Lunch

Go to Work, and Don't Forget Your Lunch

Dad was a working man; he had a metal lunch box.  There are other kinds of jobs, of course, but as a kid, I had the idea from somewhere that men who carried metal lunchboxes were the core layer of American society.  I often looked forward to the day when I too could carry a metal lunch box to work.  Sometimes, mom helped us play "work."  She lined up the kitchen chairs in the living room with sheets over them to form a tunnel we could crawl through to the corner where a blanket formed a tent of sorts.  She packed some food for us in paper lunch bags.  We took out lunches and crawled through the tunnel to "work," which actually amounted to us eating our lunch.

My first "real" job was with Arrow Door.  I had worked for a time in a pharmacy, but there was no opportunity for carrying a lunch to work, as it was part time.  At Arrow Door, I was on an eight hour shift, six in the morning to three in the afternoon.  I needed a lunch.  Unfortunately, I was still living at home, so mom pitched in and make me lunch every day.  She packed in a paper lunch bag.  A little later, I was promoted to junior management, and going out to eat for an hour took the place of the brown bag.  I was going in the wrong direction.  After about six years, I left Arrow Door; my plan was to get back into college.  My plan was not well thought out, and after a year, I needed to work again.  (The Reagan Era was a different time, and school loans were not what they are today)  I applied around and got a call from Haven-Busch, a steel erector facility in Grandville.  By then I was living on my own, but I immediately went back to mom and dad's house to borrow a lunch box.  A metal lunch box.  Dad didn't mind, he had a couple of extras in the back cupboard.  He let me have a black metal lunch box with a big green Philadelphia Eagles sticker on it.  I was very excited.

After my interview and job acceptance, I found that, not only did I need to bring lunch, I needed steel toe work shoes, and even better than that, I was issued a hard  hat.  I bought a couple of flannel shirts to complete the outfit.  At work, we wore safety glasses and thick denim aprons, wore thick gloves in addition to our steel toe shoes with special metatarsal guard and the awesome hard hat.  Every time I walked in the front entrance, I saw dad walk off in another time, when we dropped him off at the old Reynolds Metals facility when I was small enough to wear pajamas with feet in them.  He always had his lunch box with him; now I had mine.

It probably doesn't matter that the job was not a good arrangement for me.  I was trying to go to school, and I was on the most evil Second Shift, from three in the afternoon to eleven at night.  Most of the jobs in the facility were welding related, a skill for which I had zero training; there was absolutely no patience for a rank novice, so there would be no job openings for me, past the one I hired in for.  Of all things, I was the assistant to the guy who ran a punch, which was irrelevant.  This important thing about the guy was that he was the union steward.  Now this was still the early eighties, and working with the union steward meant one thing:  he was never in a hurry, ever.  I was the assistant to an employee who really didn't need one.  I followed him when he looked at his schedule.  And when he looked for a stack.  And when he brought the stack over with an overhead crane.  And when he lifted one beam and put it in the machine, (though I did get to help him line it up).  I followed him when he punched one hole, and retraced his steps in reverse, putting the beam with a hole in it back where it was before.  It was boring as hell.

That summer, I met Dorothy, my wife-to-be.  I quit the steel erectors in favor of a quality manager job at a machining shop in Grandville, where I stayed for seven years and grew up professionally.  There would be no more steel toe shoes or hard hats.  After only three months in the "real man's job" I had fulfilled my childhood dream, however, and I didn't need to overdo it.  I had gone to work, flannel shirt and all.  I smelled the acetylene and had seen the flashes of arc welding.  I had sweated my ass off underneath the most extensive protective layer imaginable, but I was fulfilled.  I had taken my lunch to work in a metal box.