A Good Day's Work (13 page)

It's light by now. Spring Garden Road, one of Halifax's main drags, looks the same as any other major thoroughfare in a twenty-first-century Canadian city: a young Asian woman in a tailored suit clicks by on high heels; a woman in an Islamic head scarf makes change at the newsstand; a twentyish guy—trim as a nail, olive skin—fiddles with his iPod as he steps past the panhandler sitting on the sidewalk. If Bill turned in a circle, he would see a Turkish restaurant, a brew pub, a martini bar, a cell phone store and a bookstore with Malcolm Gladwell's
latest thumb-sucker in the window. A film company with an Academy Award under its belt is headquartered not far from where Bill rummages. Within a couple of blocks of his van—which has a handwritten cardboard “Farmer's delivery van” sign in the window—a hot yoga class is under way and someone is buying a single espresso that costs as much as this book.

Years ago I lived in a well-off section of Toronto. Occasionally I would see a middle-aged man in Old Country peasant clothes walking through the neighbourhood, ringing a bell and pulling a small cart. He was Italian, I was told by one of his countrymen. A knife sharpener now living with a daughter, perhaps; a man who longed to be back in his old Sicilian village practising a trade passed down from generation to generation.

The scene was totally incongruous, like he had stepped through a crack in time. And I get a bit of the same feeling watching Bill, still doing a job that hasn't essentially changed in 150 years. Civilians pay no heed as they walk near him. If they knew he was a milkman, passersby might stop, rub their jaws, say “Really?” and smile at the very quaintness of the notion. Tom Cruise doesn't star in movies about men who wear ball caps, smell of bad milk and use the service entrance. Nevertheless, Bill and the kitchen help, cleaners, deliverymen and other nameless folk who work behind the scenes in the service industry allow our everyday lives to function with a semblance of order. Our ignorance of what they do shows how well they do it.

This responsibility digs furrows into Bill's brow. At 10:30 a.m. he's still running late. To make things worse, instead of printing bills, his printer voids them, wasting reams of paper. “There's not enough paper. Not even close,” he moans after
another botched attempt. “I don't know what I'm going to do. Why did I take my spare paper out of this van? Oh man, the paper I'm going through. I don't have time for this. Man oh man, what else can go wrong?” Soon he finds out. As he's on his knees filling a refrigerator in a mall convenience store, the owner leans over and tells him that he's completely out of milk at two other outlets he owns farther down Bill's route.

You can see the walls of the store narrow and feel Bill's pulse begin to pound louder. A year ago he lost the illusion of invincibility. One day Bill's face went numb, he suddenly started to drool and couldn't speak. His doctor said it sounded a lot like a stroke. He fit all of the criteria: early sixites, stressed, a few pounds overweight. Night work of any kind is bad for the health. Women who work the night shift have higher breast cancer rates. Night shift workers are at a higher risk of accidents, sleep disorders, bone fractures and digestive problems. Scientific evidence even shows that the disruption of the body's circadian rhythms can make a person's metabolism go haywire and lead to hormonal and metabolic changes that even increase risks for obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Bill's tests were inconclusive. Even so, he decided to do a better job looking after himself. On the dashboard sit a nice juicy apple and a heart-smart bottle of water, plus the alarm clock he uses when he has time for a short nap in the cab. “I know I can't do this forever,” he says. “But I'll keep doing it until I can't do it no more. I've been paying into RRSPs for years. If I have to stop, I'll be okay.”

We shall see. Bill likes to fish for trout at a lake near a backwoods cabin he owns with a friend. He plays golf. Once he was a good enough ten-pin bowler to compete in tournaments in
the United States. For now, all the fun has to wait until retirement. After his twelve-hour days Bill heads home and has a bite in the bungalow he shares with Blanche and their two grown-up children. He watches a little television—“I have no interest in sports, news or politics, but man I love karate and kung fu movies”—and is in bed by six. Six hours later he rises and does it all again. On the weekend mostly he rests.

It took chronic back trouble and two knees badly in need of replacement to get Blanche to quit working. Now Bill is searching for his own exit strategy. They're debt-free; if they watch it, their savings should see them right through old age. He just has to find someone willing to take on his route. Because these people need their milk. For nearly five decades that duty to his customers was something for Bill to hang the entire workday on. His daughter, a sculptor and children's centre worker, and his son, who works in retail, have eschewed the family tradition. He can't just quit.

