I Couldn’t Park the Van Close to the Factory
I couldn’t park the van close to the factory
so I pulled up to the door, let all passengers
out and drove
three screened-in parking lots away
to a desolate place, parked the car in
between weeds that had grown up
along the cracks, and pushed the lock button
on the remote as I walked back to the factory
around chain-link fences, through
unlocked gates and on sidewalks between the
parking lots and the lower-middle class neighborhood
of small bungalows built on cement slabs.
Chain-link fences surrounded the backyards
silent of barking because there were no dogs there.
Nothing moved or made noise except me.
I wound my way through all the vehicles crowded together
as I neared the red bricked factory. If business failed,
it could be made into fashionable condos,
I thought, if it had been closer in to the city
center of whatever city the red bricked factory
was located near. Before entering, I stood and
looked at the windows. They would need
to have balconies attached, because I know my wife and
I would feel trapped inside with the
only escape to take the elevator to the first floor
and walk down the hall to the lobby and out the front door
to stand outside and breathe in the fresh air and
feel the summer, fall, winter, spring princess caress our faces
with a zephyr, tornado or hurricane. Walking inside, I was
greeted by my two grown kids, another person who apparently
I knew well and several others of the group that had
been staying at a less than posh accommodation not far
from the factory but closer in to city center, I think.
It must have been a retreat of some sort we
were on but we were here because we had business to do, too.
The factory floor was crowded. It was cold enough
outside to be Black Friday which would account
for my having to park so far away from the front door.
I didn’t see any police. There were long lines of shoppers
waiting to talk to someone about the only thing available.
Apparently, it was a one item company – woodcuts.
Some of our group wandered the aisles moving from the
waiting lines to areas where the giant woodcuts would
be dipped in the voluminous ink vats and pressed against the
massive presses. None of the ink splattered into the aisles.
It was a clean operation. Finally, the person I knew well and I,
and I think maybe my kids, moved to the front. The redheaded, female
clerk with a 50’s kind of permanent and a very ruddy round face
wasn’t helpful at all. She was impatient and bossy. We were all getting
frustrated. My children left to wander the aisles. The person I knew
well had with him a woodcut cut into the rounded
end of a broomstick handle and one other piece which
was nice, as I recall, except I can’t remember enough about it
to explain it in any detail. I didn’t have anything with me. I saw
the short, bald-headed, kindly printmaker I knew from sometime before.
He was standing as if waiting to receive the next in line, but it seemed he was there
just for me and the person I knew well.
I told the red-head I wanted to see the bald-head, so the person
I knew well and I turned walked up to the printmaker who was waiting
for us with a kindly smile. We greeted each other and I introduced
the person I knew well. The printmaker said things were going well and
presented a very large print. He unfolded it on a nearby table, but
the table wasn’t big enough to hold it.
It was an abstract woodcut by my late wife, but instead of being ink on paper
It was a wood woodcut, hinged in places so it could be folded. It looked
a bit like laminate instead of wood. I don’t ever remember having seen it.
The person I knew well presented his broom handle and the
piece I can’t describe to the kindly printmaker. We went to
his station, he dipped the broom handle into the ink, pressed
the woodcut onto a sheet of paper. The rounded head of the
broom handle made a circular indentation in the paper.
That looked nice. I could imagine it dried, numbered and framed.
Before he did the piece I can’t remember well enough
to describe, the kindly printmaker, who was standing on a
stool, turned like a pirouette toward us and told us that
the work would be very expensive. How expensive we asked.
Very expensive, like thousands and thousands of dollars expensive.
The rest of our group was getting antsy and bored and wanted
to go back to the not very elaborate retreat center closer
to the city center to get their things together before going home.
I headed back to the van, passed all the cars still
jammed in the parking lot, through the gates, along the sidewalk
with the bungalows with the silent, vacant backyards. I looked for absent dogs.
In the distance I could see the van in the otherwise abandoned lot. When I squinted,
I could see the weeds surrounding the van. I was still separated from
the van by a chain-link fence and I had a hard
time seeing the unlocked gate. Was I supposed to have gone
around this fence? I sat on a chair right there. My MacBook Pro
was in my lap, opened, on and connected to the internet. The remote
was too remote to work and I had to use openthedoor.com, but I
couldn’t find the site. The person who I knew really well stood next to me.
He told me that a former parishioner of mine whom I didn’t even
know was on the retreat was angry about the whole thing and
decided that he was going to walk to the retreat center
by himself. I was worried because he had recently survived
a brain aneurism and was very fragile.
Anxious, I went back to the computer, but, accidentally,
I wound up scrolling down through movies to rent. I tried to get out
but each time I clicked an icon I rented another movie.
The last I remember, I owed $3,447.
bobdahl 