Of Four Letter Words and Other Happy Things

    

     "How's this job coming?"
     His left eye is clamped tight shut, channeling vision through his right into the lens of a hydrometer.  "This guy's coolant's too weak."
     "All right."  I suppress the urge to tell him that his 'Buick's not all the way in the garage' for the second time today.  He seems to appreciate the added air conditioning in the nether regions.  "But how long will you be?  You've got plugs to do on a Ford pickup and only 2 hours left in your day."
     He peels his eyeball from the lens and glares at me like I've just loosed a stinker in church. 
     "Aw for cripes sake!  Give that job to Gil.  Damn Ford's are gonna drive me to drinkin'...heavier."
     "Job's in your slot.  Gil's fighting with an alignment.  Customer wants his truck by 5.  I'll call this customer to see if she wants her coolant spiked."
     Kachang...kachang!  The raw impact of solid steel on steel cracks in my head like a detonation in a bell factory.  I clamp my hands tight over my ears, rolling my eye balls back into their sockets, while Quasimodo takes another swing at a rebellious rotor.  
     "Really?" I exclaim into the racket, my voice dissolving into a million splinters and dropping at my feet.  "You could warn a person."  Kachang...kachang!  
     In bay 3 Gil has commissioned the air gun at mach 1, breaking the sound barrier and any crystal that may have the misfortune of being within 100 feet.  Together they sound like a redneck symphony.
     I seek refuge in the office.  If they're trying to get the boss from breathing down their necks they know how to do it.  
     The office door swings open and Walt shuffles in.  By this time of day he's covered in greasy splatters and tire tread marks.  I often muse at how he can look like he's been run over by a truck...every day.  
     He grabs the waiting keys and slaps a work order into his clip board.  "Son of a freaking bocce ball, gold damn plugs..."  The colorful expletives follow him out the front door and into the parking lot, leaving a thick black ooze behind him, lingering like the stench from a sewer back up in spring.
     "Walt is feeling rather loquacious today.  What's got his knickers in a knot?"  Cody is talking into the computer screen, his generation Y fingers moving on the keyboard faster than humanly possible.  
     I smile.  Having grown up in this shop and spending a few years himself in the automotive trenches, Cody had learned to knit together a few experimental rows of superlatives himself.  Still, as a service writer, a few slip in here and there when the necessity for a 'bring it home' adjective arises.  Knit, knit, knit, purl.       
     We never forbade the use of bad language at home.  If we had, their father would have had a bar of Palmolive in his mouth on more than one occasion.  What seemed more effective, at the time, was to inform our kids that people who intersperse truck stop language profusely throughout their sentences come across to their listeners as Kindergarten drop-outs.  Knit, purl, knit, purl - or more appropriately, knit, hurl, knit, hurl.
     If you want to shut the potty mouth up (and everyone does), use intelligent words.  It'll throw them from the vulgarity train onto their cocky keesters real quick.  
     "Plugs on a Ford F150."  I respond.
     "Aah.  Damn, that's too bad."  
     "Yup.  For all of us."
     Working in a world of kinesthetic males performing gruelling, sweat-inducing tasks means frequent releases of oral diarrhea and lingual gaseous explosions.  After a while it begins to take on its own vernacular.  
     Occasionally I slip and, for a fleeting moment, sound like one of the boys.  It's like living with an Aussie.  Eventually you're going to start to talk like one, mate.  And that's okay.  Outside of the profanity and belches that break the needle on the richter scale, they're just good old boys.  
     I'm a little out of my element in their world.  But when they slap me on the back or email naughty pictures to my inbox, I can't help but grin.  Sometimes its alright being 'one o' the boys.'

     

The Pollyanna Principle

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the

 world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to 

plan the day."

For years I've been trying to draw a line in the sand but the tide comes in and washes it away.  Sometimes a fair west wind bends down to blow loose grains over it and covers all traces of its existence, fragmenting my desire for juxtaposition.  How am I supposed to objectively analyze and separate when the line keeps disappearing?  

Our world is a complex web of goodness and heinousness and each day, as a citizen of it, I have choices.  The goodness is the easy part.  It's what to do with the heinous that troubles me.  

