Child Labor and other things I learned from my mom

When I was four or five, my mom had a project that needed much labor power. Projects in my family often, in hindsight, should have included: building permits, maybe some chemistry or engineering schooling, or any other form of formal precursor. For example my recent boat bike would be considered a middling project. Its best qualifiers including: no plan, a complete lack of nautical knowledge and trying to use tools not suited to the task at hand.

Back to my mom...

Mom wanted carpet in the family room. The entire floor that was the kitchen/dining/family room had white linoleum with a small brick-like pattern that seemed random to the casual observer but after hours of building Lego villages or Erector Set towers one could very definitely see a repeated pattern of shapes in each square of linoleum. Much like the 3 variations of the same floor plan that made up our sub-division.

She concocted a plan to keep the linoleum in the kitchen/dining area and carpet the rest of the room. I'm guessing a 15'x 20' area from vague memory. The catch was there was no capital financing.

No problem! Mom was/is a scrapper. She liked to say, "We're turning lemons into lemon aide."

Each morning that summer she would thumb through the yellow pages then talk on the phone while I ate my Rice Crispies or Cheerios. Sometime later we would get in the family truck, pick up her friend Mary Anne and proceed to our first "stop".

Upon our arrival, mom would wake me up from my morning nap. In the beginning we would go through the front door of the carpet stores first and mom would have a conversation with the clerk...as the summer progressed, we did not go inside so much... The "nots" were usually places we had previously stopped at days before. Some of the stops were stores, some warehouses. Regardless, my job started when we drove around back and mom would pull up to the dumpster. Like a hunting dog I would respond to her pointing by leaping into the dumpster and picking up all the scrap pieces of carpet I could lift. It was exciting for me I'll admit. The small pieces I could throw as hard as I could muster and occasionally I would find a roll of carpet bigger than me that I would lift like a pole toss in Scottish Highland games.

Then the trip home for lunch and to sort the sizes, colors and textures of carpet. Being a little too young to play with knives, my brother and sister were suckered into cutting the remnants into uniform brick sized pieces. It's good to reflect now and know that their summer sucked too.

My first recollection as a kid of being sweaty and tired from hard work comes from dumpster diving for carpet remnants. The sense of accomplishment was great and all, but I was one dude with my mom and her gal-pal. I felt emasculated but wasn't old enough to know what it meant. Torn between feeling proud of being my mom's "Main Dumpster Man" and wishing I could just ditch the women and play Army with my friends (who by the way were all dudes). I soldiered on day after day not really understanding what the point was.

I hit my limit when, as usual, mom pulled the mustard colored Dodge 500 truck up next to a dumpster and I climbed out the back of the camper (that my dad built), dove in and landed on a homeless guy. I was well beyond being potty trained, but if I didn't full-on crap myself when I stepped on that guy, I would bet money I at least peed on he and I both. He yelled something at me and I jumped out of the dumpster, back into the truck and told my mom in few words, "I quit."

Perhaps for redemption or maybe to ease me off my ledge and keep me around to do her dirty work, mom and Mary Anne took me to A&W for lunch. A&W was way cooler than McDonald's for two reasons: Root beer floats and the Bear molded into the straw. See, as you sucked up the root beer in the float, it goes through the straw and just above the top of the mug the straw becomes shaped like a bear then goes back to a normal straw shaped tube. Frigging AWESOME when you're 5.

Regardless of mom and Mary Ann's bribery, they lost all credibility as we left the restaurant and walked out the emergency exit tripping the alarm and nearly making my ears bleed after a morning of soiling my pants.

Fast forward to Labor Day weekend and somehow my folks roped a house full of friends into helping glue down a million brick-sized pieces of random carpet onto a pad to make one BITCHIN' 1976-style family room rug. The bummer was that the house smelled like glue till Halloween and the carpet remained intact through the 80's when the house sold. The first condition from the new buyers? Put the carpet in a dumpster.