Love’s austere and lonely offices

August 26, 2023 12:16 PM

I'm now writing a song about hardworking blue-collar parents, probably from a child's point of view.

The starting point for me is a friend's recollection of her father who had a service/gas station, quite Route 66 in flavor (and a true service station, i.e. he was a mechanic)

What can you tell me about your parents (or even grandparents) blue collar work?

Taste, Touch , Sight, Sound, Smell, Body, Motion references are very helpful

As the title suggests, I am familiar with Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

posted by falsedmitri to Human Relations (16 answers total)

My dad's hands were so hard and calloused that they felt like unpolished granite. I remember being a kid and realizing (or at least figuring) that he couldn't feel anything soft (like silk) with those hands.
posted by gideonfrog at 12:32 PM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: My grandparents had an Italian deli and worked seven days a week. My grandpa got cancer in his back when he was in his 50s, and it was a huge excision, the size of a man's hand. It never healed and he couldn't afford to take a day off. Every morning before work they would get dressed in the apartment they shared with my mom and me, my grandma in her white polyester food service dress, and before my grandpa put on his undershirt and shirt, he would stand before her in their bedroom while she packed the wound. And every day by lunch it would bleed through both shirts. He only stopped working when everything else had failed and he was accepted into a clinical trial, where he died a few weeks later.

It's hard to explain how tired he must have been, how little money there was, how scared and stressed we all were. He got out of breath turning the steering wheel of the car. But after work he would ask me if I wanted to go watch the planes land, and we would drive out to the regional airport and sit in the car together quietly, watching the planes come in. Or he would ask me if I wanted to go to the beach, and he would sit in the car and watch while I looked for beach glass. On New Year's Eve he stayed up with me, and at midnight got me to join him in marching around the apartment banging wooden spoons on kitchen pots, cheering and singing Auld Lang Syne.

I remember the first time I read the Hayden poem, probably four or five years after he died. I've always loved it.
posted by HotToddy at 1:29 PM on August 26, 2023 [24 favorites]

The smell of oil, gas, gritty powdered rubber on the brakes, and grease. Gasoline rainbows on the asphalt, that you could make sneaker-prints with by running through them. The satisfying, competent clang and click of a ratcheting socket wrench finding its groove, and the occasional curse when it fell in your face as you were under the car. Dipsticks and paper towels. Running fingers through engine oil to see how fast or slow it filled in behind your finger. Pages of the Haynes Manual smeared with grease and oil. Picking through old baby-food jars, repurposed to hold multicolor fuses, to find the right one for the headlight that's out. The white ceramic of the spark plugs, and the spiraling threads after you clean the soot off from a mix that's too rich. Orangey tang of Goop degreaser on your hands after the job was done. Jeans, jeans, jeans, so many jeans. The sweet lemony-creosote smell of PineSol in the wash with the greasy clothes.

Running coat hangers with string lines tied on through joists, so we could pull them through parts of the house to run new wiring. Cotton-candy fiberglass to step over or pull away as we cut holes in the ceiling of the floor below us. Foggy protective glasses with an elastic headband that's losing its stretch. Prickly face masks. Cleaning paint brushes with paint thinner. Step ladders and old sheets.

Crowbars and sledgehammers knocking cinderblock walls down. Snapping chalk lines on walls. Cutting sheetrock with utility knives and snapping the board at the cut. The electric drill squeaking the screws into fresh wood. Putty and joint compound and making sure the edge of your spackling knife was clean and smooth. The gray patches where you could see your spackling was too thick and taking longer to dry.

My dad is a university professor but he's always done his own (and others') manual labor, and I grew up helping him.
posted by cocoagirl at 1:43 PM on August 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

My grandfather had a gas station and was a mechanic. He always had a "bad back", from spending so much time underneath cars, on one of those old rolling Creepers. It was wooden, and looked like a sleigh. When grandpa woke up every morning, his body was visibly stiff, and he would shuffle through the living room with a newspaper under his arm on his way to "his bathroom" (a barely sheltered add-on to the house) to do his morning business.

