Higher Education had always been my aim but it seemed like an elusive dream. My aspirations to become a writer were finally realized when I registered at Columbia University for Comparative Literature. Unfortunately, adverse circumstances changed my direction. Three years later I moved to Los Angeles and opted for a different major to secure a stable income for my child.
I sailed through my junior year at the Business School of California State University with flying colors, and now, in my senior year, I was leaping through five courses per quarter, with special permission, to graduate early. Administrative hurdles about college credits obtained in Beirut and New York, puzzling the admittance committee, were finally resolved after explaining that my itinerant status was due to employment with the United Nations in different countries, and my desire for higher education was not just a whim.
Comfortably seated at my desk in a morning class, I was reviewing my assignment when somebody dumped his knapsack beside me, and sat with a thump. It sounded familiar, the thump of exhaustion after a stressful day. But it was a bit too early in the day.
“Hi,” I said, to acknowledge his presence, but really examining his unshaven, haggard, ghostly looks, while he pulled himself together, “You look dead-tired.”
“I’m exhausted,” he sighed. “I worked the graveyard shift.”
Was he joking because I said “dead-tired”? Or was he an apparition visiting the earth in search of clients? Yea, there are no repeat opportunities in this business.
My knees started shaking for sitting so close to death. For a split moment, I had the urge to move to another seat but the professor’s call for attention nailed me down, physically at least. No matter how hard I tried I could not focus on his lecture. The graveyard-shift worker puzzled me. If he’s a real person he must be desperate. I wonder if he sees ghosts sauntering around the cemetery while he’s working. Some students live a miserable life making enormous sacrifices to earn a diploma, but working the graveyard shift? Isn’t this a bit extreme? At this stage of education surely he could do better than digging graves all night unless pay rates were higher of course! Or maybe it suited his schedule.
I certainly was familiar with fatigue, not the garb the military wore but the strain of physical and mental exhaustion. My own path for education was sprinkled with dilemmas, like choosing attendance between finals versus my daughter’s surgery, dashing out daily to drop her off at her kindergarten and weaving through traffic jams with an old car to make it in time for class. I usually circled the congested parking lot three times before I could find a spot. The worst of it was climbing stairs to reach my classroom perched on top of a hill. Now, my routine seemed quasi-normal compared to this guy’s daily grips with dead bodies.
My imagination had taken wings again, ignoring the professor’s lecture on business management. The journalist in me was bubbling. What was it like working in a cemetery? Was he paid by the hour or was this a regular job with benefits, like securing a burial plot for free? Did they make serious errors like burying somebody in the wrong plot, or a dead person coming alive during the ceremony, or did they have incidents like one of the mourners experiencing a heart attack, or missing the funeral date, venue and such?
A zillion questions were invading me. I wanted to engage my classmate in conversation before he disappeared. If I didn’t ask the burning questions, I would die of curiosity. The business management session was over and I was still brooding. I perked when he stood up and leaned over to pick up his books.
I said, “Excuse me, sir, may I ask you a question?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“What made you choose to work in a graveyard? Time, convenience or – ?”
“What graveyard?”
“Didn’t you say you work in one?”
He paused for a moment, stared at me sheepishly and then started laughing hysterically, inviting some unwelcome attention. Where did I go wrong? Was it my accent? My looks? My audacity to question him?
“I don’t work in a graveyard,” he said. “I work nights. It’s called the graveyard shift!”
Oops! The patches in my English education were showing, and it wouldn’t be the last time either.
When I was recovering from the surgery that paralyzed my hands and arms, I took long walks in the country and visited a neighbor's farm. Old man Martin had fourteen children, was obese, and bent over from arthritis. All of his children graduated from the eighth grade Catholic school a mile away. As soon as they could, they left home because the old man worked them so hard. Tom, 18, was the head of the family of about eight left, including a girl with down syndrome, the 14th.
Tom was working at the local mobile home factory where I worked before I was paralyzed. That meant 12 hour days during the summer. He also did all of the milking of the cows and the farm work. He would stop work when I came by and we became friends. That summer, the old man had him building an addition to the barn, so he didn't have much time what with working in the factory, on the farm, building the barn extension, and, whenever asked, digging graves for the Catholic Church where he went to school. Still, he found time to take us in his father's 1952 2-door Ford to town or to the drive-in movies during the graveyard shift. I don't think he ever slept.
Three years later, Tom got his GED while in the Navy as the driver for the naval commander of Alameda Air Station in San Francisco. I was a student at Stanford, so we got together a couple of times. He married, had a successful career in auto parts, and had no children.
Ron