The falling sensation woke me. And so I continued to trudge the slippery road that I’d created for myself.
It was 8pm. I’d left home for work at 4.40am and had arrived home from work at 7.45pm. It was a long hard day. And now I was on their bed, fabricating a version of the three little pigs for Havana and Ilyana. As usual, making it up as I went along, but with the burden of a 15-hour shift weighing down on my creative syanapses.
I’m working at the very furthest reaches of the bay area, on a busy 400-man construction site. My sore joints are pounding away at the job, trying to see the end of the proverbial tunnel.
I get to draw a breath while sitting in the portable. But its hardly restful, listening to the surround-sound ominous din of reversing big rigs and forklifts and wondering if a large piece of machinery was gonna be dropped on me or back up on me and flatten me. But I open the door and the light and fresh dusty air floods in and I return to the drudgery and high pace of my construction existence; along with all the other worker ants crossing paths and standing aside for cranes or moving materials.
My day’s highlight, while at work, remains the same. Thinking of the girls as I left them. Curled up on their predawn beds, newly covered up, innocent and wonderful and peaceful in their dreams. And the job juggernauts forward. Me doing overtime, millions of others with no work to speak of.
I get home and they are already pj’ed and waiting for me. The girls are demanding “coffee shop.” A nightly serialization of my experiences at the local coffee shop, with the local zoo animals that work and hang out there. I don’t have the emotional-creative energy to make up something from scratch and so I opt for a variation on a traditional theme. The three little pigs.
This story was perhaps originally created to justify how those in brick houses survive life’s natural disasters and those of us in trailers or mudhuts will have our badly-built homes swept away. If only we’d had the money to build a brick house then maybe we’d not gotten eaten by a hungry wolf. Work hard, we're lectured, and you'll be safe from roving wolves. At some point the homeowners/renters in the story became pigs, convoluting the moral of the story. Surely, it’d only be natural that the wolf would eat the farm animals? Or maybe pigs made the moralizing more palatable for children.
So there I am, half asleep careening through some made-up version of the 3 pigs’ adventure of being pursued by a hungry endangered species, and I crash into the void of sleep that keeps telling me, you’re on a bed: sneak in a nap, it’s not like you’re driving a car, drift off, drift off. And so I do, dragging the story down in my wake.
A cue to my state of mind weaves its way into the story's plot: the first little piggy builds a house of pillows. The next pig, as I wrestle to get back my audience’s attention, builds a house of legos and then the third, a house of Barbie dolls. “A Barbie house?” repeats Havana, sharing a half-disgusted, half-amused look with her younger sister.
Then, in exhaustion, the story hiccups and I begin by trying to end a sentence which I cannot for sure remember how I started. I am aware that I am talking nonsense but assume the girls may not be distinguish between the funny creative nonsense and the plainer, simpler type.
At the end, I close the non-existent bedtime story book, exhale and rise up to sit on the side of the bed. As I reach the door for the final farewell, Havana enjoys the moment: "Daddy, there’s no farmer in the three little pigs" she explains. Evidently a farmer wondered into the story. Despite this happening in recent minutes, I have no recollection of having referenced a farmer. Although it sounds credible.
“Well the farmer was working overtime girls, he’s in everyone’s story tonight, all over Oakland. But now we should let him sleep too.”
Every moment of overtime at work, is time less with the girls.
Even with all this society's evidence of prosperity, in the end, we’re all still out there building pyramids for the pyramid owners. And in a society driven by the priorities of the pyramid owners, time with our families is hardly of importance.
