My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen (Cont._4)

Weekends were nice as 1972 sped along, though I often put in half-days at the office on Saturdays. Sainted Mother wanted me home, always, on the weekends. She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a young man wouldn’t want to spend the entire weekend with his mother.

They are like that, mothers are, particularly southern ones. Of course mine never met my friend Jackie, or some of the others who tempted me away from the comforts of home. Secrets enrich, after all.

Some Sundays, I would go fishing with my father on his only day off. We had fun, but he took it a bit more seriously than I did. I’ll always remember talking to him long-distance during our years apart and hearing of a fruitless fishing trip. “Didn’t catch much, and we fished hard,” with emphasis on the word “hard.”

I always took the position that if a fisherman fished “hard,” he was missing the point.

They were good folks, though, my mother and father. He had made enough money working at a CCC camp during the Depression to come back to Arkansas and marry Mother. They had sharecropped until my sister came. Then a stroke of luck put them in possession of a hog, which Daddy butchered. He peddled the meat in Pine Bluff to old customers of his daddy. One thing led to another and they saved enough to purchase an old grocery store just south of the city.

He ran that store six days a week for 40 years, so I didn’t see a lot of hardship in working some Saturdays. I think I developed a reputation for being a hard worker, though at times a short-tempered one. Nobody’s perfect, I suppose, though I often regret not being as even-tempered as some I knew.

Oh well. Things were changing. We had a new secretary/receptionist/typist named Christie Porter. She would prove to be one of the most capable people I’ve ever known, a Master of Production. In fact, with her arrival, the firm was about to begin a record of hiring unusually talented and gifted people, a record unmatched in professional circles. Some are still making marks on the city and state.

I’d like to think I had some part in hiring them, but I didn’t. It was pure luck. If anything, a slight ability to spot a better class of people may have contributed a modicum of assistance.

Anyway, our firm would be blessed with high-level personnel, over and over again through the years. Our state and our cities would reap the blessings as well.