The Magic of Ordinary Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

day.” He went to the coffeepot and filled his thermos.
    â€œAre you working nearby today?”
    He turned red, even to the ears. I’d never have believed a man could be so bashful. Finally he looked up and nodded.
    I took off the apron I’d been wearing. “If you’re not too busy, then, would you show me around?”
    â€œYou mean the farm?”
    â€œI guess so.” I shrugged. “Or anything else of interest.”
    He moved to the icebox and poured the fresh milk into a wide-lipped glass bottle. Then he drew water from the tap. After he gulped down a full glass, he said, “Okay.”
    He drove the truck down a narrow road that ran between fields. “We have us a good-size farm.” He glanced my way. “A hundred and sixty acres.”
    Ray looked to me as if he wanted my approval. It was wartime, and farming had become an important, crucial industry to feed the country, our troops, and much of the world. Clearly, Ray was proud of what he did, and war needs had raised the status of the family farmer far beyond what it had been during peaceful times, equal at least to that of other businessmen. I remembered one of the government’s wartime slogans: “Food will win the war and write the peace.” And a government poster I’d seen at the train station featured a uniformed soldier telling a farmer, “Those overalls are your uniform, bud.”
    I watched the fields and irrigation furrows go by and I asked him, “What are your crops?”
    Ray gestured out the window at the fields. “Those there are sugar beets.” When I nodded, he said, “Our best crop. We have over half of our acres planted in them.”
    â€œI notice that some of the fields are empty.”
    â€œYou bet,” said Ray. “We’ve already taken the cash crops—green peas, green beans, sweet corn—in June, to get some money coming in. The cucumbers came out in July, the tomatoes in August. We just finished them up. Pretty soon the big work starts up—onions and dry beans. It’s almost time.”
    â€œTo harvest?”
    He nodded. “And after that, we’ll take the sugar beets.”
    It seemed I had come at the busiest time of the year. “May I help?”
    His face drained of expression. “I doubt it.”
    I almost laughed. Our situation seemed so absurd. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about farming.”
    After a period of silence, he said, “But you have the house to take care of.”
    Ray turned up a wider road, where he picked up speed. The wind started blowing in through the truck window and hitting me full in the face, wind that carried the odor of manure. I scooted over to the center of the bench seat, but as soon as I did, Ray sat taller in the seat and gripped the steering wheel with callused knuckles. Too late I realized I had moved too close. For the remainder of the drive, I could feel his unease.
    At first it baffled me. The man was thirty years old. But then I thought of some of the young men I’d known in high school. In the sad hierarchy that ranked persons primarily by looks, I remembered several groups of young men who were both unattractive and terribly shy, who never went out on dates and never got invited to parties. Many of them never got accustomed to contact with girls, and judging by his reactions to me, Ray must have been just like them. In comparison, my social life, although nothing to brag about, had at least given me the opportunity to befriend a few men. In high school and even in college, my girlfriends and I weren’t the most popular, but we had our occasional dates and didn’t grow up uncomfortable with the opposite sex, either. When we went to the cinema or the ice-skating rink, often a few of the studious guys or a brother or two of one of the girls came along.
    Those timid young men in high school had long since graduated and gone into the service. Rumor