Blue Sky Dream (34 page)

The writer has discovered something delicious. “At Our Lady of Peace, souls seeking solace may have their prayer wishes recorded on microfilm and perpetually stored inside Mary’s giant heart, much the way tax records are stored at some county office buildings.… So far, more than 100,000 prayer requests have been loaded, with room for millions more.”

The writer has made a bit of room for the perspective of Sister Mary Jean, who is secretary of the shrine. “This is a time of great tribulation. People release sorrow just by putting it on paper. They know God’s mother understands.”

The writer has summed up in the voice I instinctively recognize and warm to, the voice of the gremlin who whispers in my ear and will not be brushed away. “The church folks say Mary will receive your message,” ends the column, “even if heaven is a place without microfiche machines.”

Attached to the article is a note in that familiar, small script of my mother’s. “I thought of you,” she has written.

ELEVEN
 ORGANIZATION MAN RETIRES
 

M
y father and I are in the sky again. We have not been here together since a day twenty years before when he had placed me with him under the bubble canopy of a sailplane and, to show me what could be done with no power other than a thermal updraft, had sent the two of us somersaulting over the soft green ridges east of Silicon Valley. Shortly after that day, my father stopped flying. He devoted more time to the family, or else, whenever he wanted to be alone, he spent hours in the garage repairing television sets and stereos for friends and neighbors. Those fix-it jobs held a double attraction, he liked to say. They were problems he could solve, and they afforded a chance to make someone happy. But such satisfaction, I sense, could not match his enjoyment now as he pokes the nose of the Cessna through a stratum of cloud above the Santa Cruz range. “As I used to tell the other guys in the squadron,” I hear in my headset, “God must have intended man to fly. Why else would He have made the tops of
clouds so much prettier than the bottoms?” I smile in surprise at my father’s uncharacteristic sensualism, his even rarer talk of God. He is smiling, too. “They all laughed at my little attempts at philosophy.”

It was shortly after his early retirement from Lockheed Missiles and Space Company that my father took up flying again. He was only sixty years old, but after thirty-two years with the company his salary and benefits had grown so that the downsizers of Lockheed reckoned it would be cheaper to pay him to quit. They offered him and several thousand others a deal sweet enough that to say no meant you either needed the extra bit of pay that staying on would provide, or else you needed to prove you were still needed by Lockheed and the working world. My father did not place himself in either category. Besides, he guessed (accurately) that the deal would soon evaporate, and people like him would be shoved out the door without the cushy incentives.

So my father was lucky at the end, as he had been lucky (he was saying often, now that he was retired) his entire life. Lately, he would lay it all to “flukes of chance”: He was a teenaged “airhead” handed a Navy scholarship; the Navy “happened” to see in him a jet pilot; “by plain dumb luck” he joined aerospace at the dawn of its Cold War heyday; he had “the great good fortune” to meet my mother; they arrived in an unspoiled California where “the great joys of his life,” we four children, “flourished”; certain investments “worked out”; when his employer no longer wanted him, the news came at the “best possible moment”; and now, upon entering retirement “with health and finances intact,” he has found “the perfect thing” to fill his time, a membership in the Seagulls, a group of men who share ownership of a Beechcraft Bonanza and this Cessna 172 he is piloting today.

“Well, nothing pressing on
my
calendar,” he says as we drop into more undulating whiteness, emerging to find the Monterey Bay silver-blue and calm before us. “How about we land in Watsonville for a Mexican lunch, do a little whale watching on the way home? Sound like a plan?”

A
mong the unlucky was Gary Kolegraff. Hired out of college by Lockheed to be a cost analyst on a satellite program, he was laid off ten years later at the end of 1993. He had never married. At thirty-five years of age, he was renting, together with a government geologist and another Lockheed worker facing layoff, a tract home not ten minutes from that of my parents. Sure, fine, he said when I called a few months into his joblessness. Come on over, and I’ll tell you what it’s like for me. His chipperness at the door, his face unlined by worry, made me worry for him. There was a shell-shocked artlessness about Gary Kolegraff, the smile of one who hasn’t quite comprehended an insult thrown his way.

“When they let you go, it’s amazing the cycle you go through. Initial euphoria: ‘I’m free!’ You’re out in the sun playing. But then, I didn’t realize what I’d left until it was gone. The paycheck was gone.”

This house he had lived in for five years, a prototypical rancher of the 1960s, was never meant to be inhabited by single men with futures clouding over. The bright functionality of the original vision was masked by old green shag on the floors, Formula One posters on walls, fried bacon smell in the air. The living room couch faced a pile of stereo gear tangled in cables and extension cords. In the backyard, neglect had made everything brown. In the kitchen, a magnet in the shape of Lockheed’s supersonic SR 71 Blackbird held a Mark McGuire baseball card to the refrigerator door.

“I saw myself as buying a house, settling down, getting married. I guess I saw myself a lot like my dad.”

I had found Gary Kolegraff on a list of the unlucky (exconvicts and aerospace workers, mostly) kept in a three-ring binder at the job search center at Queen of Apostles church. When I saw the Kolegraff name I recognized it. Though I didn’t know Gary, who was a few years behind me in Catholic high school, I knew the Kolegraffs were fellow tribe members in the
parish. I was not surprised when Gary told me his father had been at Westinghouse for thirty years, a draftsman on nuclear missile launcher designs and other military projects.

