Dad’s Two Sick Days

A few days ago, I mentioned my dad working 121 months without a sick day. For Father’s Day, I want to talk about his two sick days—and why they didn’t count.

Background: Dad didn’t finish school. These days, that might mean he didn’t get his degree or—quelle horreur!—maybe he didn’t even graduate high school. But in this story, that means: Dad dropped out at 13 and went to work, a decision that seemed natural at a time so many men were fighting in Europe or Japan.

He had two jobs his entire life. For the first 35 years or so, he drove a forklift for a mattress maker in south Los Angeles. Benefits included an endless supply of 2x4 pine cutoffs brought home by the truck full and burned in the family fireplace, their black soot eventually leaving a dingy halo in the living room.

It was a union job. Decades later and between dementia fuge states, Dad talked once about he and his coworkers beating up scabs and driving them off the jobsite in a trunk before he was 18.

I have no idea if that was true. But it was the only time Dad talked about that job.

That company eventually went bankrupt; I came home from school one day to find Dad on the couch and out of work. That led to his second job, warehouse labor for a long-defunct clothing retailer called Miller’s Outpost.

He started as a temp and was quickly hired on; if you own plows, you recognize good mules.

It wasn’t complex or important work. But it needed to get done and he set about doing it. I was a self-absorbed teen—all I knew was Dad had a job, there was food in the fridge and we’d occasionally go to Miller’s Outpost for new clothes on the cheap.

He’d been doing that not-complex, not-important work for about two years when I came home one day to find Dad in the living room, home before dark.

That wasn’t right. It was, in fact, unprecedented.

With a fixed smile that even my clueless teenage self knew was fake, he announced, “I quit!” and then turned the TV on to watch Hee Haw. Junior Samples and the gang had cornball jokes to tell, but no further enlightenment came from Dad that night. Or the next day.

But on the third day? He rose (yes, Christ-like—even as a dumb teen, I could catch a metaphor when it smacked me with a cutoff 2x4) and went to work. He worked there for almost 10 more years, never missing a day after that. And management? They didn’t count his absence for the day and a half he was home.

It took a few years to get the full story, but here’s what happened: Dad was a great employee—reliable, mature and calm in an environment full of young and immature men, and unafraid to work hard. So of course, they wanted to give him more responsibility.

And of course, he couldn’t read.

Faced with a few sheets of daily paperwork, Dad didn’t know what to do. He got scared and walked off the job.

I still don’t know whether management figured it out or my Mom reached out to them; all I know is that Dad got a call: Come back. You can have your old job. Let’s just forget about all this.

And so, Dad went back to work. And never stopped until he retired.

I avoid the “My Dad’s the greatest! Thanks, Dad!” stuff. By nurture or nature, I don’t like schmaltz—or, I guess more accurately, I don’t like it in public. (I’m more than capable of being a 12-year-old drama queen in my own head.)

So I don’t know if Dad was the greatest. But I’ll say this: That can’t have been the first time he was scared. And in 89 years, it was the only time I saw the fear.

Maybe that’s the constant, right? The fear. He can’t have been the only one carrying it. Maybe it comes with all fatherhood, an occasional visitor or constant companion. And maybe I can’t fully wrap my head around it because I’ve never been a father myself.

But if I can’t understand it, I can at least recognize it, honor it and (yeah, some days) mourn that I won’t experience it.

Happy Father’s Day.

Greg W. Brooks. First published on Facebook, June 18, 2023.