The Springsteen song talks about sports and the vagaries of youth; as I hit my middle aged stride squarely on I look back, not on my sporting accomplishments, because of course, I have none- but on the work I have done in my lifetime.

I remember, pretty clearly, a summer I worked in a lumberyard. Well, I worked there for more than a summer, in fact several years, but the summer after I graduated high school, I worked as a roustabout in a salvage lumberyard in Cedar Lake, Indiana.

The work was hot and hard. There were no light labor jobs. No puny kids ever applied. Boxcars of lumber would show up, we’d unload them, put them where they belonged, out of the weather, stacked neatly.. and the next day, we’d do the same thing over again. And always, the relentless streams of customers.

Slivers. I never had such slivers, in my brief life. I learned to piss on my hands to toughen the skin against them, to put a drop of oil on a sliver to make it swell and pop out. I learned to operate a chopsaw, a bandsaw, I became a better than average lift truck driver. I hustled wood and bricks and siding and trim and shingles and god forbid anyone ever saw you break stride. My colleagues were like me, young kids who knew everything, strong and more piss & vinegar than skill, but we could work. A hot summers day might see a truckload of fiberglass insulation, itchy and hot and requiring a hot and then cold shower to recover. A boxcar of sheetrock, the rest of the yard hands busy that day, I unloaded with one of the other guys.

A boxcar. Of sheetrock. In an 8 hour day.

We grabbed two sheets at a time, at first. then four. At the end of the day we were grabbing six sheets at a time and hauling them indoors to stand them on end in banks of fifty. We filled the end of a building with 3/8″ drywall, and the boxcar stood empty.

At that time I still didn’t have my driver’s license. Dad came and picked me up, and i rode back to the house in silence, my muscles screaming and my lungs expanded further than they had ever been, my heart finaly slowed to a normal rate. The distance to the house was less than five miles, but I fell alseep nonetheless.

Dad, a veteran to all these things, and harder, drove back, pipe in his mouth, woke me up when we got to the driveway. I tucked into dinner with reckless abandon and- apparently- even ate an ear of corn cob and all. I went outside and sat on the glider, lit a cigarette, and fell asleep again. The cigarette burned down to my fingers and the burn woke me, and dad suggested I go to bed.

In retrospect, that day may be the day I turned the corner. The moment I stopped being a boy and started being a man. I think Dad saw it. I haven’t thought about it until just this moment, but now I look back on it I’m pretty sure. There were still irresponsible moments after that, but for the most part, that day of backbreaking and intense labor flipped the switch.

I’m more senstitive to those moments in other people now. The friends who lose all their family members and shut out the rest of the world. The colleagues who learn that new skill and then realize how it has changed their lives. The child I never thought I would parent, becoming a woman. Do we become more senstive to these transitions because we grow wiser with age, or is it that as our time grows shorter we are more cognizant of it’s passage?