Saturday morning, I got up at five, put on my gloves out of habit, drove down to that loading dock, and went to work.
Nobody asked me to and nobody paid me. I was not on that property as an employee, and I want that said plain, because a fellow from corporate got very interested in it later.
Trucks were backed down the frontage road at ten past seven. Mrs. Tate was fourth in line. She is seventy-nine and she takes twelve sacks, stacked left, because her shoulder has been wrong since a horse rolled on her in 1988.
There were two boys inside working registers and one cart out on the whole lot.
So I loaded. Until about two in the afternoon, and I ran out of gloves, and Dub Hollis bought me a pair off the rack and would not let me pay him.
Men kept trying to hand me money and I kept not taking it, so by noon they had quit asking and started putting it in the coffee can on my tailgate. Six hundred forty dollars and change. I did not count it until I got home, and then I sat in my truck in my own driveway a while.
Around eleven a woman I did not know pulled up with a border collie in the bed and asked if I was the biscuit man.
Here is the part I have not told many people.
The tin in my coat has been there since 2003 and my wife started it. Ruth Ann worked the register at that store for nine years and she filled the tin every Sunday night, and she died in 2009, and I have filled it myself every Sunday night since.
It is a King Edward cigar tin and there is a strip of masking tape inside the lid, and she wrote on it the week she started, and it is still legible if you know it is there.
Verl. Biscuits are for the dogs, not the men. But a fellow who has driven forty miles and does not have the money he thought he had will let you do something for his dog before he will let you do a thing for him. Start there.
Eleven of those ranchers wrote to Denver. Not a petition. Eleven separate letters, which Dub told me later was on purpose, because a petition looks like a mob and eleven letters looks like a market.
The position came back in April. Every store in the region, and it has a name now, customer load-out associate, and it starts a dollar ten better than I was making.
I did not take it. I am sixty-six and my back is what it is.
What I do now is Tuesdays and Saturdays at the dock, four hours, on the clock, training the young ones. Two of them, and I have taught them both which trucks get stacked left and why you never let a rancher see you struggle with a sack.
The director is in Fort Collins. He never apologized and I do not need one.
Both those boys carry a tin now. That was not my idea. They asked me where I got mine and I told them, and I did not get all the way through it.