Saturday morning I was up at four anyway, old habit. I put on my good flannel, walked down 26th one more time, and there were already thirty vehicles in the empty lot across from the store.
Plow trucks. Two ambulances off shift. The paper carriers. A folding table with two coffee urns and a woman I have known since 1981 pouring.
Nobody called me. Dwayne Pekala at the street department put it out on the radio Thursday and it went the way things go in this town.
By five thirty there were better than a hundred people standing in a gravel lot in the cold drinking coffee out of styrofoam.
Marge Kowalski came. Eighty-one, her son drove her. She brought a thing I did not know existed, a laminated card out of the cab of her nephew’s plow truck.
The city puts one in every truck. Routes on the front, salt tables on the back. Down at the bottom, in the same print as everything else, there is a line that has been on that card since 2009 and is on the one they printed last October.
Route breaks: Gas-N-Go, 26th and Cascade. Ask for Stan. He opens at four whether we are out or not. Nobody runs a full route without stopping there once. This is not a suggestion.
Twenty-nine winters. I never got paid for opening early and never thought to ask, and it turns out I have been written into the city’s snow operations since before the boy who fired me could drive.
Dev came out of the store around six. He had a hundred people across the street from his grand re-opening and a radio van pulling in behind him.
My daughter still argues with me about what I did next.
I told everybody to go buy a hot dog.
I meant it. I said the man paid for a bounce house and a radio remote and there is no sense in a kid missing a bounce house over me. About seventy people crossed 26th and spent money in that store, and the line was out the door by ten.
Dev found me in the lot at eight. He did not know about the card. He did not know the plows came at four. He bought that store off a broker in Cleveland and nobody told him a thing, which is not an excuse and I told him so, and he took it.
He asked me to come back. I said no.
The street department hired me in November. Three mornings a week I run the crew room at the garage on Bacon Street, four to nine, coffee and eggs and a radio, and they pay me an actual wage for what I did free for twenty-nine years. The drivers still call it going to Stan’s.
Dev came out there in January with two coffees and sat in my crew room an hour. He has hired two people over sixty since. I hear he is all right now.
A young man looked at a pair of shaking hands and saw a liability. The city of Erie had those same hands printed on a card in every plow truck in the fleet, and had for sixteen years, and nobody ever thought to mention it to me either.