Manopause

Me and Kipling met at the Budd Automotive plant in Kitchener round about '73 or so. Budd was a going concern at the time, and you could make more money, coming in off the street with no skills, than the teachers at the high school you'd dropped out of. And come in off the streets we did. The day I got hired there was a line at least 100 yards long out the door of the employment office. They came in and they went out just as fast. Most of the new hires quit within the first two weeks. If you had zero skills you started your career on one of the press lines. You stood between two 500 ton presses all day feeding parts from one to the next. It was a dirty, stinking, physically exausting, oil-soaked, steel-sliver inducing job, but if you could handle the pace, you took home a pretty fine paycheque. It was always disconcerting when you came in and one of those presses had amputated the arm of some poor putz who miscalculated his timing when pulling a oily piece of metal out of it. It was even more disoncerting to come in the next day and see the same press up and running with a fresh recruit who still had two arms. Today me and Kipling met at the Teviotdale truck stop. He pulls in behind the wheel of a 58 year old Pontiac sedan, straight six and three on the tree. It was a bargain basement full-size sedan in its day. The folks in the factory that built it could have readily afforded it. We get together periodically to trade notes on aging, and to marvel at the fact we've made it this far. Ya, things get a little dicey, and moreso the further you go. Eye surgery or hand surgery is a pain, but beats the hell out of dropping dead from a heart attack, or even worse, being diagnosed with a terminal disease that'll let you linger incapacitated for months or even years. Naturally, we reflect on how our lives have unfolded. Free Trade was the dagger through the heart of Southern Ontario's industrial economy and the working class who made their living in it. NAFTA hasn't been the only challenge in the last 50 years. It's only with the life experience of decades that you realize the role testosterone had in your life. Once you're crowding 70, let's face it; you're not making all that much of it anymore. What a relief!