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Sept. 23, 2004 Charley was a medium man. He’d tried marriage once but that no longer existed in his life, just as the kids produced from that union no longer existed as any thing other than a weekly deduction from his pay check. He went to work in his medium Ford car to go to his medium job that gave him no prestige. He was a clerk in a warehouse. He spent his days getting am invoice from a pneumatic tube and gathering the goods that it listed. He spent another few minutes packing the items for shipment while another clerk who made more money but was still in the medium range took his production and placed it in the right shippers pile; one for UPS and another for DHL and yet a third for the US mail. The biggest pile was for the mail because of the three costs it was the medium priced one. Charley knew all of this but it wasn’t in him to care. He did his 7 hours worth of work in his eight hour day and drove back to the house he and his mother shared. They did not speak much because long ago they had talked each other out. His mother did have food waiting for him when he got home. This was the accommodation, Charley paid the utility bills and drove her to bingo on Wednesday night and she prepared his dinner six nights a week. On Wednesday’s he ate at McDonalds while he waited for her. Those six nights after they silently ate together they’d silently watch television. First Wheel of Fortune where occasionally one of the other of them would label a contestant as stupid for buying a vowel or misspeaking when solving the puzzle. Then Jeopardy where more times than not no one in the room knew the answer. So they just silently watched people they knew were smarter than they get rich on trivia. It was a medium life and Charley suited himself to it. At forty four years he knew that he would have nothing other than what he had now. The car may change or the television shows may occasionally be preempted for something else but what he had and what he did would not change for thirty or more years. He had spent a part of his past trying to get a better job, if not for the money, then so his wife would quit calling him a loser. Charley wasn’t a loser though; he never gambled so he never lost. He simply was medium. He never went out with his work mates because the two times he did drink he got sick so he never drank again after the second time. He didn’t want to gamble with his health and thought that the four beers he’d tasted in his life was experience enough. When he thought about his drinking days at all, thoughts that had crossed his mind years before, he thought about the beer and not his spent youth. Charley thought about his life and occasionally knew with a certainty of mind that he made only a negative difference to the world. He knew that his car while clean as Ford could make it did pollute and that when he used his home air conditioning he helped global warming too but he didn’t know what to do about that so he kept driving and knew his AC was the only way he’d ever be cool so he kept using it too. Beyond that he knew the world wouldn’t care one way or the other if he stayed or left. Charley never dreamed about being a rock star, never once played an air guitar (Burt Bacharach used a piano anyway), never thought how good his life would be if he wrote a Pulitzer winning book. (He never wrote anything other than the checks to pay the utilities anyway.) Charley was not going to lead the world to peace or find a cure. Charley was just medium and he knew it. His kids knew it. His boss knew it. His mother knew it but most importantly of all, he knew it. Ten years ago a kid came to work in the shipping department. He was the son of some manager who needed a summer job the year before he went off to college. The others in the department were used to each other; they didn’t talk amongst themselves because they had all years ago talked themselves out. They were all varying degrees of medium. But they did have some lively conversations about this kid…his earrings, pierced nose and lip and the kanji tattooed on his arm that he told them meant happiness and peace. They all, Charley included, tried to ignore the kid. They all thought that he’d carry stories about them back to management. They did not know of the anarchistic bent in the youth of the day. They did not know that the kid and his father had fought and if the kid wanted to go to college he would work and turn the money over to his old man who planned to dole it out as allowance during his year away from home. Except for not being medium the kid tried unsuccessfully to fit in. He used words with passion, trying to foment revolution among the medium people he was surrounded by. He was the first (and last) person Charley had ever seen play an air guitar, Charley almost thought he should call 911 because the kid was having an attack of some kind, then he took note of the smile on the kids face. Charley never smiled when the kid talked to him, only acted like the kid was bothering him. But he did smile on his medium long commute home when he thought about the antics of the kid that day. Charley never shared these stories with his mother, she wouldn’t understand. Charley didn’t want to have to answer a host of questions about the kid so he just kept it to himself. Finally when the summer was over Charley and the rest of them just formed up around the hole that his leaving made in their shipping world and things returned to the way they had been; medium. Occasionally Charley wondered at what the kid may have been doing now; he didn’t connect the death notice seven years ago with the kid. In the company newsletter his obituary was printed without detail with the company’s condolences passed on in print to the father, a senior manager. There were rumors of an overdose but that was not in the newsletter. The rumors never reached Charley’s ears anyway. So in his memory the kid was still alive and Charley thought he was probably a successful something or other. Not medium like he was. ------------ About the author: Mr. Durfee is a trouble maker. He has recently decided that no matter what the end result of his research is that there is only one way to think about things and that way is your way. hhhhaahahahhaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaahhhaaaaa Email: mcd5255@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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