elizabethlevett

We bought some really cool postage stamps some time back called, “Made in America, Building a Nation.” One image I love is of a young man in a coverall, facing the sun. He’s fastening heavy metal cable, sinewy arms glistening and legs wrapped around the cable, boots carefully perched on a large coil. He’s working on a bridge high above a city. He looks just like my dad did back when he was a strong young man in the early forties.

Being the youngest, I knew my dad in his gentler years and I adored him. He fixed anything that ever broke, built things for us, and warmed up the car while we fussed and fought and got ready for church. When my dad fixed things, I loved to help.  I learned the difference between a socket wrench and a monkey wrench by the first grade and I still have a special fondness for hardware stores.  He believed a job should be done well and a work site should be left clean, not just because that was the right way to do things but also because, when a person does something the right way, they can walk away proud and rest easy. He didn’t believe in fighting with someone if you could find a way to work things out. “It doesn’t cost any more to be pleasant,” he’d say.

My dad used a t-square, a compass, even a slide rule. He even had a little book of astronavigation he’d kept from his days in the Navy. I know he dreamed of being a writer someday – an artist. He went to college, but he didn’t get to finish. See, that was before his father’s illness and then the war, and then of course, the passle of children he and my mom accumulated. My dad worked in the federal prison system. His job was teaching the men in his charge what he called “a trade.” The men trusted him because he was kind to them, did things for them. He had a quick wit and loved to make people laugh, help people feel a little better and then go on. My dad insisted the sense of self-worth that comes from knowing how to do a job well could keep a person out of trouble. Over the years I visited penitentiaries from El Paso to Marion to Atlanta and a couple in California. I remember there were times when my dad would be called on to help negotiate if things escalated. He knew how to listen and seemed to have an amazing ability to keep his cool when tempers flared. (I guess my mother could be credited with keeping him in practice.)

My dad’s been gone a long, long time now. I still miss his gentleness and his wit and the way he looked in his work clothes, his skin brown and creased from smiling at my mother, his sinewy arms glistening. But I’m glad he’s not here to see what’s happening to incarcerated people today. It would break his heart.

* “In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” – Elwood P. Dowd (from Harvey)

More information: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-covid-19-prison-jail-1018526/