It’s cold in your kitchen unless it’s summer and then it’s sweltering. I comment I should go steal something and get you some money to fill up your propane tank. Without turning or even raising your head you reply, “I’m cold, I’m always cold in the winter, but I ain’t no thief…” and she walked over to the counter next to the sink and rinsed out a dirty coffee cup for me.

Her’s was a profound poverty, more than generational, or a relic of the Great Depression; it was personal, it demanded ownership. It was as if she poked a stake in the ground and on it, she raised the flag of her poverty for all to see.

She held an honor in her poverty, a strange pride I could never connect to. Like her ability to see the value in anything. I’d not bend down to pick up a dime. A penny she found on the ground was to her a fortune of good luck and cause for a celebration of gratitude.

Everything she owned was old and worn and threadbare. Her dresses were clean, but stained, and she wore an apron, and that too was stained, but clean and she was happy in the work that left the stain.

Pride and reverence and an abiding gratitude for the next to nothing she could call hers—a respect born of fear of everything being taken away—again—that everything must be used and reused and repurposed, and never-ever wasted. Her’s was a world of sin and salvation, and it could be, had to be, the greatest sin was gluttony and waste.

Aluminum foil, folded and creased in a drawer. The madness of watching her unwrap a Christmas gift, working loose each piece of tape. Slowly removing each bow, and gently removing the paper, again, folding it neatly, perhaps to be stashed by the foil.

Her son would buy her cans of food and gently dent them, a crafty move. Presented and challenged with the dented cans—she could not accept them as charity—but she could not let them go to waste. A moral conundrum. She took the cans, and often looked for ‘poor people’ to share them with.

She came from another time. Her daddy was the son of a Civil War soldier. In my sad and broken world of excess, I see now, long too late, the lessons of her time and her earnest depravation

It Wasn’t Always Like This

It wasn’t always like this, the rush and commotion and panic and dread of something so meaningless. No, it was simpler, because it was a simpler time. A scary a-bomb time, but simpler. The season was shorter, and it was less important, because it is less important.

A man could make a hundred dollars a week and put his hands in his pockets and jingle his car keys and coins and feel himself quite a success. A one-hundred dollar a week man would still have a boss, but he could maintain some semblance of dignity. A well-paid man.

At a hundred dollars a week, a man could own a car and a house, and have a family and a black-and-white TV set that worked more often than not. On the nights the TV worked, which was most nights, the man could listen to Walter Cronkite and see pictures of John Glenn blasting off into space, hear stuff that made him worry about the Russians. The man took a shaky comfort, and a cumbersome pride in being an American. Something I never quite understood, though I was sure I was supposed to understand it.

About a week before Christmas, each year, I’d accompany the man, and we’d walk deep into the woods. Everything that was the previous summer was dried and dead, and our feet would crunch the hoarfrost on the leaves and twigs and we’d break footsteps in the white rime of the frozen dirt. A week before the festive day, not a month or two months; just a week.

He’s take out his oiled and sharp knife and carefully cut us a big armful of scotch-pine boughs, while reminding me of the importance of caring for my tools. Tools were precious, much more than an implement to break free a bolt and nut or cut a branch.

Few greater sins confronted me as a boy than a socket or ratchet or a knife left out in the rain to rust. Tools were generational and inherited, not simply purchased. A lineage was completed when a hand grasped the grimy carbon steel. I touched the same steel as my father’s father, and in a way, I felt the callouses of that hand in my hand. When he did buy a wrench, or a knife, it came with an expectation it would last at least three lifetimes.

He owned two sets of outdoor lights, with maybe ten bulbs in each. A similar set was in the charge of his wife, and she dutifully attended to the tree inside. We’d weave his lights into the carefully nailed-up pine that framed the front door. Sometimes his wife would decorate the pine with bows and shiny balls. The front door a kind of no-man’s-land where the responsibilities of indoor and outdoor decoration commingled.

The lights were the big and ancient, even by 1963 standards. Fire-code breaking lights of red and blue and green, with bulbs that got hot enough to burn skin and peel paint. He would point out the Underwriters Laboratory tag, with a strange pride, implying and assuring me they were safe. But he’d turn them on at 5 p.m. and off an hour or two later, fearing to burn them any longer would set the fresh pine on fire.

I spent most of my Christmases as a young boy waiting for the house to burn down from those sketchy lights inside and out. I came to realize it must be an important holiday to put so much at risk for his lights.

When he died fifty some odd years ago, I knew him as a young man, but today he’d be nearly one hundred. I feel myself a time traveler of sorts stranded between two worlds, his and mine. The path between them is so muddied and blurred I wonder at times if either ever existed or exists.

I suppose it is good in a way he died when he did, before we came to challenge and hate each other. Such is the tribal ritual and passage of boys to men, and the reality the young men force the old men to admit and accept; the best days for the old men have passed on by. I feel the anger of that confrontation now, in every sore muscle and once broken bone. It’s good, I suppose, he died before we could have ever spoken to each other in rage and torrents of testosterone. When all I took from him was the importance of caring for the generational tools, without question or cursed words or angst or hate.

