Charmed Life

 

So what have I been up to all this time? Weeeell...

After I quit my job I took a little more than a month off using my savings to maintain my lifestyle and keep my bills current. Oh, I made concessions, but I must say I enjoyed myself too. After all I knew that I could always get a job driving for somebody if push came to shove.

A friend of mine was going to build a house if the client could get financing. It was going to be a big project and he would need another laborer, beyond his usual crew. I was holding out for that. I’d been doing some temp work in a machine shop over in Bloomfield but that wasn’t enough, and I found it as difficult to get to work there as to drive to Indianapolis, though they wanted to hire me permanent. I live a charmed life and true to form the bank came through just as my finances were getting critical.

So I spent a couple of months building a house out of insulating concrete forms. It was sweet. We were working on a hilltop north of Ellettsville out of sight of the road. I could get to work in 20 minutes through the Beanblossom Valley, having only to cross the Brutal Highway, but never going into town. It was springtime!

The work was hard, but refreshing because of it. It’s good to know that I can still do the heavy lifting when I need to. It’s good, too, to be a part of something that takes shape from the ground up. It’s a beautiful house, and big; two stories and a basement. My favorite room is the sun room. Unfortunately if faces north, but with the R-factor of the construction that isn’t such an issue. It sits atop the open end of the basement, which is dug into the hill and with windows on three sides overlooks the woods. I’m sure the owners are going to be spending a lot of time in there.

And what a crew we had. The contractor and lead carpenter are old hippies; another laborer is a young (in his 40‘s) intellectual, and then there was my next door neighbor John, a contractor in his own right and a true Brown County Hoosier. Steve, the contractor was always saying what a diverse, interesting crew we made. He took pleasure in it and so did I.

It’s far too long a story to go into how John ended up working with Steve and being my next door neighbor. We needed something to differentiate me from Steve so I became “Neighbor Steve.” There are a lot of Steves in the circles I run in. I’ve been “Trucker Steve” for a long time. I never even found a suitable handle for the CB but I finally had an appellation I could feel comfortable with. I was Neighbor Steve.

And this too shall pass. I had hoped that the one job would lead to more, and it would have except Steve doesn’t have any jobs big enough to need the extra hand. He has work for me, but it’s not steady and he doesn’t know ahead of time when he’s going to need me. The problem is that we’re all too old. Steve’s got his Spray Foam Insulation gig and other investments so that the contracting is almost a hobby; and Cliff, the lead carpenter, has his turkeys and his goats. Me? Hell, It’s too late for me to resume my construction career at 54. Besides, the work is seasonal. I was laid off from construction when I answered that add in the paper that said, “Learn to Drive a Truck,” oh those many years ago.

Andrew delivers for Bender Lumber, where we got our materials for the job (other than the ICF forms themselves which came in on a Big Truck, but that’s another story...). Everybody knew Andrew and the first time he delivered to the construction sight I was introduced to him as a driver. Andrew holds a class A license too, but like me wants to go home at night. He still drives occasionally for a local company. He said I should check it out. He said you can call them up cold and they’ll find something for you to do. “Yeah right,” I said to myself, but I checked it out and so what began as a fallback gig for rain days has become my bread and butter. That’s right, I’m “Trucker Steve” again.

Before I give you the general outlines of what I’m doing (the detail is for posts to come) let’s get in the Wayback Machine. Listen to the bells and whistles as I set the dials for, circa 2004...

I listen to Public Radio; NPR mostly but Pacifica when I can get it, and my first choice Community, when I can find it. Never mind the French only stations on AM in bayou country, it’s really just about NPR. I’ve always been one of those guys that Ira Glass would love to shame: a listener but not a supporter. I’d given before, but not consistently, and my finances were always in a mess. Well, those were sort of sorted out. I mean; I could afford a Manhattan apartment (when the boy was in school), surely I could give to public radio, right?

Pledge week becomes pledge month on the road, as different stations schedule their fund drives at different times (think about the logistics of programming at NPR that allows them to do that). Just pray there’s more than one NPR outlet in your current market, they never overlap fund drives hoping to draw listeners. In any case it’s a guilty bother, but how can I possibly support every station I listen to? “Call now and your pledge will be doubled!”

I happened to be passing through Terra Haute, IN during pledge month. The NPR feed there comes through a translator from WFIU, from my home town of Bloomington. I pulled over on the shoulder of the interstate. “I can’t support every station I listen to but I can support my home town station,” I thought. Thus began a practice that continued until I got the gig in Plainfield and I started listening to WFYI all the time. Then my finances collapsed because I quit my job, for reasons elsewhere enumerated, and now I’m being hounded by three public radio stations because I’d once contributed to Chicago’s just to get a DVD of This American Life’s TV attempt; along with pleas from all of the other good causes I’ve made the mistake of supporting when I thought I could along the way, and all of the other good causes that those good causes have sold my name to.

There’s plenty of money. I heard a story just yesterday about a kid who died but started a web campaign to give $500 dollar tips to waitresses. Money came in from middle class folks, and wealthy folks, and maybe more than a few service industry personnel from all over the world. They’ve been able to give over one hundred $500 tips to not only waitresses but waiters and cab drivers as well. Buckminster Fuller was right, there is enough wealth to go around. Somebody should tell Mitt Romney.

But I digress, and grow political, which is far more dangerous! Forgive me, the point was that Ted answered the phone to take my pledge. I told him how I was an over the road driver missing my home and he told me that he was the head honcho at a trucking company right there in beautiful Bloomington Indiana, volunteering his time for public radio, and that I should get in touch with him when I came back. It’s been a long circuitous route, but I’m working for Ted now.

It is a symptom of my “charmed life,” but no less a nightmare...