Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Shipment Day
When I was 12 years old, my father paid me a dollar an hour to work in our five and dime store. I was the only person I knew who was 12 who had a job. He gave me my pay on payday, the dollar bills flat inside a bank envelope. Sometimes there was change if I’d worked only part of an hour. He knew because there was a time clock. I had to punch in and punch out. “Janice” it said on the time card.
Of all the things I did at the store, I loved shipments the best. The semi-truck would back up to our door and my father would unload the truck. Then we’d open the boxes and check in all the merchandise. We used a hand stamper to put prices on some things and ran a little printing machine to print price sticker for others. It depended on what it was. You can’t hand stamp a bottle of Evening in Paris, for instance. That would need a sticker. Knowing these things took experience; one couldn’t be wrong or we could lose money. That was the worst thing.
Then I’d break down the boxes. Dozens and dozens of boxes. Flip them over, slit the tape, pull the flaps, and flatten the box. By the time I was done, there’d be a stack five feet tall of flattened boxes. I was fast and definite. No equivocation. There is only one way to break a box down. It just takes a sharp object and brute force. I loved using brute force. It felt good going home at night with scrapes on my hands like I had done real work that needed to be done.
I thought of that today. Breaking down boxes with just a sharp object and brute force. It felt great.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
I was the one buying all that Evening in Paris perfume. Every birthday, mother’s day, Xmas, I’d buy it for my mother. I loved the cobalt blue bottles. Much more exotic than Ben Hur which stank!!!!
The cobalt blue bottles – yes, indeed.
When I was 12 I had a paper route. Our job title was probably something more bureaucratic, but everyone called us paperboys. And that was simply descriptive–girls weren’t allowed to be paper “boys,” I believe the logic being that it somehow wasn’t safe for girls. I suppose part of the concern was that you were out in the dark by yourself at 6:00 A.M. (Recent events have of course put a new perspective on when girls and women might or might not be safe.)
Eventually girls were also allowed to be “paperboys,” probably in the 1970s. A few years ago our Journal Sentinel here in Milwaukee switched to all adult deliverers, part of the reason being that this was simply more efficient, but I believe part of logic also was a belief that this work wasn’t that safe for either boys or girls. Probably, but for me being a paperboy was kind of like ripping up the boxes was for Jan; it was fun, and I was able to earn my own money.
Great experience for you. I raised rabbits while I was in the 5th, 6th, and 7th grades. Every Saturday I delivered five or six to a local grocery store. I don’t remember how much I earned, but that was my walk around money. That was in the 1940s.