Another Saturday: Part One
Get up, grab coffee, go outside to throw the balls for the three dogs. Back inside, make breakfast–fried eggs, sausage, toast from home made bread and juice.
I run to Miniers Plaza two miles away to get my haircut at Shear Knowledge where Karen has been cutting my hair for a decade. She knows my hair better than I do. We both love to read and watch movies so she usually tells me about her favorite authors and I give her a couple movie reviews.
We just watched V for Vendetta last night which I loved.
Back home. Gather the garbage, throw it in the Jeep and head to the bank before it closes at noon. The teller who looks like Jennifer Aniston cashes my check. I love looking at her but I limit myself to glances. My daughter once told me while having breakfast in a hometown restaurant in Utah that I stare at people too much.
“I’m a writer. I study people.”
“You stare too long.”
“Is it that noticeable?”
“Yes.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t stare so long.”
Off to the transfer station where I talk with the pleasant horse faced man who’s retired, chews gum and smokes cigarettes. We talk about tomatoes because we both grow them, him successfully, half successfully. “Yeah, I give a lot of them away, now that my wife is gone,” he says for the 20th time. He stares somewhere far off and deep inside for a moment.
He looks over at the airport right beside the transfer station. “You go back by the airport, you take a look at them planes.” I look over at a fleet of corporate jets. There are races going on at Watkins Glenn. “They here for the races?” I ask.
He nods once. “If you and I had the money that just one of them planes cost, we’d never need to work again.” He thinks a minute. “Course, that kind of life is pretty grueling, too. I did it the last three years I worked.”
This surprised me. I had taken for granted that he had been some kind of blue collar worker. “What did you do?” I asked.
“I was with 3M. The last three years they flew me all over the world to help them set up. I was all over the Middle East. The worst place was Morocco. Man, you leave Casa Blanca and go out in the rural areas and they’re 75 years behind everybody else.
“The employees, the first week, worked a 40-hour week. Then they started coming in later. Then they had to have hour breaks. Pretty soon they were working maybe an hour a day. They knew the king or bought their way to the royalty and got away with it.
“One day I needed a five-gallon can of gas and the place you got it was maybe from here to there.” He pointed to the Olive Garden maybe a 10th of a mile from us. “I had to ask for it through my interpreter, of course. The worker said he’d get it. I never saw him again the rest of the day. The next day I asked for it again. The worker said he would, then left at 11 and I didn’t see him again. The next day I said to the interpreter, ‘you tell him to bring me that gas or I’ll track him down and knock his head off!’ I got my gas okay, and pretty quick, too!”