He turned and looked at me and said, “These machines, this equipment was built by a good man, good men who went to work at seven in the morning every day and brought their sandwiches in bags and on weekends they played baseball and drank beer and they took their families on picnics on Sundays. When they died people went to their funerals and genuinely wept because men like this would be missed in a community, the community was somehow diminished by the passing of men like these. They built things that were good and strong. These old machines are their legacy. They still work and do the job they were designed to do long after these men have passed. We will never be men like this, we will never understand men like this. We are another type of men. There is no good in men like us. Sometimes I come out to this barn just to be alone with this equipment and try to understand what it must’ve been like to be the man who built such things. To be a good man. A simple and good man.”
Then he looked over at me and said, “What will our legacy be, nephew?”
With that he turned toward the barn door, stopping to wait for me as I let his words sink in.
As I joined Unk he continued, “We live in a world without walls to contain us or boundaries. But, we come to learn we cannot trust anyone. Allegiances and allies change, seemingly by the minute. Your right hand, the guy you always trusted, you end up putting a plug in him because he fucked you over. Life happens, keep moving.
We lose touch with who we were, we lose our life before this. Every day in the life pushes us farther and farther away. We lose the simple things. We lose right and wrong, they are ever changing. Right and wrong are simply a result of circumstance. A condition of the now.
