Mules

When it's dinner time, nuthin moves.

It was 1976 or maybe 77. Wendy and I were living in Janesville, which was closer to Blackhawk Technical Institute (now Blackhawk Technical College) while I got a certificate in Office Machine Repair. (The irony of learning how to repair things like IBM Selectrics just as electronics were getting set to take over the industry was not readily apparent to me then.) It was an upstairs apartment near the railroad tracks. An old man, I don't know exactly where he lived, would wander the neighborhood. You might see him anytime during the day, summer (in overalls) and winter (snowmobile suit), walking and stopping to look at whatever caught his curiosity.

One day I came home from school that summer about four in the afternoon. I was bounding up the stairs thinking about a chicken sandwich, a coming test, and maybe a bong hit when I heard a shout behind me from across the street: "HEY! You ever work a mule train?" It wasn't a weak shout. This guy had a voice that carried.

I'd never heard that voice but I knew who it was. I don't know what made me stop and holler back. "No!"

"Well I have!"

I stayed on the peeling wooden stairs and looked. He walked across the street, pretty spry for somebody that old, talking about mules. I don't remember a lot of what he said. I asked some questions, he volunteered a lot of information. Mules know when it's lunchtime, and when they decide it's time, they sit down and wait for the feedbag without worrying about where they are. If it's a narrow shelf on the side of the mountain, they sit and it's up to the drivers to slide around each one with a feedbag and they don't much care.

He talked for maybe ten or fifteen minutes and then he just said so long. I don't remember what else he said. I watched him walk away for a minute and went inside. He never hollered to me again. I finished school about six months later. By then, he wasn't walking the neighborhood streets anymore. I never found out where he lived. We didn't exchange names. He just disappeared sometime that winter.

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