Uphill both ways

You know how people joke that their grandparents had it so much harder than they have, with stories about how they had to walk to school in the snow for miles, and it was uphill both ways? Well, I actually have such a story.

It took place in the ‘90s in Minnesota, where I got up every day at 4:30 a.m. to work at a bindery. It was winter, and no busses went there. So I’d put on two pairs of pants, shoes and boots, a hat, coat, scarf, mittens, two shirts and a sweater, and go out into the cold.

The temperature got down to -18ᵒF on some mornings. When I tried listening to music on the way there, the batteries in my Walkman cassette player would freeze and stop working by the fourth block. When I blinked, my eyelashes froze together, and I’d have to rub my eyes with my mittens to get them pulled apart. I got frostbite on my fingers a few times too, in spite of the mittens.

At the bindery warehouse we made notebooks using a punch press machine, and if we weren’t careful, we could chop off a finger in its sharp, circular blades. There were other assembly-line types of machines, all of them ear-splittingly loud. I wore earplugs the entire day to protect my hearing, especially when the shrieking horns went off to signal the ending of lunch or break time.

It was a balmy 55ᵒF in the warehouse, so we employees kept our coats and hats on, but had to remove the scarves and mittens for our own safety. Sometimes people would remove their jackets if they got warm enough while lifting boxes full of paper and books. We made $5.50 per hour and there was no overtime.

I tried to do the same amount of lifting as my male coworkers — most of them bigger than me — in order to stay employed. The only problem was that I had a torn tendon on one of my thumbs from an old injury that I couldn’t afford to get sewn up, because there was really no health care for poor people back then. So when I lifted boxes, I could feel a ripping sensation all the way up my arm. I learned how to compensate and it healed somewhat anyway, though.

During lunch breaks I’d eat a peanut butter sandwich and buy a 25¢ coffee from the vending machine. I’d read self-help books and dream of a better life while my coworkers tried to rope me into their multi-level marketing schemes. My dreams and struggles finally helped me decide to get out of this drudgery and learn computers.

Today I’m a writer who’s had a pretty livable career that doesn’t involve frozen eyeballs or shrieking horns. I’m not king of the world or anything though, nor do I spend my time yachting around and doing whatever I want, but I’ve come a long way. And although I’m not ready to retire, it’s nice to know what I can accomplish and what I can endure.

There have been setbacks throughout this time, such as when I lost a tech support job in the Bay Area and got a job cleaning toilets in a punk bar. But I learned something from each and every job I had, and was damn glad to have them all. There have been times I couldn’t get a job too, and those are the hardest times for anyone, because it’s easy to feel like you’re not needed anywhere. But that’s never true.

On the day I got laid off from the bindery, I found a kitten on my way home. He was in the middle of the street, standing in a mound of snow, with frostbite on his ears. I put him into my jacket and continued to my place. As I felt him purring from the warmth of my many layers of clothing, I was not worried about how we would afford to survive. We were alive for that moment, and that was all that mattered.

It’s all been downhill from there.