The Furious Spinner

Mario and I were taking a walk during his morning break when Gordy pulled up in his city truck. Gordy is one of the city workers who has been trying to find mechanical means to kill weeds so that he doesn't have to use chemicals. A company from Canada came down and demonstrated a radiant heat weed killer. Gordy's young son was sitting in the truck next to him, dressed the same as his father. He was working with him today.

I remembered summer days I spent with my father while he was working. During the school year he was a teacher and later a principal. During the summers, he built houses. One summer he was building a house on one of the many lakes in Michigan. I would go with him, then spend most of the day down by the water. When he became principal, I think he stopped building houses, although I can't remember for certain. I went to school with him several times a year. He spent a lot of time on the phone, going to the houses of some kids to track down their parents, and talking to kids about their behavior. The stories he told were hysterical. I've tried to get him to write a book based on his experiences, but he's not interested.

The best stories were about the custodians. At one school he tried for a long time to get the custodian to fix this broken window. Dad couldn't get him to budge on this. The custodian finally told him to stop worrying about it. "I'll get to it," he said. "Besides, the windows always fall out." In other words, it wasn't an emergency because there was no way a child would get hurt because "the windows always fall out." Another time someone had spray painted "fuck you" on the side of the school. Dad again tried to get the custodian to take care of it. Finally—as a stop gap measure I suppose—the custodian spray painted the "f" to look like a "b" and the "u" on the first word to look like an "o." So it now read, "Book you." My father said no one had called to complain about "fuck you," but it seemed as though everyone called to either complain about "book you," or to find out what it meant.

After Gordy told us about the Canadian machine, he and his son drove on. Mario and I continued our walk, then split up. As I walked toward home one of my favorite local semi-radicals pulled up beside me in his car to tell me, "Hey, I just heard Kerry is up by more then 8 percentage points in Washington state, and the poll was done by a Republican group." What great news, I told him.

Don't you sometimes love small towns?

So I'm sharing the good news with you. 0 comments

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