From Here to There

A beloved member of our community died about four months ago, and the family held a giant barn sale this weekend to clear out the books and knick-knacks and the other small things we leave behind as clues, as evidence of our presence.  I volunteered on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, and most of our time over the two days was spent moving things around.  Whenever an item was purchased, we filled in the resulting gaps with new items from boxes, things that would have otherwise gone unseen.

I got home yesterday around 1 o'clock to discover that Nora had spent much of the morning moving things in the garage, sorting and arranging and finding new slots.  Winter is coming (40 degrees this morning) and we'd like to be able to get the cars into the garage.  We then re-stacked the pile of cut wood that Joe and Joey brought on Saturday, so that the tarp would fit more completely over it and the dry wood wouldn't absorb the morning rain before we have a chance to split and stack it under the deep eaves beside the garage.

As part of clearing the garage, Nora had washed and boxed 21 pint canning jars and the two apple corers.  We'd just put up 17 quarts of applesauce and about 25 cups of pesto.  I carried the canning materials down into the basement, and had to clear out space on one of the shelves, stacking other jars together and moving the backstock of vodka over to the other side of the basement.

We put laundry up onto the line.

I made dinner on the grill; squash and broccoli and cauliflower and corn.  I had to take the vinyl cover off and put it into the garage while I was using the grill.

We took laundry down off the line.

We covered the more sensitive plants in the garden with rags and old sheets to keep them from losing all their heat to the cold night sky.  We put dishes into the dishwasher.

How much of our lives are about moving things from one place to another, at scales small and large?  A company moves equipment into the forest and moves logs out.  Another company moves those logs to a paper mill, and then moves the paper to a commercial printer.  A publisher has words stamped onto that paper, and boxes of the resulting books are sent across the country to bookstores and airports and grocery checkstands.  We buy one of those books, take it home and put it on the nightstand.  We probably move it three or four times before we finally get around to reading it: the nightstand, the bathroom, the desk, the end table next to our favorite chair.  Then we put it on a shelf, and later into a box to take out to the barn.  The tag sale volunteers move it onto the ping pong table so it might be seen and bought.  Four or five people pick it up, leaf through it, reject it and set it back.  Finally, the right adoptive hands are found, and the book goes into their bag with the other books, 25 cents or six for a dollar.  They put the bag into the car, take it home, unpack, and put that book onto their own nightstand.

We search for order.  Wouldn't it be nice, we think, if our keys were always on the same pegs, our purses always in the same spot in the hall, the ketchup always in the fridge door and the dressing behind it.  We buy organizers, precious little drawers and shelf systems and peg racks, color-coded key heads, silverware dividers.  That's the drawer for the dishtowels, and this is the drawer for the plastic wrap and baggies.  That holder is for the sink sponge, not for the old sponge we used to wipe up cat puke.

Pool is about moving things.  If the goal of the game were to have no balls on the table, we'd just clean them off by hand and be done with it.  But the goal is to move them consciously, within the parameters of whatever particular game we've chosen.  It's never the same, and we're always starting over.  The cue ball was here, and now it's there.

Writing is about moving things.  Those things are immaterial, a life's worth of vocabulary and ideas and interests that we keep shifting around, putting kin next to kin to form new relations.  We've taken in millions and millions of words, we've pressed typing keys millions of millions of times to write essays and send e-mail, to express love and sorrow and friendship, to amuse and to keep in touch, to clear an idea out of our head and put it into the barn for someone else to pick up.

We have things from my parents, from Nora's parents.  She wears a ring that has my great-grandmother's diamond in it.  And those things will all go on from us as well—to a barn sale, to a landfill, to grateful friends.  I gave my old car to a mechanic friend, and he gave it to a friend's son, and I see it go by every so often.  I had 15 years of use, and he'll have at least five more.  Then on for parts, for scrap.  We move things from here to there, from them to you to me to her to them.  All of life is re-gifting in the end.  All our treasures are previously owned, and will be owned again; they'll move through the house a thousand times along the way.

Reclaiming the Holiday

Happy Labor Day.

If you're like me, you hear those words and think only of a Monday not at work; the last barbecue and potluck of the summer; a small-town parade; the day before kids go back to school; no more white pants until next June.

I would like us to reconsider, to reclaim the use of "Labor" in Labor Day. In this era of financiers who imagine themselves above both the law and above all of the rest of us, we might consider the words of Abraham Lincoln, from his very first State of the Union Address in 1861:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Anyone sufficiently foolhardy to utter these same words today could expect to be berated for months on Fox News.  But Lincoln was hardly a socialist; rather, he was communitarian, a man committed to the belief that we all rely upon one another both by choice and by necessity.  In fact, in this same State of the Union, he called for the Federal construction of a common railroad as a means of cementing loyalty and manufacturing opportunity.

Even in 1861, the nation was far too large for its citizens to know each other personally. Political gridlock had broken loose into open warfare; clans and gangs ruled much of the territory, regardless of formal political organization.  Lincoln's communitarian spirit was not the nostalgic desire for some homogeneous, pleasant small town, but rather the acknowledgement that we don't have to like one another or agree with one another in order to respect one another.

The labor movement rose up in conditions such as these we see today.  In the 1890s, power was concentrated in the hands of very, very few.  Malcolm Gladwell shows that nearly a sixth of the richest people who have ever lived on Earth were born in the 1830s.  Labor was disregarded, dangerous, and so poorly rewarded that a 60-hour workweek was insufficient to provide food and safety to one's family.  It was from the bottom of that pit, where the only way to look was upward, that labor organizations began to emerge, to gain strength, to give us the broad prosperity that the 20th Century provided.  The painters, the pipefitters, the teachers, the drivers, the dockworkers, all decided that they could do more together than they could accomplish individually.  And they were right.

Now labor concerns are on the wane once again, pressed down by a 40-year political cycle of raw economic power concentrated in the hands of the few.  The minimum wage has about two-thirds the purchasing power today as in 1968; McDonalds provides a sample budget to its employees that assumes that they a second job equal in pay to the 35-hour-per-week McJob, that they not buy groceries or have a child, that they own and insure a car that never needs gasoline, and that they can get health coverage for $20 per month.  Meanwhile, the CEO's salary increased about 50% last year, from $8.8M to $13.8M.  So the worker in the store makes $7.50 per hour, and the CEO (let's assume he works an 80-hour week) makes $7.50 every eight seconds.

Mr. Lincoln clearly understood that the desire of the powerful was always to make use of the powerless at least possible expense.

It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent.

It is easy to see that the labor movement of the 1880s and '90s was the logical outgrowth of the emancipation movement of the 1860s and '70s.  Both were founded on the belief that none of us is superior, as humans, to any other; the belief that work should be justly rewarded; the belief that common effort and common dignity serve us all.  Lincoln's words remain as current and important today as they were 150 years ago.

Happy Labor Day.