New here? Start at the bottom with August 9th. That's where I explain myself.

9/26/99 -- Sunday

Church this morning. Nessa sang the solo on "Precious Lord" and I watched half the men in that sanctuary wipe their eyes and pretend it was allergies. I've been married to that voice nineteen years and it still gets me.

Pastor Reed preached on Joseph in Egypt. What you meant for evil, God meant for good. He didn't know I was sitting there with a buyout letter folded up in my Bible. Or maybe he did. That man knows things.

Tomorrow's the last game ever at Tiger Stadium. I put in for a vacation day two weeks ago, first vacation day I've taken on a weekday since the strike. Pop and me are going to watch it on his big Zenith. Here's the news: Andre asked if he could come. Didn't have to be told. Asked. I'm not going to make too much of it. But I'm writing it down.

Pop took me to that ballpark in 1968 when I was fourteen. We sat way out in the upper deck. Willie Horton hit one and Pop stood up and hollered so loud a white man in front of us turned around, and Pop just kept hollering, and the man started laughing and hollering too. That was the year after the riot, and that team is the only thing I remember everybody in Michigan agreeing on. Pop says that ballpark is where he found out he was a Michigan man and not just a man from Alabama with a job in Flint.

They're building a new park downtown for next year. Fine. I'll go. But Monday I'm going to sit next to my father and my son and watch the old one go.

9/21/99 -- Tuesday

1:15 in the morning. Kitchen table. The buyout papers are spread out next to my plate.

Here's where it stands. I've got twenty-four years in. At thirty years I can retire on a full pension, doesn't matter how old I am, that's thirty-and-out, that's what Pop did and what I always figured I'd do. Six more years. Now the company's offering some of us a lump sum to walk away early, and it's a lot of money, more than I ever saw in one place. It would pay for Monique's four years with some left over. But you give up years toward that pension, and the man in personnel couldn't tell me straight how many.

Nessa came down in her robe around 12:45 and sat with me. She said, "What does your gut say?" I said my gut says I've watched them close plant after plant in this town since I was a young man, and the ones who stayed till the end didn't always get what they were promised either. She said, "That's your head. What does your gut say?" I didn't have an answer.

Under the buyout papers is the first bill from Michigan State. I didn't move it. Seemed like it ought to have a seat at the meeting too. Nessa put her hand flat on top of it, like you'd quiet a dog, and we sat there till the furnace kicked on.

Pop says never walk away from a pension. Pop also still thinks a Buick is a luxury car. I've got till the middle of October.

9/16/99 -- Thursday

Tuesday night I got home at 12:20 and there was a blinking light on the answering machine. Nessa had left it for me to hear myself. It was the attendance office at the high school. Andre has missed fifth and sixth hour six times since school started. School hasn't even been in two weeks.

I didn't wake him up. I wanted to. I sat on the edge of the bed and Nessa said, "Don't do it at midnight. Nothing good happens at midnight." She's right.

So yesterday morning, before my shift, I drove him to Pop's instead of school. Pop's 74. He hired in at Chevy in the Hole in 1955 and worked the line thirty years. He didn't yell either. He sat Andre down on the porch and told him about the heat in the summer on that line, and the foreman who called him "boy" for eleven years, and how he never once missed a day because missing a day meant somebody else's son got his job. Then he said, "Your daddy's done twenty-four years of second shift so you could sit in a classroom. What you doing instead?"

Andre said he was at a friend's house. Playing video games. That's all. I believe him, mostly. He's sixteen. He's a good kid. He's also sixteen.

He went to all his classes today. Nessa called the office to check. It's one day.

9/10/99 -- Friday

Monique called from East Lansing at 11:30 last night, after Nessa was asleep, and left a message on the machine for me. She said she's fine, she likes her roommate, calculus is hard, and she misses her mama's greens. At the end she said "Tell Daddy I love him" real fast, like she was embarrassed. I played it three times. Tired. More this weekend.

9/6/99 -- Labor Day

Cookout in Pop's backyard. Ribs, potato salad, Nessa's peach cobbler, my brother Curtis and his crew up from Detroit. Somebody had a ballgame on the radio. First Labor Day without Monique at the table.

Curtis started in on last summer's strike, like he always does. He's at a different plant and they got laid off when the parts ran out, same as everybody. Fifty-some days. I walked a picket line in the hottest June I remember and I'd do it again. But I remember the grocery bills from that summer too. Nessa remembers them better.

Pop sat in his lawn chair and told the same story he tells every Labor Day, about coming up from Alabama on the train in 1955 with one suitcase and eleven dollars, and sleeping at his cousin's on the north side, and standing in line at the employment office at Chevrolet for three days straight. Everybody's heard it fifty times. Nobody ever tells him to stop. Andre sat right next to him the whole time. I noticed that.

8/29/99 -- Sunday

We moved Monique into her dorm at Michigan State yesterday. Our first one to go to college. First one in the family ever, on either side. She wants to be an engineer. "Design them instead of build them, Daddy." Pop said, "Good. Then you can fix the ones I built."

We loaded the Buick and Curtis's pickup and went down 69 in a two-car parade. Andre carried every heavy box up four flights of stairs without one complaint, which I've never seen before in my life. The room is about the size of our bathroom. Her roommate's from up by Traverse City and had never met anybody from Flint. She asked Monique if it's as bad as they say. Monique said, "It's home." That's my girl.

Nessa made the bed with the new sheets and fixed the corners twice. Then it was time and Monique walked us down to the parking lot and hugged her mama a long time and then hugged me and said, "Go on, Daddy, you'll be late for work." I was. First time in years. I sat in the Buick in the plant lot for ten minutes before I could go in.

One more thing. On the drive home, before I dropped everybody off, Andre rode up front with me for once instead of in Curtis's truck. Somewhere around Durand he asked me if I like working at the plant. Sixteen years old. Nobody's ever asked me that. Not Pop, not Nessa, not me. I told him I like what it pays for. He said, "That's not what I asked." Smart boy. I didn't have a better answer, and he let it go.

8/18/99 -- Wednesday

What second shift is: you leave the house at 2:45, you punch in at 3:30, you punch out at midnight, you're home by 12:30 if the lights are with you. Your kids are at school when you're asleep and asleep when you get home. You see your family at breakfast and on weekends. That's the deal. It's a good deal. It paid for this house.

Every night Nessa leaves me a plate in the oven with foil on it. Tonight it was smothered pork chops and rice and green beans, and a note on the foil in her handwriting: "Monique leaves in 10 days. Keep that Saturday morning free." Like I didn't know. I ate it standing up at the counter in the dark kitchen and I thought about how many plates of food my mother left in the oven for Pop. Thousands. I never once thought about it till now.

8/9/99 -- Monday

My daughter Monique set this up for me before she leaves for college. She said, "Daddy, you think all this stuff at 1 in the morning and never tell anybody. Type it." So here I am, typing it, with two fingers.

My name is Lamont Pettiford. I'm 45. I've worked at General Motors in Flint for twenty-four years, second shift, and my father worked the line before me, thirty years at Chevrolet. My wife is Vanessa. Everybody calls her Nessa. We have two kids: Monique, 18, who starts at Michigan State this month, and Andre, 16, who starts eleventh grade and is going to give me gray hair.

There's talk at the plant about buyouts. There's always talk. This time it sounds different. That's part of why I'm writing. I want to remember what I was thinking before I decide, whatever I decide.

Write me: [email protected]


people have stopped by. Thank you for reading.
Last updated 9/26/99
© 1999 Lamont Pettiford

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