Hashtag throwback Thursday. Listen y'all, I want you to know something about me that you might not know because isn't that the real reason we throw it back on Thursdays? I have forgotten the reason we throw it back on thursday. Namely because I am constantly throwing back, I throw it back on Sunday and Tuesday. I throw it back on Monday, but anyways, I want to tell you something about myself. During the four and half months of late spring and summer after I graduated from high school and went to college I worked in a steel plant. I started out just doing labor, you know, whatever they wanted. Sweeping. Painting. I started on the second shift and moved to the third pretty quickly. I would have lunch in the lunch room with some of the old timers. Guys who had worked at Bethlehem Steel or Republic for 18, 19 years. They had battered lunch boxes and drank from theromoses. They swore a lot and talked a lot of shit. They were relentless to each other, and then they turned their wit on me. I mostly kept my head down, but after a bit they opened up to me. I noticed their lunches were packed lovingly by their wives and they appreciated it, you could tell by the way their eyes shined when they opened their boxes. This was the type of place where there was a giant furnace where they would process sheets of steel into coils, I think it was used in automobiles or office furniture. It was a really clean operation. Processing was different than manufacturing. Anyways. After a month of sweeping and painting, I got put on the line, shadowing an old thin guy who worked the banding machine. He showed me how it all worked. Told me what went on before and where the steel went after it left us. Mostly we sat silently in the racket of the machinery, watching the steel pass along the conveyor belt. I asked him one night about what he did before this. What he did in the other plant he worked in before it closed, and this is what I want to tell you about myself. I want to tell you what this old time steelworker told me in the middle of the night in Buffalo, New York one summer before I left Buffalo to go to college, and though I didn’t know it then, the last summer I would spend in my hometown.

He said: I worked in the chip shop, when the work was steel. When the blast furnaces billowed smoke that turned snow black. He said, the poured ingot molds don’t come out too perfect, 
so a back leaned into a nine, ten pound hammer and chisel to chip and smooth them until they come like they ought to be.

He said: you work days, evenings, and midnight. Swinging.like 7 to 3, 3 to 11, & 11 to 7. I liked midnight, the big wheels wasn’t around then, and well, jeez, just starting out everybody are not talkers and everybody are not open, so you do what you do, you find the ones that you could talk to, that are drawn to you and in the end they will be the ones that clear the way for you
and show you how it’s done.

That’s the one thing.

He said: the guy who showed me to chip, real nice guy. We called him Squeege. He said, you can do this chip in two ways, you can just push and push hard on that hammer like all these guys do or you can sharpen your chisel.

another thing,

don’t cut no more than you can cut.
you do it right
you ain’t going to be aching harder
than anybody else.
a day’s work won’t hurt at all.

This is what he said to me over the machinery, he said: I come to call myself a good chipper. They come down, the boss and them, the big wheels, and the boss said, I got this for you to do and I got that for you to do, and that made me happy. I figured I must be able to do it, like maybe I was one of the good chippers and maybe I come out like I ought to.

(this appeared in slightly different form in New World Writing in 2014.)

Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me and my sister taken about six years ago on the east side of Buffalo, New York. I want to praise my sister. There is much to praise. Her toughness and overwhelming kindness. Her heart, which is all encompassing. Her love. Her love. Her love. I am getting ahead of myself. Six years ago was a year of relentless rain in my life. One of those years where the 1% probability of a 100-year flood occurring actually does occur. I was wholly unprepared for the deluge, without raincoat, umbrella, or galoshes, but still, that rain fell and fell. It fell so much that it saturated the ground and crumbled foundations and swept them away. In wet shoes and wind I gathered up the pieces as best I could, but the whole of everything I knew was gone. In that storm my sister came out in a thin coat and tied a rope around my waist so that I should not blow away and disappear. It was an incredibly long rope. She was in Buffalo and I was in Texas. It was in that storm that I began to see my sister, who is considerably older than me, she being the oldest and I being the youngest in the family, in a way I had not seen her before. I will try to be clear. As my world was falling apart our mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. So the storm continued in a hospital near Christmas where we gathered around my mother. My brothers, my father, my sister. All of us talking in that quiet way when the person you love is resting but needs you all there, needs you to be all around them. In that quiet, a group of carolers came to the door and asked if they could sing. My sister said yes. Yes. The carolers sang Silent Night with its sleep in heavenly peace and unknown to them it was my mother’s favorite and that made my sister cry who had said yes. I had rarely seen my sister cry and that made me cry. In the room that night I saw the old Polish kindness, love, and toughness that was my grandmother and my mother come into the heart of my sister. I saw it extend further back to my grandmothers mother and then to her mother, both of whom I never knew, and then I watched it come back to settle in the heart of my sister. I remember feeling a sense that everything would be okay. In some quiet way my sister made me see this, made me see the bright sunlight through the storm. The wall of grief and uncertainty that had been built around my heart seemed to weaken. The waiting and wanting seemed to drift away. There was a brightness of my heart, and a calmness of my mind. I felt as though I could see myself from a great distance. Surrounding me was the quiet, the beauty of work, the lake, and all of the moments of those who had come before me and who had brought me to this place and then would carry me forward. The connection to everything became concrete again. There was a lull in the storm. As my mother slept, my brothers and sister and I walked through the old neighborhood of our youth where we had been formed. My sister told us the story about how she had dressed me up like a girl and then paraded me around the neighborhood. This had occurred when I was just a milk-bellied toddler with huge blonde curls. I was ringlets of golden sunshine on a glowing head that smiled and smiled at the attention and she had walked me around the block waving to everyone, showing me off. A spectacle. This was during the time of tube socks, rock and roll, and buttons. I didn’t have a clue, the only thing I knew was that my sister made me feel special and important and beautiful. At the telling of the story, she stopped and looked at me there on the street in the old neighborhood. Battered and stooped, she saw me, and I straightened up. We all stopped. She gave one of my brothers a Kodak camera, the rest she told to get the hell out of the way. We had not made a picture together in many years, but she held me like she did when I was her babiest of brothers and I put my arm around her, and in that moment I knew everything would be okay and then the camera clicked and I went back to Texas where the rain continued to fall in that odd year. Still the rain wouldn’t cease, and just when it seemed like the sun would never shine, my sister sent me mail and inside the envelope was the photograph she had made.