Change is Inevitable II [In re: United States Gypsum Company]
I went to the 6pm Mass Young Adult Mass at Saint Mary's with my parents, and sat up near the front with my mom and my dad. I really didn't say much to my parents. I happened to bump into them on the way to church as I rushed down Main Street, and with our coat collars up and wool hats pulled down near our ears, I abashedly asked my dad up what he was going to do. So we talked, and there was a lot of "I think, I feel, I'll figure" it out type of conversation going on. Finally, we happened upon the great granite and brick structure that is Saint Mary's, and felt obliged to walk in. When we got to the pew, my dad commented on my shirt: "Varitek" he said. Then my mom asked, with Filipino accent and all: "oh, why, honey, you're not cantoring tonight?" I kind of shrugged it off. It was the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the first reading, from Isaiah chapter 8, verse 23 or so.
Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness:
for there is no gloom where but now there was distress.
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
I let the reading sink in my head and the thoughts process the matrix of my mind.
Now there comes a time when you really do begin to worry about your parents. I don't know if it's part of the natural life cycle or what, but it seems like, in the midst of weddings and engagements and pregnancies, talk of the parents is the next in line hot topic among my friends and my junior associate co-workers; we're either tackling the fact that some day, our parents will get old and die, or we're avoiding the topic because we're too scared to confront the change and the love-anguish associated with the idea. I always thought I'd be long off from thinking about my parents in that way, and luckily, I think that's a far ways away still. But somewhere admidst the homily and the Nicene Creed during Mass, I started thinking about the United States Gypsum Plant at the end of Terminal Street in Charlestown. I really couldn't comprehend that USG was going to idle a good portion of the Boston plant come the end of March; that all these employees, who watched me and my siblings grow up, were being W.A.R.N.'d under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act; that, even though all of these people survived USG's Chapter 11 reorganization and crazy USG company picnics at Canobie Lake and even crazier times working just beneath the Tobin Bridge, in an instant, they were all suddenly being let down and let off. I'm sure, for some, this was like the miracle in the works waiting to happen. And I can assure you -- there will be many a commuter who will be happy when they don't have to drive over the Tobin Bridge through the steam from the USG Plant's steam stacks. But I, I felt like a piece of me -- even though I didn't work at USG (my sister, though, worked in the lab all through undergraduate and graduate school summers) -- was dying off. And I felt like, suddenly, I was worried about what my dad was going to do.
I'll always remember when I got into Notre Dame. It was my birthday in 1999, and since I had been feeling a bit nauseous at school, I dodged my friends after seventh period, called in sick to work, and just went home (I didn't know, at the time, that I ended up missing my own surprise 18th birthday party). I came home to find a thin letter from the ND Admissions office. And so, you know how the urban legend goes "if the letter's thin, there's no way you're in." Well, I eventually mustered up the courage to open the letter. The rest is pretty much history, but I did call my dad and hiked down to Terminal Street to the USG plant to show him the letter. And in lockstep Rudy style, I put on a green hard hat and walked through the USG plant with my dad. "Little Neal's going to Notre Dame" he'd announce proudly. And of course, all of the familiar, tired faces at USG lit up a bit -- whether congratulatory or a bit bitter -- and extended manly hands to shake my soft adolescent paw. I remember the way the fine dust from crushed gypsum rock felt with every shake; it dried the hands and crusted in the same way thin layers of overly diluted plaster crusts on the surface of a spackling spade. I recall the tears that were in my dad's eyes when he read the letter at the front entrance of the plant. And I'll always remember the thought I had standing there under the bright, orangish lights inside the factory: "thank you, USG, for helping our family pull through. And thank you, USG, for making sure I didn't end up throwing cement bags for the rest of my life."
As with any good post, I guess I don't know where this is heading. But what I do know is this: with the USG Plant idling along the shores of the Mystic River, another piece of middle America, industrial America as we know it in Greater Boston, will move into askew memories of an (industrial) time that once was. Another opportunity for some middle-class, blue-collar, working-class family to live on the hope of getting ahead -- much like the family I was born and raised from -- and subsist on at least a half decent living, will ride away on the waves of what is, to many, a vibrant and transforming economy. And with that, I'm left to wonder what else is left for the working-class folks of Greater Boston to do. I wonder, with pause, what my dad will do.
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