We were both waiting, among others, for our cars to be repaired. It was a dealer's shop, so I was in the showroom extended. It was spit-shined clean. There were coffee and snacks. I was told they'd be an hour because help was short that day, but I was in no hurry. I'm retired.
When I get the oil changed and everything else checked, I bring some of the Sunday New York Times with me. I never read the whole thing on Sunday, anyhow. Too much to go over. Sometimes, it takes the whole week, then comes another one. Here we were on a Wednesday. I was halfway through it. That seemed about right.
I was reading about how Seattle is trying a new approach to drug addiction--treatment across the board instead of jail, not a bad idea--when he came up behind me. Craggly-faced, he had more hair on top than I did and so his gray crewcut wore well. Stoop-shouldered, he couldn't have been taller than five-eight to start with. His flannel shirt had a tear near one of the breast pockets. His other pocket bulged with a cigarette pack.
I must have looked approachable, or considering the very casual way I'd been dressed, I must have looked blue-collar. There was no other explanation. He just decided I needed to hear what he had to say. I sat at a small, raised, circular table with four chairs. He, too, had a styrofoam coffee cup; his, too, had cream in it. He set it down.
"I see Trump is going after the unions again," he said. Something about me must have suggested I'd be amenable to such a sentiment. I used to be a nationally-elected teachers' union leader during the last decade. If he was looking for empathy, he needed to look no farther.
"Yeah," I said, with that tone that let him know I was in his corner. He dialed history back to Ronald Reagan, who had unleashed the anti-union attacks with his devastation of the air traffic controllers. This guy's tuned in, I thought.
"I'm a union man, too," I said. I mean, if he was going to hold court, I'd be the gallery. It was difficult to hear him over the Musak smooth music, even as he stood near my left shoulder. He didn't seem to be speaking that naturally with sotto voce; it was as if he was trying to keep from causing any kind of agitation, now that he had found someone to share common attitudes with. We'd learned to do that over the years, he and I. We didn't have to say so. I knew exactly what he was doing. Union people keep each other close. Others could be listening.
He continued with a review of his work career. It had begun in Marathon County at age 16. His father had just suffered a heart attack and couldn't work. Someone else had to keep the home going. He dropped out of school to work in a bakery. "They asked me when I could start," he said. "I said, 'I can start right now.' 'Okay, why don't you come back at midnight?' the guy said."
He did, and worked through to 10:30 that morning. That was his life for three years. He walked home from work. It took him an hour.
"I'd sleep until about 8 p.m.," he went on. "Then I'd go back to work." Some life, basically from 8 to 11 p.m. Then work. Then sleep. Teaching, I thought, was never that bad.
His union connections began in Manitowoc at the shipyards. Again, I have no idea why he was sharing this. He just decided he'd tell someone, and I was the guy that day. "I don't know how old you are," he said more than once. "You could be 80, for all I know." To which I thought, Thanks a whole lot. Do I really look that old? But just days before, I had just been mistaken for being my dad's brother. He's just turned 93. I laughed when that happened. Did I have any choice?
"I'm 73," he said. "You and I, we've been around." I told him I was 67, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd been at the top levels of politics in Washington for six years, had been in nearly all the major cities for meetings, had met such people as Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. No. This was no time for dumping what was left of my ego on him.
He had worked in Sturgeon Bay for a few years, too. By that time, he'd met and married his first wife, but she preferred Milwaukee. He hadn't, but they moved. "But you got through it," I consoled. "Yeah," he sighed wistfully. "I got through it."
In Milwaukee, he worked for a Patrick Cudahy meat-packing plant. He showed me the company insignia on his watch. "I worked my ass off for that," he said twice. He had a pension, Social Security, Medicare with a supplement, and Medicaid. Life was all right.
Except for Medicaid, it was exactly the way I was getting around now. "You have to set your sights a little lower," I admitted. "But it isn't bad."
Having stayed in Milwaukee, he was working on his second marriage. "Been eleven years now," he said. "We're doing okay." "Good for you," I said, admiring someone who'd tried again at 62.
Karmically, his phone rang. He spent a couple of minutes on it, and I briefly returned to the New York Times. He hung up and decided it was time to end his soliloquy.
"Sorry to bother you," he said pretentiously. He knew better. I had held the ultimate barrier of putting my head down and continuing to read the paper at any moment, ending the conversation. But I hadn't. He had had his story to tell, and I let him tell it. Perhaps he had needed validation; perhaps he had spent the last few hours trying to sum things up and thought he'd try them out on someone who looked as if he'd care.
He had found that someone. But then, that someone remembered how often he'd sat and listened to others in his own profession describe their own careers, sometimes with a sense of wonderment: I'm still here. I'm still alive. Being a contributing member of humanity often obliges not what you say, but what you hear others say when they want you to hear it. The world crowds around all of us at times. We all have voices that need to be acknowledged, somewhere, somehow, by someone. I harkened back to the refrain from the play "1776": Is anybody there? Does anybody care? "No bother at all," I said. "Good to be with another union brother."
He walked on. Within a minute, I raised my eyes from the newspaper and looked to see where he was: Gone from that vast showroom as if he'd flown away.
He was back in ten minutes after having paid his fee. His stride was more confident now. Shoulders back, he stood straight as he walked back past my table, though he hadn't had to. He wanted to make sure I'd seen him leave. "Take care," he said, aiming at me with his hand like a pistol, the way people do when they're on a mission. Emotionally, he looked like he'd gotten an oil change.
We never knew each other's names. We didn't even shake hands. I had a master's degree, he didn't finish high school. My shirt didn't have any holes in it, and I would have been embarrassed to have worn one that did. There's no doubt he had ever gone to work wearing anything other than flannel shirts or t-shirts and jeans. I never wore that when teaching, and I had had to wear suits every day while on the road as a national union representative for six years. His career began in Marathon County and ended in Milwaukee; mine had tossed me to meetings and jobs in places like Little Rock, Arkansas and DC and Austin, Texas and Seward, Alaska and all the way to Ankara, Turkey, at one point.
We had absolutely nothing in common, outside of a Toyota that needed repairs. We also had everything in common: broken marriages, several jobs, and the aftermath, for which our unions had played an enormous role, placing us somewhere along that spectrum between comfort and desperation. Both had landed us here, in Milwaukee, one late summer day. It was, in total, not that bad of a spot. We had our unions to thank.
Angels show up when you least expect them, and they often don't look like it. Maybe I was his angel that day. Maybe he was mine.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
Your humanity is showing again, it is your greatest asset.
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