You kinda want a story that will make people feel but you don’t want a story that will hurt people. You want a store that will make people think. There is no wrong story. It’s a story. It’s the raw truth. It’s your life. Experiences. I should be able to tell my story, but I really don’t want to hurt anyone. If they knew how many times I had that same word “N— lover” used against me to hurt me… and the people I love, and them people call me that to hurt me, you know, that’s not right.
My dad’s a really hard worker. He takes care of elderly people. He owns the business. He wakes up to it and he goes to sleep to it. He’s around them all day long. He’ll feed them, he’ll do their laundry, and he’ll cleanup. He’ll do the floors, and the tables. He helps with given the men showers and taken them to the bathroom. He helps give them their medication. He also does real estate on the side. He has a realtor’s license. I think it’s going pretty well for him. He knows how to do it well, he knows the timing, and he’s been doing it for years, and he’s pretty successful at it. He’s persistent and driven, he’s a very driven man. Very smart, intelligent man. He has a good heart. It takes a different kind of person to run a home for the elderly, it really does. He’s just living and breathing it every single day – that’s hard.
He had a job before that for a long time but that plant medically retired him because he’s a two-time cancer survivor. The cancer he had was the same kind of cancer that everybody got working at that plant. Dad has two grandsons that are in his life a lot, and he enjoys them immensely!
My aunt (his sister) is retired too. We would go there on birthdays and Christmases when I was little. She worked a lot while we was being raised. She worked a lot of hours and a lot of days. There wasn’t a whole lot when I was a kid but we made ends meet. A lot of mouths to feed. I couldn’ta had a better aunt. She’s a God-fearing woman. I don’t want to be cruel saying it, but I think my aunt has been almost better to me in my life than my mother, because my mother didn’t think things out. My mom was always having kids and I don’t think my mom was raised right. And I’m not trying to put my mom down, I’m just saying my aunt was more levelheaded and could see beyond the here and now.
So why am I telling you all this about my family?
There is a guy that delivers produce at the store I work at. I knowed him for about a year and he seemed like a pretty decent guy. He brings the produce in crates. He wheels them in on a dolly, about seven crates high and he has to wheel in about three or four stacks. He takes the old expired stuff out and wheels the new stuff in. We sell a lot of produce at that store. And then after he brings it in we shoot it with the gun (bar coder) and then he would stack it where it needs to go. I’m in charge there so I usually worked with him. I was talking to him regular when he would come in. I think he said he was going to retire in another year or something. But he said before he was going to retire, he was going to get this fixed and that fixed; he had a lot of sick time that he had acquired. He had acquired it throughout the years and it just rolled over every year. He was gonna be off six months and getting paid before he was retired.
He has a son and a daughter. His son I’m guessing from what he said was about 34, and his daughter was about my age. She’s going to school. And I ask him if he had any grandkids. And he said, “No I told my children not to have any children. I don’t want any grandkids.”
And I ask, “Why?” because that seemed sort of extreme.
And he said, “Because the blacks are on the rise.”
I couldn’t believe what I heard! That made me so mad I just had to walk away. I balled up my fists and just turned and walked. I walked right on out the door. I stayed outside doing parking lot cleanup. I have no idea what he thought when I walked out, and I don’t care. I was pretty mad about the ignorance, I never perceived him to be that kind of man. It was like you think you know someone, and then you don’t know anybody.
The last time he was there I barely talk to him. I just send other people over there to help him now.