The Spanish Diggers
I woke up late for my first day, must have slept through the alarm. I groggily made my way to the kitchen and got the coffee started. Later I pulled on an old pair of jean shorts and looked at myself in the mirror. My stomach looked like an overflowing vanilla pudding cup. Oh well, a couple of weeks at the new job would tighten up those abs. I bolted a bowl of bran cereal and banana and rushed out before I had the chance to detect a bowel movement. “I’ll pay for that later”, I thought. The man I was supposed to meet was also late so I called him on his cell and he told me he was on his way. Geppetto or something was his name. All the best construction guys were Italian and I bluffed my way into the job earlier over the phone. Two years experience, the ad said and I wondered how difficult it could be, I mean, c’mon we’re not talking brain surgery here. He arrived and we made our introductions then I parked my car and jumped into his truck and we drove to the site of my first days work. We made small talk in the car about where we lived and family shit, he pulled into a Tim Horton and bought a coffee, I declined one.
The job was pretty straightforward, dig out an old driveway and fill the slope with gravel. There were also some old cement stairs in the backyard to bust up and dump. The owner of the house was a retired engineer who compulsively snapped digital shots of the whole procedure as if he was working on the world’s most boring documentary. Nice enough guy although a little on the pompous side. These clients always talk about some home renovation project they started and took three years or something to finish and inevitably want you to see it. This is how they bond with the common, salt of the earth type labourer and they generally throw in the odd mangled French word. I see the look of surprise on his face when I speak, as if he expected the monosyllabic grunt of some stereotypical fantasies. “Perhaps we’ll find a Spanish galleon under all this”, I say gesturing at the gnarled dirt path that was a driveway earlier that day. “If there’s doubloons we split the booty.” says I. “One would most certainly find those only on the east coast” he replies, oblivious to my stab at humour.
I’d taken this job because there was a lull in work in my chosen field of animation. I sometimes find myself wondering what the hell I’m doing, or not doing with my life. A long time ago I used to watch those people with the washed out faces, the bags underneath their eyes looking like an accumulation of melted candle wax. You just knew that they’d either given up on life or given in to reality, in other words “conformed”.
I smirked as retired guy took another picture for his scrapbook, he was lucky, I thought, all his battles were behind him, except maybe a fight with cancer or slowly succumbing to dementia. Mine were still looming largely in front of me, taunting me. Once in a while you can look back on a life filled with accomplishments and admire the way you took hold of certain opportunities that arrived your way. I felt that the last few years had left only bitterness in my mouth and resentfully watched the years and debts build up exponentially as I took lesser paying jobs that I cared nothing about.
All this was a shock for me. I know I was dwelling in the past and that to move on you have to let go, but I couldn’t help thinking that life had gypped me out of something. I was worth more than this wasn’t I? Just standing over the piles of gravel with a shovel made my stomach tighten with anxiety, so great was my feeling that my talents were being buried in this pointless task. It didn’t help that Geppetto was barking out his opinion of my shoveling technique every two minutes. Geppetto yelled a lot. Surely this was all a misunderstanding and when I get home tonight the message on my answering machine will reassure me with the offer of a lucrative contract. thus renewing my career.
The gravel pounding machine roared to life as one of my work mates started smoothing the crushed rock base. The other guy was digging behind me and sweating profusely. Christ it was already stinking hot and it was just nine fifteen, going to be a scorcher. The two guys working on this job were Portuguese and barely spoke English as I found out later on one of our breaks. They’d been more or less working for Geppetto since they’d migrated to Canada five years ago. They were stuck with this job and they knew it and were just trying to make the best of it. I couldn’t understand how they let Geppetto treat them like dog shit for five years without taking a shovel to his head. I’d only been there for an hour and I was ready to do it myself. “We just stopped listening to him.” One of the Portuguese guys (George) told me. “He no big deal.” They had learned to tune him out, I guess, something I could never imagine being there long enough to acquire as a skill. The worst of it was that they’d sometimes have to shut off their machines in order to listen to Geppetto’s tirades about not working fast enough. I suppose a person can get used to anything in life and should just take life as it comes, good or bad, but if you let yourself settle for less, when does it end, how far away from your goals do you end up?
