After the Deindustrialization of America, My Father Enters Television Repair

My hands hold, my father’s older the wires– picture rolls once, then steadies… an English castle! A voice-over drones about Edward I, who, to subdue the Welsh, built castles. Some sixty years, dozens of engineers, the masses conscripted from the villages. My father moves on to a Zenith with a bad tuner. TVs interest him, not English with their damp, historical programming. * * * Here there were Indians, mound builders. Here, an English fort, a few farmers. And here the industrialist settled his ass, John Ford on the river dredging sand for making glass. Plate glass. (Why should America buy from Europe?) Some half dozen years, German engineers, and hundreds of Slavic peasants. Grandfather sat on his samovar warming himself and making excuses, but finally, he set off. Got a room, became a shoveler. Got a wife, a company house. Ford City: a valley filling with properties. No one got along– Not Labor and Capital, not Germans and Slavs, not husband and wives, for that matter. * * * Edward’s castles were ruins by the fifteenth century. Not from Welsh armies, but the rise of the middle class. The towns around a castle thrived: tailors, smithies, cobblers, coopers. Drawing in the Welsh peasants. And what with intermarriage and the rise of capitalism… a castle grew obsolescent. I turn off the set. My father hunts cigarettes at the Kwik-Mart on the corner. Overhead, my mother’s footsteps, the tonk of bottles, the scraping of plates. * * * During Eisenhower’s reign my grandfather retired and mowed his lawn until I took over. He primed the filter, set the choke, then we took turns pulling till the sputtering engine caught. (“Somanabitch,” he spit) And watched me as I mowed back and forth for two dollars. Once in the garage he showed me a scythe. He mowed hay in the old country, and the women would follow, raking it in windrows. * * * The factories today are mostly closed down, or full of robots or far off in Asia. Ford City lives through the mail: compensation, a thin pension, and, of course, Social Security. I always drive along the factory, windows rolled down; I want my kids in the back seat to see. Seven or eight, probably pensioners, congregate on the corner, each man dressed quite alike: Sears jacket, cigarette, salt-and-pepper hair. “Honk the horn,” my oldest begs. He waves and waves zealously until a man turns–a man with my face, but full of sweetness now, silence and clarity.