His hands had never seen the insides of gloves. They'd seen so much oil and grease that he couldn't remove the brown between his fingerprints. He used all kinds of chemical grade soaps to try and remove it. Orange lava soaps with a smell nastier than the oil he was washing off. I think he used to wash with the "heavy duty" soap and then with normal soap to get the heavy duty smell off.
posted by nadise at 1:52 PM on August 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

I remember my dad’s dark hair getting a grey halo from drywall dust or splatter when he painted.

He had an old drill with a cord that was all twisted and distorted from years of being wrapped quickly. It had a gear key thing to open the part the drill bit sat into, and the key was tied to the cord with a bit of old shoelace.

His battered workshop table had a few old carpentry pencils with gritty lead, hand-sharpened by my dad’s pocketknife.

My dad’s pocketknife had a wooden handle worn very smooth and shiny from use. I think he used to rub his fingers on it inside his pocket. He sharpened the blade (and our kitchen knives) on a grey whetstone once in a while.

My dad worked in the lower-middle tier of an organization, mingling with snobby PHDs on one hand and janitors on the other. He didn’t think much of the snobby PHDs. One spring, he tied a glass bottle over a tiny apple on our apple tree and it grew into an astonishingly flawless apple, perfectly wedged right in the middle of the bottle, entirely filling the inner diameter. That fall, he took it to work and asked everyone, “How do you think the apple got into the bottle?” The PHDs came up with silly complicated theories that didn’t account for the perfection of the apple: “You dehydrated the apple to shrink it, and then reconstituted it with water? You used steam? You welded the glass botttle around it?” On and on. The janitor said, “oh, you musta tied that bottle onto the tree when the apple was small!” My dad had always thought the hierarchy was nonsense and this delighted him.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 2:12 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

Best answer: My paternal grandfather was a butcher in a beef processing/packing plant.

1) My grandmother was a stay at home mom to 6 kids, supported only by my grandfather’s wages. They were not wealthy by any means, but my dad and his siblings always had secure housing and enough food at least. Given what I know about wages for similar work now, that blows my mind.

2) Part 1 is largely true because my grandfather was a proud union worker. He was especially proud of that fact that his union was racially integrated early on—no small feat in 1950s/60s Oklahoma.

I know this is not as evocative as some of the sensory memories above, but so much of the history of blue-collar work is bound up with the history of organized labor that I wanted to throw it out there.
posted by ActionPopulated at 2:42 PM on August 26, 2023 [9 favorites]

My father, who remarried and I rarely saw growing up: now tells me about the roads he paved when we drive around the tri-county area when I come back to visit. He still works, now as a custodian. Walking on the hard floors are doing a number on his back. The metallic smell of coming in from outside on a cold day always reminds me of him.

My uncle, the union carpenter. The one we'd call if something went awry at our home. The realization, as a late teen, that he was getting older and could not climb much the way he used to when he came to rid our attic of a raccoon family on Christmas Day.
posted by paradeofblimps at 3:35 PM on August 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

All my grandparents grew up somewhere between working class and dirt poor, and started working as children. They went through the Depression, and my grandfathers served in World War II (one of them in particular seems to have suffered PTSD from the war, which of course he was never treated for).

One grandfather became a carpenter, the other painted and installed signs. To this day I cannot catch a whiff of sawdust, paint, or varnish without thinking of them. They drove old pickup trucks, back when vehicles smelled very strongly of metal, rubber, leather, and oil. They were both extremely strong; my dad told me that his father (the sign maker) could grab a pole and hold himself horizontally (kind of like this) at least into his early 50s. They had home workshops where they could tinker or build things; both worked on their cars and built additions onto their houses.

