Loading Day Date Thursday, April 25, 2024 - 02:12 PM PST Topic Work Loading day comes with a chill in the air; it's cool enough for just me in the basin of the conrete jungle as people bundled loosely in coats not believing that the morning chill will last the day also take to the street early for their jobs. My last two hours of sleep were warcked with nightmares, as usual, and sleep did not come easily but came in gulps, like air to the lungs as you break the surface of the water from the great dive of life. It's loading day as I come in to the store, the closets cleaned out for spare supplies for the store in Martha's Vineyard. We finish the small signs for the ghlass early in the morning and then start bagging the real big orders for businessmen and weddings that have absurdly too many guests, and my foot hurts like hell on steel. The boots are too painful to stand in for nine hours without the gel inserts; and too tight to be in with them, and less relief come from them. Steel toed boots. And they won't save anything but my toes worth a damn if I drop any of the cooking supplies coming from upstairs. the great sheet of marble is tinted a beautiful blue from the faint light of the windows that are shadowed by great bricks buildings on either side, shadow and sky blue swirling the patterns of white and gray and black to become a beautiful portrait of a sky I will probably never see in my life save in fleeting dreams, and it is lost to all but memory as we heave the stone monument up and begin to haul it downstairs, out to the moving truck, and from there to a place I will probably never see. A mixer is going with, a steel brute mechanism with no good grips save for letting the base fall off and carrying the motor and giant steel bowl seperate in peice and then taking the base plate down as a acoutremont de mechanique. We stand and watch a man we admire who suffers from a migraine early in the day load the u-haul with supplies that will one day appease the sweetest teeth of Northward regions that seem distant and unreal at the moment, and the lazy haze of a Tuesday afternoon in the now-sweltering weather is only slightly destracted by a crash of fiberglass and plastic as a pathfinder and camaro entangle one another at the corner, both in a hurry and now both defeated of haste by the obligations of law and destined to continue the obligations for another three hours as fear of lawsuits must be defeated by paramedics and firemen and police who will be called to the scene an hour hence. And then the day is done, the workers paid and the final meals et and the night fallen, and tommorrow, oddly, the feeling of absence of task and meaning sets in long before the day actually comes. But someb ody will always want fudge. And I'll probably be the fudge packer who packs that fudge. *snicker* This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=328