If you have a truck you can get work, sometimes strange, unusual work. I don’t remember a day growing up that my Dad didn’t have a truck. He always had a pick-up truck and later in life when he started his own back-hoe excavation business he also had a dump truck. I would work with Dad just about every Saturday during the school year. Each Saturday would bring a different adventure, as I never knew from one weekend to the next what job we would be working on. Usually it would be plastering a swimming pool or house, but once, when I was about 12 years old, I was riding with Dad in his pick-up truck and we stopped at an old detached garage. More workers pulled up in his dump truck.
My Father told me that his brother M~ (who he sometimes worked for) said that this old garage was to be demolished and that we were to take all of the junk out of the garage and haul it off. And when my dad had a job to do, he did it to the letter. We opened the side door and entered.
There was just enough light entering from the open door to see that the building was full of old boxes. I mean full as in every square foot from the floor to about 6 feet straight up was solid cardboard and wooden boxes. The boxes were all about the same size - approximately 16 to18 inches wide and deep and 12 inches tall, stacked one on top of the other in columns, each column of boxes touching the next.
It was a strange sight. At first glance, I marveled at the sheer number of boxes and then wondered – what could be in all of these boxes?
“IT’S ALL A BUNCH OF JUNK! THROW ALL THE BOXES INTO THE DUMP TRUCK!" I heard my Dad shout out to me and the other workers. I saw Dad and the others picking up the boxes and chucking them into their trucks. I followed suit like the others. I always followed Dad’s orders at work. That’s the way he was brought up and he raised me in the same way. I picked up my first box and thought, dang this thing is heavy! Then I dropped it into the closest truck, barely getting it over the side, and it landed with a loud thud.
Wow! What was in that box I wondered? I watched each worker closely to see if anybody looked inside their boxes, or if any of their boxes would break open to see their contents fly out. Nothing! With every box that passed by me on its way to the bottom of the truck bed, a grave of unanswered questions, I thought… What was in that one? We’ll never know now.
Finally I could take it no longer and devised a quick plan. I would stall at the far side of the truck and when the other workers were inside the garage picking up their next box I would open mine and find out what was inside! After a few cycles of getting ahead of the others they were finally all in the garage at the same time and I was now alone on the far side of the truck so that it was blocking their view of me. I quickly opened the taped up box and looked inside…
