country
where I stuck out every bit as prominently as did Elly Mae on the “Beverly
Hillbillies,” which crossed our TV screens a few years down the road. The push
and pull; the black, white, yellow, and tan faces; the scents of exotic cuisines
through open windows; the narrow, brick streets lined with parked cars on both
sides for as far as the eye could see, that had been my 507 West Second Avenue
in Columbus, Ohio home, and the trade-off in the wide-open spaces of suburbia
wasn’t hitting my sweet spot. And then one morning when I walked in the kitchen
of the new house my parents and their siblings had built for us with their bare
hands, I caught my parents sitting at the table crying.
There isn’t much of anything more
arresting to a child than witnessing the “first” argument between his/her
parents. As I was to discover that morning before I boarded the bus that would
cart me off to the battlefield of my new school, beholding ones parents wrapped
up in each other arms swaying in utter grief is similarly earth-shattering. “What
did I do wrong?” was my first thought. “Are we losing our home?” was my second.
At the time, my dad worked nights as
a punch-press operator at the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company in Columbus. Like
the inner-city neighborhood from which we had moved, the company had been the
staple of our family’s existence since I was a young girl. But that day, and
for a few, uncertain others to come, it was our punisher, for dad had lost the
end of his middle finger to the punch-press machine that night. The accident
was the source of my parent’s tears, not so much because dad was in pain, but
because of their fear over what it would mean in terms of his job security.
Would he be able to continue with his current job? Would the company place him
in another one if need be? Would he be let go?
Within a day of two, dad did return
to work. I do not remember if to his old position or to a new one at the plant.
Other than that incident with his losing part of his finger, I do not remember
my dad ever missing work due to illness. I am reminded of a statistic I once
read. It stated that most of the people of the world go to work every day sick,
or wounded, or even dying. That was my dad, and my mother, too. That was the
kind of people they were.
That’s three or four-year-old me in the photo, peeking around my mother’s hip. Dad worked at
Jeffrey Manufacturing even then.
Multi-award
winning author Linda Lee Greene’s books are available worldwide in soft cover
and eBook formats on Amazon and other online booksellers.
