About Town | By Press Editor Chris Evans

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.

Before that, I was what you might call a custodian. My first job was cleaning the office where my dad was an accountant for a large mining company. I emptied wastebaskets, swept floors and cleaned a lot of ashtrays. That was back when everybody smoked at their desks, in the breakroom and just about everywhere else.

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

or perhaps the clay mines. Wherever he was going, somebody expected him to be there, and he was.

He came by as surely as the sun rose and set – until one day, he didn’t.

Days passed. Then weeks rolled by without that white rig easing down our chip-and-seal road. For a dozen years or more, we had watched it go by. Then it simply disappeared.

Had Mr. Worker bought another vehicle and we failed to recognize him? I don’t think so. Nobody else ever filled that precise time slot on our little country road.

Had he lost his job? Changed jobs? Moved away?

I never found out.

Maybe he simply retired.

He never knew that someone noticed his punctual passage every morning and evening, but someone did. That steady rhythm helped shape my understanding of responsibility – of being where you are supposed to be, when you are supposed to be there, and doing a fair day’s work in a reliable fashion.

How all of that sprang from watching a white Chevrolet Blazer roll past the house, this same mind is now too feeble to explain.

Nonetheless, as my own career proceeds into its twilight years, there is a certain amount of reflection that comes naturally. You begin counting less by years ahead and more by miles already traveled. You remember the people who taught you, the jobs that tested you and even the strangers who unknowingly left tracks across your life.

Sooner or later, every worker makes that final evening drive home and does not come back down the road the next morning.

The white Blazer taught me that, too.

Chris Evans, a newspaperman since 1979, has been editor of The Press for more than 30 years and is the author of South of the Mouth of Sandy, a true story about crime along the Tennessee River. You can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold.