It was a large and widely attended retirement party at work: the new retiree had worked there almost 40 years. As the door opened again I registered the arrival of X, who had retired a little over a year ago, when I had transferred in. And also registered my flash of annoyance. I know she'd worked in that room for 20 years or more, know she was responsible for all the stately, decades-old plants, and that I love the plants. I know that. It's just that she's been here at least once every two months since she retired. She doesn't work here...What does she want?
And now I register my mother's not entirely put-on horror at my father, who retired from the plant he'd worked at for 30 years or more, and who “never darkened the door again.” I understand that, don't even think to question it. As far as I'd thought about it at all, I assumed that, as I resemble my father in many ways, this was just one more of them.
And so I came to think about the times I have gone back to former workplaces. One large building, I remember: when I went back to sub there a couple of months after transferring out, I realized I'd forgotten my habit of putting on mental body-armour as I traversed lobby. (The lobby is huge; it always evokes the word traverse.) When I returned there on a short-term exchange a few years later, I found it... Hard to describe. I did leave early, twice, not caring whether I was found out or fired: the first time I was internally screaming, the second I was about to burst into tears. To this day I don't know what happened to my mind or soul those late Tuesday afternoons, that I was ready to gamble everything we have and everything the job keeps in existence, in order to get out now.
Other places I have returned to, temporarily, for one necessity or another... have invariably seemed smaller, darker, dingier than when I was there; essentially & ineluctably external.
I have always worked by absolute necessity. I had to earn a living. I've never worked anywhere I would have chosen to, have always struck the best deal that seemed available to me. When I walk back into a place I've worked in, it always subliminally presents itself to me as a cave which I have to stoop to re-enter. Though my sense of my internal self is pretty much amoeba-shaped, I have always had to edit myself/become someone else to fit work. And so I think my experience of revenance is this: I'm no longer willing to shrink to enter that particular darkness, fit that particular Procrustean bed.
But my mother's employment... During the Great Depression she worked as a milliner in the only millinery shop still open in the city. The girls were laid off before public holidays and re-hired the day after. They were unionized, but the union had been bought off; my mother saw the coins go into the inspector's hand every time he visited.
My mother ran a table of 40 girls; each girl had to make 6 hats a day. My mother was to initial the note each girl wrote, declaring that she had completed 6 hats. She and the girls laughed all day long, my mother always said. They got together once a year for lunch for well over 30 years afterwards. My mother quoted them often, talked about the things they did, the warden-like nature of the assistant-like manager(ess), and the meanness and hypocrisy of the owner. The daily matter of the 240 hats was handled by one girl, an expert forger, writing the notes, my mother initialling them. The hats went into storage, the notes went to the warden-like woman. The totals were never checked, and so this went on for years, until my mother married my father and so was legally forced to leave.
And so my mother never did try to re-enter her former workplace; if not forbidden by law it would have been so unusual as to be suspicious. And she liked working, had great native intelligence and shrewdness, liked running the table. Though she would really have preferred to be a hairdresser, her work never sounded as though it had crimped or crippled her.
I have no idea what my father thought of his job; though he was a man of great fundamental decency, I have no idea, any more than anyone else in my family, what my father actually thought about anything.
So now I come to look at it after all these many years, I can see why X might want to return to the room I'm in now.
Me, 5:30 p.m. on my last day (if I haven't already said bugger it and buggered off early), I'll be gone for good and all.
And now I register my mother's not entirely put-on horror at my father, who retired from the plant he'd worked at for 30 years or more, and who “never darkened the door again.” I understand that, don't even think to question it. As far as I'd thought about it at all, I assumed that, as I resemble my father in many ways, this was just one more of them.
And so I came to think about the times I have gone back to former workplaces. One large building, I remember: when I went back to sub there a couple of months after transferring out, I realized I'd forgotten my habit of putting on mental body-armour as I traversed lobby. (The lobby is huge; it always evokes the word traverse.) When I returned there on a short-term exchange a few years later, I found it... Hard to describe. I did leave early, twice, not caring whether I was found out or fired: the first time I was internally screaming, the second I was about to burst into tears. To this day I don't know what happened to my mind or soul those late Tuesday afternoons, that I was ready to gamble everything we have and everything the job keeps in existence, in order to get out now.
Other places I have returned to, temporarily, for one necessity or another... have invariably seemed smaller, darker, dingier than when I was there; essentially & ineluctably external.
I have always worked by absolute necessity. I had to earn a living. I've never worked anywhere I would have chosen to, have always struck the best deal that seemed available to me. When I walk back into a place I've worked in, it always subliminally presents itself to me as a cave which I have to stoop to re-enter. Though my sense of my internal self is pretty much amoeba-shaped, I have always had to edit myself/become someone else to fit work. And so I think my experience of revenance is this: I'm no longer willing to shrink to enter that particular darkness, fit that particular Procrustean bed.
But my mother's employment... During the Great Depression she worked as a milliner in the only millinery shop still open in the city. The girls were laid off before public holidays and re-hired the day after. They were unionized, but the union had been bought off; my mother saw the coins go into the inspector's hand every time he visited.
My mother ran a table of 40 girls; each girl had to make 6 hats a day. My mother was to initial the note each girl wrote, declaring that she had completed 6 hats. She and the girls laughed all day long, my mother always said. They got together once a year for lunch for well over 30 years afterwards. My mother quoted them often, talked about the things they did, the warden-like nature of the assistant-like manager(ess), and the meanness and hypocrisy of the owner. The daily matter of the 240 hats was handled by one girl, an expert forger, writing the notes, my mother initialling them. The hats went into storage, the notes went to the warden-like woman. The totals were never checked, and so this went on for years, until my mother married my father and so was legally forced to leave.
And so my mother never did try to re-enter her former workplace; if not forbidden by law it would have been so unusual as to be suspicious. And she liked working, had great native intelligence and shrewdness, liked running the table. Though she would really have preferred to be a hairdresser, her work never sounded as though it had crimped or crippled her.
I have no idea what my father thought of his job; though he was a man of great fundamental decency, I have no idea, any more than anyone else in my family, what my father actually thought about anything.
So now I come to look at it after all these many years, I can see why X might want to return to the room I'm in now.
Me, 5:30 p.m. on my last day (if I haven't already said bugger it and buggered off early), I'll be gone for good and all.
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