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the ear plugs, a decision he was glad of when the machines started up and the graveyard shift went to work. The din was deafening, as Connie had warned him.

      “Come with me, Richard,” Ben yelled above the noise. “I’ll show you your station for the time being. Do you have gloves?”

      Richard nodded and pointed at his pocket.

      “Here’s a hat. You wear it,” Ben yelled close to Richard’s left ear, “to protect the product and keep it sanitary!” Ben handed Richard a round, white paper hat.

      Ben next grabbed Richard’s left arm and towed him toward a machine where a man pushed silver cans of peas without lids onto a large revolving circular plate from metal trays that contained a dozen cans.

      “Jack, Richard will take over. You go back to your usual station.”

      “Glad to!” Jack gave Richard a look of pity and sauntered away.

      “Now Richard, keep feeding the cans in these trays onto the turntable,” Ben said loudly. “Make sure they move smoothly onto the conveyor. When the stack of trays gets low, someone will bring more. And make sure every can is full.”

      “What do I do if the can isn’t full?” yelled Richard at the retreating shift leader. But Ben continued to walk, apparently not hearing Richard’s question.

      9

      Friendship With Tony

      When lunch break came Richard was surprised that time had passed so quickly. Maybe that’s one advantage of having a repetitive job, you lose track of the time. He got his sack lunch from the car and slumped down wearily on a bench at an unoccupied table. He was surveying the contents of his sack when he suddenly became aware of someone standing behind him.

      “Alright if I join you?” a voice asked.

      Richard turned to see a man who had the appearance of an old hippie. He sported a short, scraggly beard and a long pony tail of gray hair; he wore a white, tie-dyed dress shirt tucked into faded jeans, held up by a wide belt with a large oval buckle bearing the peace symbol in brass.

      “Sure! Glad to have the company.”

      “Food goes best with conversation,” responded the stranger, as he seated himself across the table from Richard. “Don’t you think that’s so?”

      “Yes, I . . .”

      “I’m glad you agree, friend.” The stranger nodded his approval. “We human beings were designed to herd together and help each other. But we’re more and more separate. Say, my friends call me Tony. What’s your handle?”

      “Oh, my name? Richard.”

      Tony pulled an apple out of his sack and took a bite. “You know, Bob Dylan was right on. His songs warned us where this society was goin’. And it’s finally got there!”

      “Where’s that?”

      “Where? Right under the thumb of the establishment, that’s where, man! See that camera up there on the wall? That’s ‘Big Brother” with his eye on you.”

      “You mentioned Bob Dylan. I especially like his song Tambourine Man. I sometimes play it on my guitar.”

      “Right on! You dig Dylan, heh?”

      “I taped some of his songs from the radio several years ago for my collection of 60s songs. I think he represents that era better than any other singer of that time.”

      “Yeah, that’s it, man! I heard him sing in concert a couple of times. He and Joan Baez caught the soul of our movement in their songs.”

      “What was the ‘movement’ as you saw it? I mean what was your goal?”

      “In one word, love,” said Tony, as he stared into space as if seeing something long past. “Me and my friends would get together on warm summer evenings, and talk about love. We’d sit in the shadows of the Douglas firs. And we’d talk about the beauty of love; how we could keep it alive.”

      “Alive?” Richard chewed a bite of sandwich thoughtfully. “I don’t understand.”

      “You see, Richard, we knew it was dyin’. Lookin’ back, we didn’t know how right we were.” Tony dropped his head sadly and munched on a piece of celery.

      After drinking juice from his small thermos, Richard asked, “When did you and your friends start seeing that love was dying?”

      “At Berkeley. There was this huge rally on the campus against the Vietnam War. That was 1966. We could see that the killin’ in Nam was just a symptom of the problem. We could see that the establishment was to blame.”

      “The ‘establishment’? When I came across that term in my reading, I could never really figure out what you people meant.”

      Tony smiled indulgently. “You know, that artificial machine we call society—that’s the establishment. It tries to stamp everybody with the same face and outlook. Every soul is expected to spend 24 hours a day on a capitalistic hunt for the almighty dollar. Our movement centered on love, not bank accounts and prized possessions.”

      “I don’t see how you separated yourself from society since, as you say, it had stamped its patterns on you. Didn’t the establishment create the love you saw dying, in the first place?”

      “Oh man. You’re too young to know what I’m sayin’. You see Richard, nowadays, we hear about crime, greed, pollution . . . and we don’t think anything about it, ‘cause we’re desensitized.”

      “In other words, we’ve come to see it as normal.”

      “Yeah, we see what’s goin’ on as ‘normal’. Funny thing about the word normal. Norm gives a group a standard how to act. Whatever the group accepts as normal is normal, or whatever it sees as true is true. It doesn’t matter how bad it really is, either. So, we can’t assume that most people, even the majority, know what’s true. If we can’t have the truth from our society, we have to go out and find it for ourselves.”

      “Well how do we do that?”

      “I’m glad you asked me that,” smiled Tony. “You find truth in the natural, and in the spontaneous.”

      “I think I know what you’re getting at.”

      “That’s just it,” said the other. “You don’t have to ‘think’ about it. Just feel it.”

      “Feel what?”

      “Richard, don’t you get it? You don’t analyze a thing like love. You let it come to you. You’re tryin’ to grasp what I’m sayin’, but you’re tryin’ too hard. And that’s the influence of the establishment. It creates a regulated, controlled environment that dictates how to act and what to think. It forces you to conform. ‘One size fits all’ reads the label.”

      “Well there are certainly a lot of people who let others think for them,” said Richard, still not sure if this was what Tony was getting at. Suddenly glancing at his watch, Richard let Tony know that the lunch period was nearly over.

      “See what I mean? The clock says jump and everyone goes to their pigeonhole.” Tony spoke with the tone of one whose point had been proven.

      As the two men parted company to head for their respective stations, they both expressed interest in talking further about the social revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s. Tony saw the revolution as a continuing objective in society, one not fully realized; whereas Richard saw it as a dissipating influence in society, losing ground to traditional forces. In college he had written research papers on it, which he believed, made him something of an authority.

      The days seemed to pass faster and faster with little change in routine for Richard. What did change was his growing respect for his fellow workers. The men and women who worked the graveyard shift, he came to realize, were industrious, good humored, and helpful to one another. They showed knowledge and skill

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