“I’m the kind of person who really likes security, routine. Put in your eight-hour shift and come home and have fun. But now it looks like that’s changed. I’m looking for any job I can find.”

A mere three months’ worth of unemployment checks remained, and still Gary Kolegraff was spending a lot of time on the grounds of Lockheed, still there with unlucky others at the Career Transition Center, a place to print out résumés and make calls and wait for the calls to be returned.

“They try to make it happy. They have coffee and everything, but it’s not a happy place. Looking around at everyone else just reminds you of all the competition for jobs. It’s weird, though. Just showing up at the career center, sitting in a module with a desk and a phone, you feel like you’re still going to work.”

He was hearing that defense workers had the reputation of being out of touch and even lazy, that Lockheed was ridiculed as a training ground in today’s job market. He was imagining the word “Lockheed” read and rejected by those electronic eyes the bigger companies use, the machines that scan résumés before any human being ever sees one. He had lost count of the hundreds of résumés mailed, calls made. All had yielded no more than a couple of dead-end interviews, and chipperness was becoming ever more exhausting to maintain.

“My voice has changed from the stress, a tightening in the voice box. That is showing up in my interviews. It’s almost like a spiral situation. I know it will have to change, something will come up. But it’s something I have to deal with.”

Gary Kolegraff was beginning to think, “I have to almost redefine myself.” He was hoping he could learn to be what the people at the Career Transition Center said he needed to be, a “networker.” He was hoping he would not have to go about redefining himself while living, again, in the house where he spent his childhood.

“If I can’t find a job, I’m considering moving home. That’s a reality I have to consider.”

Gary wanted my phone number. “If I’m feeling blue or something, can I give you a call?” he asked, and I said sure, fine.

W
hat a frightening specter for a blue sky mother and father: the boy at thirty-five hanging up his gray slacks and striped ties in the bedroom where they used to tuck him in at night. Had the mother and father been like Gary’s, had they been gratified to see their child begin a career in his father’s image, what would they now say to the “boomerang” returned to their breakfast table? What could they say, except that a parent’s duty is to prepare the child to make one’s way in the world of work, that they had tried in good faith, but had been mistaken in their teachings?

The lessons, very different, my father taught me about the world of work he conveyed in stories told in the afternoon heat after a lawn mowing, or when we two were alone in the car, or times, after dinner, when he and I lingered at the table. Any of the luck he speaks about today was not to be found in those tales, which I knew were crafted to warn me
away
from a Lockheed career or anything like one.

If, for example, I were to ask him about his start in aerospace, he would tell me about the J79 jet engine of General Electric, and how one of his first assignments was to write a report every morning about the testing progress of the J79, and how there developed a problem with the fuel control at idle speed, and how a device called the Idle Instability Fix was designed and tested to solve the problem. He would say that the Idle Instability Fix had not worked, and so he had tried to win the smiles of his new peers with a note of comradely humor, adding to his morning J79 report the observation that the failed Idle Instability Fix was “Some fix!” He would say he sent out the stack of morning reports only to find, not long after, the angry face of a superior hovering over his desk, informing him that he would now rewrite
the report with his two-word editorial gone from the page, that all the originals would be recalled and destroyed, that he was never, ever again to stray from the facts, only the facts, in his morning reports.

He would place his dismayed self, then, in my mind’s eye. “We all were at plastic topped, gray steel desks, all of them identical, lined up in columns, mine just a desk in a matrix of desks. If you were busy, it was known. If you were not, it was known. Your escape was to go to the john or the candy machine. We all wore white shirt and suit and tie; we wore our suit jackets all day because we were
professionals
. No self-motivated bright and curious fellow or woman would survive that way today. You had to be,” he would say to me, “sort of conditioned.”

This story contains most of the cautionary elements of his others, the theme of a man’s will bent to the needs of the organization by his superiors’ tactics of punishment and reward, the subtheme of the man lacking the awareness (early on) or the résumé (later on) to opt out. “There were strong messages there for me I probably should have heeded” is how my father ends the story of the J79 morning report.

My father began telling such stories to me when I was in high school and pondering how I might make my way in the world of work. He tells me new ones, now and again, even now. I like to think that I have taken his lessons to heart and patterned my life accordingly. I have never been in any job more than a few years. In the one large organization that briefly employed me, the Hearst Corporation, I behaved with a brittle suspicion of higher management. Otherwise I have joined modest enterprises, several of them nonprofit, which offered low pay and little security in exchange for a slack leash on my time and energy. I am today a freelancer in an economy that is said to have less and less need for anyone who is not a freelancer. My siblings have, as well, all in their own ways, reflected my father’s lessons: my sister who practiced physical therapy in small clinics here and there before taking time out to be at home with her two young sons; my brother, who is married with two daughters, and is a self-employed eye
surgeon after buying into a private practice; my younger sister, who, having earned a master’s degree in Spanish, teaches various languages on contract to universities in Spain, France, and Southern California, deciding which international boundary next to cross on the basis of what might prove the most fun and lucrative.