"So when are you coming home...
sweet Angel?"
It was a job I loved. I job that sometimes -- shh! don't tell -- I would work so late that I'd turn off all the lights and burn candles along the windowsill so no one would see I was still there, working late and later into the night until dawn hid the fact that I was standing yet at that loud binder, at the hydraulic cutter with the blade the size of scythe. I loved that job so much.
I'd arrive early every morning, purposefully before either of my bosses had risen from their beds or before one of them (I never knew which one) would break away from their two small children (one autistic, the other a Type 1 diabetic infant), leaving their care to the other parent for the day, and come to the office, dark circles under eyes either steely (bad night) or gentle (not as bad). My hot cup of coffee in my hand would sometimes burn my knuckles while I unlocked the door, the knob often frozen shut in winter. The crunch of snow, unshovelled, the layer of hard ice beneath shot with gravel, was real and alive and divine. I always wore a tie.
But by lunch the tie would be flung on the soft brown leather couch where we met sometimes with authors. And my tailored shirt would be unbuttoned two, though still tucked into my chinos. The big picture windows in the big room, the main room, showed oftentimes a mother and her children playing in the snow. Never competitive, no snow ball fights... but snow angels, and snow owls, and catching snowflakes in butterfly nets. Sometimes it was cold in the office because there simply wasn't money for pellets in the stove. It wasn't a penny-pinching cliché. It was just a truth. But I was never cold.
"I wanted to see you walking backwards
And get the sensation of you coming home.
I wanted to see you walking away from me
Without the sensation of you leaving me alone."
The production room was long and narrow and I loved it. It was my domain. It looked out not on the open courtyard with children and big sky ringed with trees above, but rather into the depths of temperate rainforest, at the time, unbroken by homes for acres. There were four kinds of evergreens and a birch (the tree of weddings and love) and that russet earth that I've only ever seen in the Pacific Northwest. There were flickers and blue jays and raccoons and wild rabbits. There were dragonflies the size of my fist and greenmen most certainly. Man, was that binder loud. But she flew. Vicious and dangerous with milling blades and power crimper and glue 390 degrees... and she took a firm hand, there was manual clamping that made my right arm and shoulder taut and knotty. Sweet life, I loved that machine.
The printers -- there were four -- whirred and clicked and made a satisfying shunk, shunk, shunk as pages chucked into output bins. I stacked the pages (four or eight up) and then carried them to the cutter for that single fateful slice. It had to be perfect but perfect was easy with the manual, digital, decimal reader. Basic math made in small adjustments. Then front to back, the pages are slapped into piles of books, nicely in order. Then stagger stacked in great, towering cross-hatched piles. Slid down the long table to stand by the binder like fruit to be harvested.
Covers were hot laminated, back-rolled and trimmed. They each had to be measured by hand, fit to the binder, sized up by eye and ruler, adjusted. One wrong meant the loss of an entire book and that came out of my pocket and my peace of mind. Into the manual clamp went the page-fruit. Tightened down. The binder roars. Glue. Mill. Cool. Mill again. Crimp. Unclamp and slide her out... an almost finished book with rough edges. After five or seven hundred repetitions of that step-by-step, the piles of white pages have become five-on-five piles of stagger-stacked bound books. They slid back up the table to the cutter.
Massive beast, that machine. My boss named him Bulba after the squat Pokemon frog/turtle/dinosaur. That boy could slice and dice 2000 pages in one ca-chunk! that shook the windows every time the hydraulics engaged.
Dear God... I loved that job.
We often worked through lunch but by dinner the scent of Armenian or Spanish or Italian food wafted across the courtyard from the "Big House" to the office and I threw open the French doors at the end of the production room just to catch a whiff of what I knew would be fabulous. She didn't like anyone to watch her cook. Wanted to pretend that no one knew the meager, off-brand ingredients that went into every prefect meal. Shame is bred as well as learned. But I knew and I didn't care.
"I wanted the ocean to cover over me.
I want sink slowly without getting wet.
And I know someday, I won't be so lonely...
and I'll walk on water every chance I get."