My grandmothers worked retail and clerical jobs to help support their families when the kids were young -- cashiering at the five-and-dime, bookkeeping, etc. Food was a classic meat-and-potatoes (and high cholesterol) diet -- basically, the heartiest food that tight budgets would allow: bacon and eggs for breakfast, thick turkey sandwiches for lunch, pot roast for dinner. Ice cream was a treat. For fun they'd go out dancing. Man, I really miss them.
posted by paper scissors sock at 4:39 PM on August 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

My mother's greatest pleasure to this day is making cones out of old newspaper by hand, filling up the cones with stuff (snacks these days, but back when she worked at the grocer's, she would fill them with rice, beans, lentils, peanuts, etc), and then folding the top flap over the mouth and tying the cones off with brown jute twine. Watching her do this when I was a child felt like watching a magician work.

The neat little cone shaped packages, dry and crackly as they rubbed together in people's market bags and baskets, were a sensory delight in themselves too. So very satisfying.
posted by MiraK at 5:50 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

My dad was a brick layer and stonemason. One of the best of a dying art (b. 194X—d. 201X). When I worked for him, we were often departing near dawn. But he was up long before, making coffee and planning for the day or week.
We treated tools reverently, cleaned and dried every day, even when we were tired. It seemed like a pain at the time but those tools will last a few more lifetimes if they are cared for in the same way.

He had amazing organization; a zillion little bits that were seldom needed, but really important when the were.

His motions were methodical and usually unhurried, but efficient and tireless, all day, every day. He joked his main job was to pick'em and then put'em down. The idea being that 'simple' tasks belie deep complexity.

He loved "clever tricks", ways to save time and energy and generally be efficient. This involved homemade tools and modifying lots of his kit. Lots of his tools were spray painted with pink or orange markings, to help avoid petty theft from others on a job site.

He taught me the idle rich were worth charging twice as much as a working family.

His hands were not callused like granite but were strong as iron. He built a life for his children and buildings that will outlive us all. Seldom a complaint about anything in his heavy toil, save dealing with the people who thought their money granted them expertise or importance. I still hate that to this day.

A very emotional prompt for me; thanks for asking :)
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:35 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

Best answer: My father got a union job around when I was born. He was taken on casual at first and needed to stick to it long enough to get seniority before he could get assigned a regular shift. In those first days he would come home in so much in pain from the manual labour that he couldn't get his fingers to unflex, so my mother would massage them for him. He was determined to stick it out no matter how hard it was on him and he did.

Less than a year after he got this job my mother was admitted to hospital for a stay that lasted several months. He ended up in sole charge of his children - a baby, a toddler and a kid just old enough to go to kindergarten. Social services provided him a mother's helper who would come in the day time when he worked day shift, and in the night time when he worked nights. But when he worked nights there was no one to watch the children so that he could sleep. It was six and two - six days working one shift, then two days off, then six days on another shift. This means that he was trying to get through those six straight days of night shift only able to safely sleep when the children napped.

There was the inevitable incident - he dozed off and the toddler fell when she climbed out of her crib, and had to be taken to Emerg. They made him sign the children away there. He signed because if they took them away without his signature that would probably make it impossible for my mother to get custody back when she was finally out of hospital. All he could think was that if he could hold down his job he could provide the income my mother would need to get custody. But it broke him, with a deep and lasting grief and sense of inadequacy about his parenting ability and worth as a man and a father. He signed his own children away.

My mother got us out of foster care about a year later when she got paperwork signed by a doctor to say she was healthy enough to take charge of us.

My father worked in a factory that made instant coffee so he was covered in coffee dust and when he sweated it got into his pores. Later, even though he showered, when he slept it would seep out of his pores again and leave the pillows and bed sheets stained brown.

He washed his own work clothes in the same washing machine that he had used to wash our diapers.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:14 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

My father and his mother, who were quite poor, ran away so my father wouldn't be sent to Indian boarding school.

They made ends meet by working at a movie theater in Florida. To his dying day, my dad couldn't abide the smell of buttered popcorn.
posted by champers at 5:23 AM on August 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: I have asked a number of times for Mefite's input when starting on the lyrics for a song. The responses have a similar vibe to Readers Write in Sun magazine. This is a good thing.