Bill is joking when he asks me if I'd ever be interested in giving the job a shot. Too physically hard. Too many hours. Too much of the wrong kind of stress for someone who gets all flustered if an editor sends an email asking where the heck the story is. The end may be drawing nigh for jobs like this. But what finally wipes the garden-variety milkman off the face of the earth won't just be the vagaries of economics; it will be because people willing or able to do the job no longer walk the earth.

I ponder the apparent inevitability of this as we plunge deeper into Halifax's business district. We stop at a caterer's, a steak house, a hotel dining room, a tourist shop and a faux Italian trattoria, where Bill moves like a ghost past all but his
service-economy kin. By now, his mood has lightened: the invoice machine is working again; he's bummed some printer paper off a passing Farmer's van. The back of this truck is finally clearing out, making it easier for him to manoeuvre around. Somehow those lost minutes are being found. “I'm happy, oh I'm happy again,” he sings before breaking into an “O Canada” expansive enough for hockey night at Maple Leaf Gardens.

There are still all those empty fridges to deal with farther down the line. But you must take the good with the bad in this kind of work. Bill moves milk. It's not finding a cure for cancer. Nor is it ever likely to be on some magazine editor's list of “jobs of the future.” A pessimist might see him as the last of a dying breed. Bill says, “Not yet, buddy. Not yet.” Then he punches the van into drive and clatters through the weak afternoon sunlight. The bleary-eyed guy who brings the farm to the citified kitchen table. The beat-up working man who feeds my family. Nobody is ever going to erect a statue to a man like Bill Bennett. But I have to tell you: after all this time it's a pleasure to finally make his acquaintance.

CHAPTER
FOUR

WATERING HOLE FOR DREAMERS

B
Y
the time he heads south on Broadway Avenue, Stu Cousins, a man of ritual, has walked the dogs. He has breakfasted. He has sat in the swivel chair before his desktop computer. There—on his favourite bookmarked websites—he has checked the buzz on the new releases in the long list of musical genres that he favours. If he likes what he reads, Stu points, clicks and listens to a couple of cuts. If he likes what he hears, he places an order. Either way he brews a chai tea in his travel mug. Then, on gimpy knees, with music playing in his head, he exits right out of the front door of the eight-hundred-square-foot house that he shares with his wife, Dayna Lozowchuk, their four hound dogs and their six thousand records and CDs.

Stu veers left at the corner of Broadway, which even in late morning has more diverse life forms than you'd expect to see on a commercial drag in a former temperance colony. Plying his migratory route, he waves, says hi, occasionally takes in a little neighbourhood gossip. For seven blocks he walks at the nice clip of a man who spent a couple of decades jumping when clients said jump but who now has the luxury of acting in a manner that acknowledges that things that really matter don't have to be rushed. At a point where the Saskatoon traffic convenes coughing and wheezing from three different directions he stops.

Stu reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a key. It's nearly eleven. But, as he notes, “vinyl collectors aren't known for being early risers.” So, no one is standing there waiting at 628-B Broadway as he unlocks the glass door with the metal security grate. From the entranceway the fifty-three-year-old pulls a sign adorned with Bobby Dylan's mug onto the sidewalk, proclaiming to the world that the Vinyl Diner is open for business. Then, in brittle prairie air, he stands tall, a touch stooped and a bit on the angular side. An empathetic face dominated by dark-rimmed glasses, straight lips and a nose that tapers. From a couple of pictures rounded up on the web I know that Stu, at some point, wore his brown hair short and blunt. Today it's shaggy and swept eastward, more front man for The Sheepdogs than account manager for Saatchi and Saatchi, which is what, in fact, he used to be.

Stu looks around. He observes. For a couple of seconds he takes in the traffic speeding by toward the airport that commemorates Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, and the football stadium named after hockey immortal Gordie Howe.
He watches cars and trucks head toward the bridge across the South Saskatchewan River to the booming downtown where the mining companies that give the provincial economy its snap are headquartered, and out toward the highway leading west to the ghost towns left when the rail lines stopped running. Then, as he has done Monday through Friday for the past sixteen years, he heads up the stairs.

Past posters for big-name acts and artists I've never heard of, he walks over skanky carpet where the smell of pipe tobacco mysteriously lingers. The higher he climbs, the more the vintages of the artists on the walls recede in time. Until, at the second-floor entrance to the shop, a man who bought his first LP at a Woolco department store at age thirteen faces the covers of albums that hit the stores before he could ride a bicycle:
The Times They Are a-Changin', Abbey Road, Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!), Surrealistic Pillow
.