today’s
Billings Herald-Gleaner
, and the front page says the high temperature will be sixty degrees today. Of course, that’s just a forecast, and forecasts are notoriously off base. I prefer facts. I will know for sure tomorrow what the temperature reaches today.
Today, however, I know that it reached sixty-six degrees yesterday, with a low of forty-four, and I record those numbers in my notebook, and my data is complete.
In any case, I can deduce from the advisory and from what I can see with my own two eyes that the garage should be dry today, while I am off volunteering for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
– • –
As I’m dressing—brown corduroy pants and a blue button-down, long-sleeved shirt, as today I will be working in an office—I think that it makes me feel good to have a job to go to today. It’s not really a job, of course, but it seems like one, in that I will be in my car when everybody else is going to work, and when I get to the Muscular Dystrophy office, I will be making phone calls and writing things down, just like a person who has a job. I wonder if I will get my own desk. That would be neat.
If everything works out all right, I might even take a coffee break. I don’t like coffee, but if that’s what they do at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, I think it would only be polite to do the same.
I used to have a job, many years ago. In 1993, my father helped me get a clerical job with Yellowstone County. I liked thework very much. I maintained files in the clerk and recorder’s office, and it was very orderly work. Paperwork would come in, and I would find the file where it belonged and put it away. I was very good at keeping everything in order, and when I was asked to retrieve a file, I could do so quickly. My boss was very complimentary of my work, and I was left alone to do it. I liked that job very much.
But I stopped working for Yellowstone County in 1997. A new clerk and recorder was elected the previous November, and she wanted things done completely differently from the way I was doing them. She did not like my work at all, and she told me that I had to do it a different way, her way. I did not like her way, and I told her so. She told me I had to do it anyway. I told her that I wouldn’t. She told me that I would or I would have to find somewhere else to work.
My father had to come down to the office after I removed every file and shook its contents onto the floor. The new clerk and recorder told my father that she was going to call the deputies if he did not remove me immediately.
After that, I did not have to work anymore.
– • –
The Muscular Dystrophy Association office is in the West End of Billings, a few miles from the house on Clark Avenue, which is in a part of Billings that I suppose you would call central. But I have read histories of Billings suggesting that where I live, at Sixth Street W. and Clark Avenue, used to be the western edge of town. I suppose that the idea of what is north, south, east, or west of something else depends a lot on what point of history you’re looking at. These are facts that change. This flummoxes me.
At Nineteenth Street W. and Central Avenue, I see the Exchange City Par 3 Golf Course. My father loves golf, so much so that he wears golf shirts no matter what time of year it is. He looks like a tool. (I love the word “tool” in the pejorative sense. I also love the word “pejorative.”) He and my mother go on vacation in places like Pebble Beach, California, and Hilton Head, South Carolina. I’m not sure what my mother does in those places, but my father plays golf.
When I was a boy, my father took me to the Exchange City Par 3 Golf Course and tried to teach me how to play. We went once, and I have never been back. Golf is a stupid game. You cannot hit the ball the same way every time and get the same result—not even Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world, can do this. I do not like such unpredictability. Our
Billings Herald-Gleaner
, and the front page says the high temperature will be sixty degrees today. Of course, that’s just a forecast, and forecasts are notoriously off base. I prefer facts. I will know for sure tomorrow what the temperature reaches today.
Today, however, I know that it reached sixty-six degrees yesterday, with a low of forty-four, and I record those numbers in my notebook, and my data is complete.
In any case, I can deduce from the advisory and from what I can see with my own two eyes that the garage should be dry today, while I am off volunteering for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
– • –
As I’m dressing—brown corduroy pants and a blue button-down, long-sleeved shirt, as today I will be working in an office—I think that it makes me feel good to have a job to go to today. It’s not really a job, of course, but it seems like one, in that I will be in my car when everybody else is going to work, and when I get to the Muscular Dystrophy office, I will be making phone calls and writing things down, just like a person who has a job. I wonder if I will get my own desk. That would be neat.
If everything works out all right, I might even take a coffee break. I don’t like coffee, but if that’s what they do at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, I think it would only be polite to do the same.
I used to have a job, many years ago. In 1993, my father helped me get a clerical job with Yellowstone County. I liked thework very much. I maintained files in the clerk and recorder’s office, and it was very orderly work. Paperwork would come in, and I would find the file where it belonged and put it away. I was very good at keeping everything in order, and when I was asked to retrieve a file, I could do so quickly. My boss was very complimentary of my work, and I was left alone to do it. I liked that job very much.
But I stopped working for Yellowstone County in 1997. A new clerk and recorder was elected the previous November, and she wanted things done completely differently from the way I was doing them. She did not like my work at all, and she told me that I had to do it a different way, her way. I did not like her way, and I told her so. She told me I had to do it anyway. I told her that I wouldn’t. She told me that I would or I would have to find somewhere else to work.
My father had to come down to the office after I removed every file and shook its contents onto the floor. The new clerk and recorder told my father that she was going to call the deputies if he did not remove me immediately.
After that, I did not have to work anymore.
– • –
The Muscular Dystrophy Association office is in the West End of Billings, a few miles from the house on Clark Avenue, which is in a part of Billings that I suppose you would call central. But I have read histories of Billings suggesting that where I live, at Sixth Street W. and Clark Avenue, used to be the western edge of town. I suppose that the idea of what is north, south, east, or west of something else depends a lot on what point of history you’re looking at. These are facts that change. This flummoxes me.
At Nineteenth Street W. and Central Avenue, I see the Exchange City Par 3 Golf Course. My father loves golf, so much so that he wears golf shirts no matter what time of year it is. He looks like a tool. (I love the word “tool” in the pejorative sense. I also love the word “pejorative.”) He and my mother go on vacation in places like Pebble Beach, California, and Hilton Head, South Carolina. I’m not sure what my mother does in those places, but my father plays golf.
When I was a boy, my father took me to the Exchange City Par 3 Golf Course and tried to teach me how to play. We went once, and I have never been back. Golf is a stupid game. You cannot hit the ball the same way every time and get the same result—not even Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world, can do this. I do not like such unpredictability. Our
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