I am once again humbled by the openness and willingness to share your stories.
Thank you.
posted by falsedmitri at 7:16 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Walking everywhere when we were little. The little red wagon did double duty as a toy and as a cargo cart, so being pulled in it while on a walk was a bit of a luxury, even though it was a hard metal seat. The sting of winter wind on my cheeks walking across the bridge, which could at times be a pleasant ruddy feeling but at other times almost bring tears to your eyes; the numbness the one time I got a touch of frostbite; the humidity on my cheeks, little tiny ice drops forming on my eyelashes, and slightly sweet smell of my own breath when wearing a (slightly scratchy, usually) scarf. Summers weren’t as hot, then, so I don’t remember being uncomfortably hot while walking. I do acutely remember the side stitches that we were told to walk through and they’d get better: sharp pains in one side at a time, in the muscles around the level of the bottom of the lungs. And tired legs, every so often having to run a little to catch up. But also feeling really proud of myself when the side stitches did go away, and of my strength and endurance even as a four or five year old. There was a sense of belonging to place, as well, from the familiarity I got with every sidewalk crack, climbable rock wall, etc. from walking everywhere. (Not extending to people, though.)

Later on, rubbing my mother’s arms when her carpal tunnel was flaring up, at an age where that intimacy was becoming uncomfortable because of trying to differentiate oneself from parents. Dry, starting to get slightly papery skin (years of cleaning without always wearing rubber gloves). My mother had less upper body strength relative to size than the rest of us, but the small muscles used in typing and similar women’s blue collar/pink collar tasks in her forearms were strong, under the inflammation around her tendons. How her fingers would slowly uncurl as we massaged some of that inflammation and tension away. Wondering if her hands would eventually look like the twisted hands of an older friend of the family with severe arthritis. But also having a bit of teenage clueless impatience with her pain and discomfort.

We practiced pull-ups on my father’s outstretched arm until age seven, or very occasionally eight (he had to brace with the other arm by then). Having to wrap your whole hand around almost your tiny kid wrist to hold on to his broader arm. (It was good practice for climbing trees, gripping on to the thicker, more stable branches.)

That particular color of dark navy blue that indicates workwear for anything vaguely mechanical.

The new bedtime routine with my father when my mother had a second shift job: sitting on the floor in front of the couch taking turns counting 100 strokes as he brushed our hair after our showers (the kid whose hair was getting brushed counting aloud, the other counting along in their head). My mother’s hair brushing technique was alternately softer and pulled on my hair too much; my father’s was consistently firm but just short of pulling on tangled hair. Then the feel of the crocheted shawls (same as the scarf, acrylic/polyester yarn) while we sat on the couch, one on either side of our father, to listen to our bedtime story.

My parents’ work shifted as I was growing up. I only noticed this abstractly rather than viscerally until one time in high school when I got a pair of chino type pants (hand me down, of course) that my mother described as work pants (as opposed to “dressy clothing”, which was how clothes we weren’t supposed to get dirty in were described previously in my childhood). Not really thinking about the difference between her work history and my father’s, or the change in type of work my father did, I misinterpreted that as “able to get dirty”, to the exasperated consternation of my mother when I came home with grass stains in various spots and mud all around the cuffs.
posted by eviemath at 7:28 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

My mother’s swollen calves at the end of a night when she was waitressing, too. As a girl, I probably paid more attention to my mother’s body and the ways it broke down with the work she did. My partner has talked about making note of his father’s various injuries and ailments. The uncomfortable mix of tenderness and revulsion, and resolving to avoid the same bodily failures but not yet understanding how they arose directly from the work our parents did. The beginnings of or strengthening of politicized anger at the broader world when we realized that connection.
posted by eviemath at 7:35 AM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

My father had immense round white shoulders from doing heavy lifting at work. They were probably no where near as big as my child self remembers them.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:50 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]