The things we

There is a photo on my desk of my father in a suit hidden by a long black gown. Graduation day. My father has a piece of paper saying that he could be a social worker. Instead, my father unloads trucks, heavy with crates and boxes and pails and cannisters, and labours for the union, for his fellow worker, making sure that agreements are kept, that the letter of the law is followed. My father works too hard at everything and now he is tired. But we shall not want.

For a moment I am back home. I imagine my mother saying, "Ron, did you hear anything today about the contract?" Her voice lingers through the house and I hear my father's weight leave the easy-chair by the window; his feet and worn-out knees move him to the hall closet, where he pulls out a riffling of photocopied collective-agreement pages from his union satchel. I'm sitting looking at the photo of my father, proud and hopeful in his black gown; short, light-brown hair tugged by a breeze tousling the surface of the St. Lawrence, visible in the background. I can see all of it at once; the day in the photo holding me and my mother, too, and the college building set back from the road and the short grass, all tended by that gust and the sun, a grainy black-and-white glow; that day and this -- my father moving slowly (I notice it is always slower whenever I am back home for a visit) to the kitchen where Mom is finishing the shepherd's pie. My father and his documents, treading the linoleum, explaining the slowness of processes, cursing occasionally the inefficiency of bureaucrats. There is a constancy in this imagined scene. A comfort in knowing that when I turn my back life slows down but goes on. I can be secure at a distance.

My father stilled by the frame is proud of his paper, the certificate rolled tight in his fist, but where am I ? -- outside, somewhere, on the grass, in my mother's arms? The invisible wind plays forever with that now absent hair.

I am slogging through endless reams of paper. Scholarly articles, essays, seminars. Scanlan has noted ... Berger's reading of Benjamin ... Derrida ... phallocentrism ... closure. Someone pipes more work onto my desk from somewhere above in the bowels of the machinery, so I roll up my sleeves and empty my head of fictions and set to processing another slew of information, repackaging and shipping it along. Barthes has remarked ... metonymy ... Scanlan. The engine, fuelled by coffee after coffee, injected with nicotine, chugs on into night, duty-bound.

In the morning I will have to turn my back on the reams; I will rise, shower, eat and go to work at the grocery store, 9 to 5. Eight hours of turning my mind off completely, trying to perfect the art of dough. This weekend I have the night-crew shift, as well, so I'll be returning to the store at 11 p.m. Sleep in on Sunday and complete a paper and a seminar in time for Monday morning. Next week: more of the same. By summer it will be two jobs, the grocery store and the hot, dusty factory making vinyl windows. It helps pay for school and school will pay for itself, I hope.

The things we must do.