After dinner, I'd take my second coffee with all spice, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, and beg off a game or tv or polite conversation to slip back out into the night, cross that space to the wedge-shaped office, nestled in trees. Back into my space. My world. Where ideas became words became pages became books became worlds.
By midnight, I'd be striped down to sports bra and jeans and socks. Hair unbraided and wild. Rocking to a soundtrack of ten hours of perfect music ('70s, '80s and '90s), sweating with the exertion, the speed, the push for perfection. Commercial printers allow for 10% overage or underage. We were always dead on. No waste. No error. No room for either.
In down time between carriage returns, I scrawled cartoons and poetry and treatises and Psalms on paper scraps and tacked them to the white walls. I dreamed of a lover who would make me feel as alive as this good work did.
Seven days a week. Twelve and fourteen hour days. Weeks into months. Months into more than a year. Waking on that brown leather couch so happy to be starting it all again. And again. And again.
And I was never paid. Not once. Not ever.
"God," I pray. "I loved that job."
Why did I decide to grow up? What was the magic rule that struck me stupid between twenty-four and twenty-five? That pushed away, that said a paycheck was a requirement for an adult? I had all my bills covered for me. Room and board. Family that loved me. I had access to the accounts. I saw what we made. Exactly what we made. And when we ran in the black, we had steak and mushrooms. And when we ran in the red, we sold jeans on eBay. I was making a difference. The company turned a profit for the first time when I worked there. My boss handed me her charts. She always looked so tired. She always worked so hard. She believed. She made me believe. She was the dreamer and the dream. The vision in flesh and bone. It was all as clear as day and dawn.
"Coming down, my world turned over.
This angel falls without me there.
And I go on and life gets colder...
Carried on someone else's prayer."
What... who... why... did I leave when I loved it so much? The answers to my own questions don't have to come from God. They rest like dull beads on a string around my neck. These truths of culture and pressure and upbringing. These expectations and traditions and mob mentalities. No one grows up to run the village any more. No one stays and fights the good fight. Not unless the good fight has funding from venture capitalists.
But there was no exit strategy there at that job. Not for anyone. It was clear that everyone there would toil until they died. Literally. Because freedom of the press means nothing without presses who are small and willing to do the books that no one else will do. I remember despising the authors who came to us as hotshots, ignorant to the industry, wooed by glitzy DIY tomes, authors who had never stayed up two... three... four nights in a row, locked in sync with the machines, making the books they so blithely scuffed and flung about like mass-market commodities. I spent more time designing, laying out, printing, cutting, binding, trimming, stacking, packing, marketing their books then they had writing them. I cared about their stories -- even when they sold like backlist or midlist -- even when they were "done" and had "moved on." I kept my babies way past eighteen.
"God..."
Decisions can be made and unmade. I've said it before. I meant it. I mean it. The trouble is: It is easy to say. Not so easy to do. Sometimes it becomes impossible to see the junction, to turn back to the crossroads, where we diverged from that thing, that place we only now -- or especially now -- know we love. That place we now know, we cannot live without. The choices build on each other and create mobius strips. Celtic knots in four dimensions that are impossible to track back to the single deciding factor that seeded the brier.
Sometimes, it's easier to push through. To keep going. To compromise. Sometimes, it's easier to lay down and sleep. Sometimes, we have to drop to our knees, literally, figuratively, and admit to our Lord that we need Him. Now. Right now. Not tomorrow and not symbolically. We need Him to lift us up and walk with us. Maybe even carry us. Because the tangle of the knotworks is binding us in place. Shackling us with something that feels like fear but is really just the weight of a series of bad decisions.
Sometimes, we have to remember: Christ will not judge us. He does not limited His love in accordance to our sins.
"So when are you coming home...
sweet Angel?"
And I have no answer to this song playing from my inbox. I have no answers yet. But even as songs answer songs, creating their own realities, pockets of emotion and meaning, I understand one constant: In despair or wonderment, in passion or pain, I walk forever with my Christ, and I trust Him, in His time, to bring me home.
EJ
