What’s this? A white Blazer
In a few weeks, I will be eligible for Social Security.
It is hard to believe I have arrived at this milestone in one piece and still above ground. It has given me pause to reflect on a working career that began in the newspaper business in 1979.
Loyalty, punctuality, diligence and the virtue of a fair day’s work were drilled into my soul as a young lad. Strangely enough, one of my earliest lessons in those things came from the anonymous driver of a white Chevrolet Blazer.
You may find it odd that a boy barely old enough to go to school could conjure up such an image, but it is a fact.
We might be playing ball in the backyard where first base was a boxelder tree, shooting snakes near the creek with BB guns or riding bicycles around the neighborhood when, like clockwork, that Blazer would pass.
Once in the morning and once in the evening.
You could set your timepiece by him.
It was one of those big-bodied Blazers. The driver was never in a rush. He was methodical, slow through the turns and right on schedule, about 7:30 every weekday morning and again at 5 in the afternoon.
That white Blazer became a symbol of work to me.
Neither I nor anyone in my family knew the person driving it. That was unusual in rural West Tennessee, especially on a country road so far off the beaten path that it would remind folks around here of
somewhere between Sheridan and Tolu, or Mott City and Frances.
In our neck of the woods, we knew everybody. Neighbors were truly neighbors back then. They attended church together, had gone to the same country school or regularly crossed paths at the little country store. Most of the extended family was settled there, too, taking up nearly a mile of road frontage from Granny’s house to Uncle Jerry’s.
So it was peculiar, to say the least, that this commuter remained anonymous, if not somewhat mysterious.
To me, however, there was no mystery. He was a clock-puncher headed to the office, the store, the factory
