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calendar lung
September 20, 2004
It was our fourth week in the calendar mines. Christmas was almost upon us, but Daryl and I worked shoulder to shoulder in the semi-darkness, digging out the lodes with our bare hands, the calendars and day planners emerging shiny and refined from cardboard boxes. Each nugget was a year in the life waiting to happen, each day highlighted by quotes from famous Minnesotans, each month by scenes from Stone Cold Steve Austin's Death Match. Dobermans, fire trucks, Britney Spears, Chicken Soup for Teenagers With Urinary Tract Infections, themes of every imaginable, ghastly variety passed through our hands as we shipped them to the kiosks and the novelty stores, but we had little time to reflect on their import. We knew only the work and the toil, for days on end. Or, rather, 2 days a week on end.
The mines were seasonal. With Christmas and the turning of the year comes the ritual of casting off the previous year's collection of tick-marked and highlighted calendars, the symbolism lost on much of our society today. To meet the exponentially increased demand, the Company solicited every year around the holidays for temporary help. With no screening for ability, anyone with the ability to find the sharp end of a pencil within three tries was given that pencil and a box cutter.
Daryl is a dauntingly intelligent friend of mine with a master's degree, who worked at the time as a researcher for a human rights organization. Consequently, she could locate the sharp end of a pencil in no more than two tries, and had a need for extra cash. I was an attorney that had taken a huge paycut to work for one of those now-defunct companies that featured free bagels on Thursdays, well-stocked fridges, a liberal dress code, and regular keg parties. Accordingly, I didn't really care which end of the pencil I used, and had a need for extra cash.
The process was beautifully organized. A hand-held, bar-code-reading, wireless device acted as a divining rod, instructed us which of the coded, differently sized and shaped boxes to pick up and construct, and how many of each calendar to put in each box, before we slapped the bar code label on it and sent it down the conveyer belt. We quickly proved our competence and eagerness, and cleverly hid our secret amusement at the entire operation and the product we were handling. As advanced calendar handlers, we had, or at least exercised, great latitude as far as job assignments went. One day we might opt for the mining operation, but the next we would weigh and ship, or quality-check outbound shipments.
On one particular day, we were sent to a 2nd-floor cage where defunct and discontinued calendars faced their final days.
We fell into an easy rhythm, dropping the boxes onto the rollers, cutting the tops open, and shoving them off down the line -- thump, slash, slash, zip. Thump, slash, slash, zip. We chatted occasionally, always careful to supplement the rhythm rather than break it. Then, Daryl uttered something dissonant and syncopated: "I got engaged."
Thump, slash, slash, clank, clank, clatter. Daryl yelped, watching my box cutter fall, neatly, blade down, through the grating, to the open work area below. She had just been gone for a few weeks to the East Coast, and met up with someone she had known years before. He asked, she said yes, pow, bang, from rogue to partner, with all the suddenness and force of an open box cutter falling on someone's head.
Over the remaining weeks in the employ of the Company, I cherished our time together, knowing that soon, the security blanket I relied on in my single life would, if not disappear, then at least shrink considerably, not providing quite the same comforting coverage as it had for years.
The work went on through those weeks, and we laughed and talked through it. We surmised that many would not make it out through the season, felled by the hazards of the calendar miner's way of life. We heard whispers of two men crushed to death by a crate of Star Trek Klingon Quote of the Day calendars, their deaths covered up quickly by payments to their families by the military-consumer-calendar complex. Their blood would join that of countless other lives broken and spent in the mines, dripping down through metal grating, flowing across the concrete floors, down into the drains and back into the earth.
Those that did survive, like Daryl and I, would carry the scars and yes, the pride of being calendar miners. As we exited into the misty December evening on our last day of employment, I looked at her, her future suddenly open to her, the promise of a life with someone who cared, who loved, and who would take care of her when the calendar lung set in, marking out her last days on yet another calendar, under the godlike watchful gaze of Justin Timberlake's prize dachshund.
Posted by Rob at September 20, 2004 11:12 AM