I face west and watch a cold, early afternoon sunset and ponder and crave the simplicity of his Christmas. There seemed to be a little more baby Jesus and mangers and wise men and a lot less retail involved back then. None of it, then or now, made a damn bit of sense to me, aside from the agency created between me being good for a few weeks, and some fat man in a red suit.

And the whole thing start to finish lasted maybe two weeks, and that was a lot. Then we’d take down the deadly two strands of lights and burn the pine boughs in a barrel and move on into the next years.

I come to the realization that the rituals I perform today are meaningless, but I do them anyway, a tribute to a man so long dead. I still wrap my front door in pine, and hang lights because he did, but my pine is purchased from the store, no more the walks in the long and dark woods and my lights less a fire-hazard.

I miss him on this night, but I realize now as then, I didn’t understand much of anything of his Christmas or this Christmas at all…

Dear Christmas,

Dear Christmas,

Two weeks into all this noise, and to be truthful, the decorations and stuff are bugging me. Clutter pisses me off and distracts me. It’s all looking ratty. I do like the lights, but that’s about it. If it was up to me, we could put up lights in October and leave them up until the sun comes back, but the rest of this I can do without.

Speaking of lights, what’s with these series style lights that die on the tree when it’s just one damn bulb that burns out? It’s almost 2023 for Christ’s sake. In 1958, with my dad and his sets of ten lights apiece, it was fun and amusing to watch him find the bad bulb; these big cheap sets with one or two hundred lights each is just a pain in the ass.

Gift shopping is just an absurdity. Does anyone actually shop anymore, or do they just click and ship? All year long, I buy shit. I’ve got crap I’ll never use up or wear out. I don’t need anything except car parts. If you want to buy me a gift, I know a great pick and pull junkyard. Otherwise, please click and ship to someone else.

The baby kitten is adorable, but she’s Hell-bent on tearing down any trees and decorations. It’s like her mission. I’m thinking of knocking all this stuff down and letting her have a little party. The older kitten, Tilly, has never seen you either. Tilly is as good as the baby kitten, Ethyl, is bad. Yes, Ethyl and Tilly. I think you need to be over fifty to get the side-splitting humor in that. At the very least you must have spent days home from school sick, on the couch, watching I Love Lucy reruns. Do they still run I Love Lucy? They should. Lucy was hilarious.

The best part of you used to be back at the lake. The big kids would collect all of your trees and drag them over the ice to this tiny island in the middle of the frozen swamp. Then we’d have a blazing bonfire where we’d all get drunk on whisky stolen from our parents and the boys would coerce the girls off into the woods and try to get laid. I’m sure I know some people, who are now in their fifties who were a direct result of the Great Silver Lake Post Christmas Bonfires. So, thinking about it, my favorite part of you was always watching your trees turn to sparks and head for the sky. And the next day when the great conflagration was over and all that remained was torched and blackened branches.

Everyone, literally everyone has Covid, the flu or RSV this year. Going to a party is risking your life. Even the grandboy is sick and I miss him bad, so pretty much bite me, Christmas.

Imagine if we took all the money and time and effort, we spent on tchotchke that will be lost, broken or forgotten by the Wednesday after Christmas and sent that to Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital so they could fight cancer in kids or food pantries so the seventeen million children in this country who go to bed hungry every night went to sleep with full bellies.

Oh, and something about Jesus, but the significance of him and this season is somehow lost on me.
My daughter is right. I am like old man Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life, but truthfully, as this world gets more complex and confusing every day, The Christmas Season totally baffles me.

Love, Bill

I’ve Forgotten How To Simply Be

And the muddy boy’s summer days lasted forever. The only plan ever to cross his mind was to one day, but not any particular day, be a spaceman or jump a train and be a railroad man.

How many of those endless days were spent snoozing by the cement and steel trestle looking at the countless heavy cars roll by, and how many warm nights spent looking up at the planets and stars.

This old man’s summer flashes in less than a wink. Is it because the boy lived entrenched in the moment while I’m greedily counting my remaining days, hoarding my remaining moments, like cards close to my chest, never fully present, always stumbling between the past and the future. Never here, never now.

One day, I don’t remember the day, but it was a just day and for no reason I can recall I lost the fascination with fishworms and trying to fix everything with tape and bicycles with shifters perfectly placed to neuter me. I traded the desire to fly in space with learning to drive a truck and shift a duplex B-Model Mack. Most of this, maybe all of this had something to do with girls and beer money.

When the beer money ran out and wasn’t enough I became a criminal. And there are things to enjoy about being a criminal, but not a lot and not for a long time. As a criminal I learned to fear both the days past and their stories as much as the days to come and what they will hold. I skated too much, too much for the law, too much for my own good. I touched by the law, but never caught. That’s not a good thing. It made me feel invincible and special. Truth me told I’m just lucky and white.

The days of being a criminal came to a quieter end than I deserved and I never did make it into space. I’m washed in a sadness today that I never did hop that train, never even tried. But the long drawn whistle that once called me to great adventure and spectacular things today issues a mournful fading wail and I realize the cars that are passing me now are gone forever and they ain’t ever coming back.

Sometime between the endless days of that muddy boy and fleeting days of the old man I realize I’ve that in all that noise and rage and turmoil and anxiety and planning and failure I’ve forgotten how to simply be.