Fiesta was a novel, albeit an
autobiographical one. A Moveable Feast was a memoir, albeit a posthumous
one. I don't know which OLD FOLKS AT HOME is going to be.
An autobiographical
memoir. A posthumous novel? Write as if you're already dead.
Dead man writing.
* * *
When I was fairly old, I took an eight-month contract job with Lucent Technologies
at their fiber-optic cable factory in Atlanta writing maintenance instructions and
operating procedures for a new process they were installing to make glass tubes they
had been buying from a supplier.
The tubes were six feet long, four inches
in diameter, and had a hole in the center a rod fit into.
The tube was like
an insulator and the rod was like a conductor, of light.
They were fused
into a glass preform and the preform was drawn into fiber in a draw tower.
* * *
After I completed my contract, Lucent offered me a permanent job, with benefits,
including retirement. I took it.
They hired me permanent at age 57. I was
grateful for the equal employment opportunity laws that forbade age discrimination.
I was vested in the plan after five years, and could retire when my age and years
of service added up to 65. But there wouldn't be much in it, then.
I planned
to work ten years and retire at age 67. By then, I'd have a large enough stipend
I could live on it and social security without having to take a job to get by.
The American Dream.
I'd have five years left to go on 40-Year Run,
which I would finish writing August 31, 2011.
Maybe I'd be able to stay at
home and write full-time before I died. Without stealing from the family.
Anyhow, that was my plan, or my dream, when I took the job.
* * *
Lucent fell on hard times and sold the factory I worked at to OFS. OFS didn't
have a pension plan for management employees.
When Lucent sold the factory
to OFS they vested me in my pension and distributed what was in my account to me.
I rolled it over into an annuity.
Then OFS fell on hard times.
OFS
laid me off.
* * *
OFS gave me ten weeks separation pay--two weeks for every year I'd worked
there, permanent, counting my service with Lucent.
I was eligible for 26
weeks of unemployment and one 13-week extension. So I had enough for a 49-week sabbatical,
if I went on early, reduced-benefit social security, sold our house in Atlanta, and
lived in Brenda's old home place, in Parker, Florida, which we would buy from her
siblings as soon as Uncle Wayne's estate was settled.
That is, I took my
retirement in stages, and that was the first year of it.
* * *
When my sabbatical year was over I worked for a year, at two jobs, and wrote
a book about doing that. Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground
Writer and His Family.
A small press publisher, Pat Simonelli, LitVision
Press, asked to publish it.
I quit my job, cashed my annuity in, and took
another year off to promte and sell Bukowski Never Did This and write a book
about doing that.
I wrote several books before Bukowski Never Did This
came out.
Then Pat Simonelli lost his day job. Before Bukowski
Never Did This came out.
I decided to write a book about vanishing Florida,
like David T. Warner's Vanishing Florida: A Personal Guide to Sights Rarely Seen.
I wrote the first part, about the mullet culture, "Florida's Forgotten Coast,"
then the second part, "Florida's Emerald Coast," about the corporate cubicle
dot-com culture, but in the third part, "Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park,"
I realized I hadn't finished with the corporate cubicle dot-com culture, especially
its affirmative action policies, and, as I had been on the Diversity Council, at
Lucent, and saw something of how diversity worked, in a large corporation, I thought
I'd share my reminiscences about that, from a Florida cracker's point of view. A
Florida cracker on a sunset cruise.
* * *
I don't have to drive over to Live Oak to do that, but I want to, so I might
make one last side trip, this week, to Live Oak, to walk the ground, remember going
there with Brenda and the boys, when they were young, then later going to see Owen
and Balder play there, in bands they were in, or are now in.
Take my camera
and shoot some pictures.