"You'd better hurry, honey," she said with a smile in her voice. "You don't want to be late."
She really didn't want him to go. Nor did he want to leave. But they both knew that it was important for him to get to work a few minutes early to show his dedication. As he passed from reverie to reality he gulped down his coffee, tucked in his shirttails and grabbed his briefcase. All he had in his briefcase was a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and a paper napkin, but it helped contribute to the image he was trying so hard to project.
He kissed her lightly on the cheek and then kissed her bulging stomach. It was one of those goofy things that men do when they are overwhelmed by a range of intense emotions that they cannot name. He said goodbye to her and then leaned down and said good bye to the child to be. He said it in a baby voice as though the fetus - the child to be, his ticket to the inside - would not understand if he had said goodbye in adult tones.
It was a lovely spring morning in Jacksonville Florida. In a couple of hours the heat and humidity would be racing each other to the limits of human endurance. But at this early hour the only signs of the torment to come were a slight clamminess in the air and a haze on the horizon. Barney thought about his child to be. Maybe it would be a boy. He would call it Barney Jr. They would play catch in the yard and go to ball games together. But a girl would be O.K. too. She would be daddy's girl and Barney would help her with her homework, as long as he didn't have to do any of that new math stuff. Barney had not done well in math in high school. In fact, he had, at one point, dropped out of high school. But that was all in the past and the future loomed large and promising.
Barney Milford was a good man who had seen some bad times. He dropped out of high school in his junior year and ran away from home. It was not so much his home that he had run from. Rather it was the things that his home had stood for. His father drank and could not hold a steady job. He had more kids than he could afford and all of Barney's siblings ran around in second hand clothes. The house was dirty and always in need of repair. But it wasn't the poverty that made Barney run away. It was the judgmental remarks and attitudes of the 'decent' people that really made him go. They said that people like him were lazy and stupid and they brought their problems on themselves. It was their piercing eyes and cutting remarks that he ran away from.
The next year seemed more like ten years. Barney worked a series of low paying jobs at gas stations and restaurants. At each of these jobs he was low man on the pay roster and treated with no respect at all. He would put up with it for a few weeks and then quit, claiming that he did not have to put up with that kind of treatment. But he did have to put up with it. He had to work because he had to eat and he was low man because he had nothing to offer but the most basic skills. And every time he quit he had to start at the bottom again. Barney was poor, but he was not stupid or lazy. He just wanted to be treated the same respect that others got. In fact he was smart enough to see that the others were right. He was making his own trouble.
It was a god awful hot night in midsummer when this realization came to Barney. The heat and humidity were so high that the air felt like warm spray paint on your skin. Barney was in the alley behind the kitchen of the restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher. He was smoking a cigarette and thinking about the mistake he had made in leaving high school. The air was so thick that you could barely breathe much less smoke and the smell from the garbage dumpster was over powering.
"Hey, shit-fer-brains," came a voice from the kitchen. "I'm paying you to wash dishes not to sit on your ass and smoke cigarettes."
A week ago Barney would have flipped his cigarette against the alley wall in an act of defiance and stomped away claiming that he did not need that lousy job. Instead he dropped his cigarette, put it out with the toe of his shoe and said "Yes, sir." With that he went back to the sink and the endless pile of dirty dishes.
From that day on, Barney showed up early to make sure the dishwasher was unloaded and the dishware was stacked where the cooks could get to it easily. At the end of his shift he stayed until everything was cleaned and put away or loaded into the dishwasher. The kitchen staff began to kid Barney about his dedication. They began to call him Dishwasher of the Year or Dishwasher Superstar. It was good natured teasing and Barney accepted it with grace. It wasn't just the dishes he was cleaning up. He was also cleaning up the mistakes he had made in his life.
A month later the kitchen supervisor took Barney aside and said that they were giving him a raise. It was a small raise and didn't have much affect on his weekly take home. Of course it wasn't the money that meant anything to Barney anyway. It was the fact that the kitchen supervisor had spoken to him with respect. The same guy who hollered at him through the alley door a month ago was now giving him more money and commending him for his hard work. It didn't take a genius to put it all together.
Barney finished the summer at the dishwashing job and went back home in late august so he could finish high school. He used a recommendation from the kitchen supervisor to get a job as a bag boy at the Duval Publix, a grocery store near his home in the southwestern corner of Jacksonville. He took a lighter course load so he could work and retook some classes that he had failed earlier. It took him two years to finish his senior year and his classmates teased him that he liked high school so much that he took six years to finish. But finish he did.
It was a few minutes before seven a.m. when Barney Milford pulled into a parking spot on the shady side of the Duval Publix. He would come out on his lunch break and move his car to the other side of the building to take advantage of the afternoon shade. In the hot Jacksonville sun, a paint job would only last a couple years without a polymer topcoat, which he could not afford right now. But no matter. It was easy enough to move the car.
Barney had been working at this same store ever since he was in high school. Starting out as a bag boy, he was promoted to cashier when he finished high school. Five years later he was promoted again to cashier supervisor, an impressive accomplishment for someone with only a high school education. Every day, Publix supermarkets trusted him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash that had to balance to the penny. And every day it did balance. A few weeks ago word came around that the store manager was retiring. Most of his colleagues felt that the assistant manager in charge or produce would move up leaving a vacant spot, which Barney had his eye on. So he made sure that he arrived early every day looking competent and professional. It wasn't just that Barney was ambitious. Soon he would have another mouth to feed so he was at that point in his career where he really had to get serious about getting somewhere. But Barney was confident. Work hard, do the right thing and life has a way of working out for you. He had figured out the secret to success.
"God's in his heaven," he thought in a rare moment of erudition. It was a line from a poem he had studied in high school. He didn't remember the name of the poem nor did he remember the poet. In fact, he could barely remember the next line. "And there's justice in the world," he thought. "Yes, that's the next line." But there was no justice for Barney Milford.
At lunch Barney put on his Florida Gators hat to protect his face from the hot noonday sun and went out to move his car over to the shady side of the building. When he came back he saw something that would change his life forever.