My line in the sand would separate the "fear, fight and worry" instinct in me from the "ostrich" instinct: a head in the sand keeps you blind to it all.  How does a body know on which side to stand when the line keeps drifting, disappearing from view.  

I naturally gravitate to "ostrich", or at least suffusing the ugly with rose colored glasses.  Not always safe or realistic but it makes me feel good in the short term.  In reality, I can be a lot like a child, covering my ears and "la la-ing" loudly, hoping it will all go away.

On the other hand, fear can stimulate anger which, in turn, should stimulate positive action.  But where is that line?  How can I strike a healthy balance?  

Many days the voice of the doomsdayer closes in on me, like walls in a night terror - economic collapse, the imminence of a world war, political deceipt and corruption, big corporation control, environmental destruction, my children's world going ass over tea kettle.  

I don't have the answers yet.  I listen ever so carefully to my heart and my head - they usually disagree.  So I wait, rose colored glasses propped vigilantly at the end of my nose. And I look in the rear view, believing that, in the end, goodness always prevails and something fortuitous can arise from the smoke of any situation.  

Call me a dreamer, but I happen to be an optimist.  I don't believe in arbitrary happenstance or a capricious god.  I believe in humankind.  Life is too short for anything less.

DEAR DIARY

The prospect of reading someone's diary can be titillating, perhaps a little brassy and reckless.  There's a boundary that one crosses opening the cover to unearth another's deepest, darkest secrets.  It's like digging around in your mother's underwear drawer; there's some places you just don't go! 

Sitting here with this diary in my hand feels all wrong.  I don't know her anymore, do I have a right?  I made a vow to myself years ago that, if ever I stumbled upon someone's diary, I would NEVER read it.  Maybe that's why my hands are trembling now.  Do I?  Don't I?  

I peak gingerly at the first page, just to confirm my suspicions.  This is indeed a diary - first page entry dated June 28, 1976.  The handwriting is tiny and swoopy, with little hearts for "i" dots.  I hardly recognize it.  But then why would I?  It was 37 years ago.  

I don't even know at this moment why I've dug it from its covert location, deep in the recesses of my steamer trunk where a collection of relics languish, awaiting a day when they'll become relevant again.  And why am I afraid to dive in?  I'm not sure I want to resurrect all that stuff again, that's why.  What if I don't like who she was?  Perhaps I've allowed a level of post-youth memory loss to cloud those turbulent years.  Neuroscience would have a name for it: Post Youthful Stupidity Dissociative Condition.  A condition not intended to be messed with, I'm sure.

Against my better judgment I begin to read and I'm pulled in like a psychopath to his next victim.  It's hard to read past all of the boo- hoo-ing and woe-is-me.  Was life really that hard as a 13 year old in the funky, flower-child days of the 1970's?  And then it gets interesting.  I strap myself in - this could be a wild ride.  

Dear Diary, it continues, as though powwowing with a confidante.  The pages are laced with details of all of those impetus moments, the events that set the stage for maturity: boyfriends and break-ups, parties and concerts, friends and fights.  She takes me on a journey that I didn't know I wanted to return to.  

At times I wince.  She really did lead that boy on.  It's no wonder he followed her around like a hyena on the prowl for years to come, burning her initials into his forearm, not knowing when to give up the chase.  

At times I'm saddened, realizing that her high school education collided with a time in her life when she had such a blatant disregard for anything cerebral.  "You coulda been a contenda, kid,"  I remind her.  

And then I smile, the roller coaster peaks and the butterflys set in - she's found love.  Young, idealistic, unobstructed love.  Of course, its not all uphill from here but her entire attitude swivels around on its axis, and she's focused outside her self-absorbed center.  Hm, funny how certain people can do that to you.

I turn the last page and I'm glad I read it - apart from the parts that should have remained latent in my memory's vault of Lost & Forgotten Things.  And I don't feel guilty.  I realize now she wrote it for me.  She wrote it knowing that, way far away in the great somewhere, I'd find the diary again and relive it.  She was a part of me, afterall, and to disown her would be denying her an earned and merited place in my life.