The Labor Of Love

My father wore a blue collar to work. I remember, as a young girl, learning to iron his shirts. When I look back, it seems curious that my father should go off to his job on a freight train wearing a fresh, neatly ironed blue work shirt. In those days, part of his job was shoveling coal into the firebox that propelled the locomotive. It was hot, dirty work.

He also wore blue-and-white striped overalls. My mother washed these weekly, along with the rest of the family clothes, in the cellar, which was how we referred to our basement, perhaps because it contained, in one corner, a root cellar where potatoes and other vegetables were kept in bushel baskets and where rows of glass jars of canned fruits and vegetables neatly lined the shelves. There was also a coal bin, which the coal man filled through a chute dropped into an open window. We were often sent to the cellar to fetch a jar of preserves or, when we were older, to throw a shovelful of coal into the furnace or to shake down the ashes.

The cellar also contained my father's workbench, a swing that hung from the beams and an old, windup Victrola that had belonged to my grandfather. Sometimes the cellar held a live chicken, which my father resolutely (although, I sensed, reluctantly) decapitated at the appropriate time, and which my mother dutifully (although, I sensed, reluctantly) cleaned and plucked bare before she roasted it for our Sunday dinner.

My father worked hard. He came home tired and at odd hours, and he was often away from Buffalo for two or three days at a time "on a run" to towns in New York or Pennsylvania. As I grew older, I learned of my schoolmates' lives, visited their homes, met their families and realized that my father's blue collar was not the rule. My best friend's father wore a white shirt to his job at the electric company. And as I moved through high school and college, I learned of fathers who were principals and doctors.

I felt a little ashamed of my father's blue collar, and I suspected that my mother did, too. She often mentioned that he should have taken an offer to work at the telephone company, where she had once worked as an operator and supervisor. But my father had a strong bond that kept him on the road. He had started working there as a boy, leaving school after the sixth grade. His brother and his brother-in-law also worked for the same railroad.

My father didn't seem to much enjoy his work. He was a gentle man, and it was a rough and sometimes violent job. From my mother's nervous reactions, I sensed that tensions sometimes erupted in fistfights among the men. My mother was especially pleased when my father was granted the title of extra-conductor and could occasionally work a passenger train or a troop train during World War II.

He was a handsome man, and when he dressed up in a suit with a white shirt and tie, he looked like a professional. He was very much anticipating retirement in less than a year when he suffered a stroke at work. He died in the hospital several hours later.

He was buried in a white shirt.