"Eddings, David - Regina's Song V2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

have machines that do the sorting, pulling, and
stacking, but the sawmill
where I worked that summer hadn't changed very
much since the I920s,
so we did things the old-fashioned way. I didn't like the
job very much,
but I really, really wanted my own car, so I stuck it out.
I'd been an indifferent student at best up until then, but
after the
summer of '86, my attitude changed. There might just
be a doctoral
dissertation in psychology there-The Motivational
Impact of the Green
Chain maybe. I became a much more serious student
after that summer,
let me tell you.
Pulling chain did earn me enough money to buy my
own car, of course,
and that's very important to red-blooded sixteen-year-
olds, since it's widely
known in that group that "You ain't nothin' if you ain't
got wheels." The
Twinkie Twins weren't very impressed by my not-very-
shiny black '74
Dodge, but I didn't buy it to impress them. They were
only third graders
and by definition unworthy of my attention. They were
blond, still chubby
with the remnants of baby fat, and they were at the
tomboy stage of
development.
Time rushed on in the endless noon of my
adolescence, and it seemed
that before I'd turned around twice, graduation day was
staring me in the
face. The gloomy prospect of pulling chain loomed in
front of me, but good old Les Greenleaf stepped in at
that point. I'm sure there was a certain amount of
collusion involved when right after my high-school
graduation an opening "just happened" to show up at
the door factory, and my dad presented me with my
reactivated union card. The Monday after graduation I
went to work at Greenleaf Sash and Door. I was now a
worker. I even went to union meetings.
I think the highlight of my first year at the door factory
came on the day when all the kids in Everett had to go
back to school, but I didn't. My delight lasted for almost
a whole week. Then it gradually dawned on me that I
actually missed going to school. That green-chain scare
in the summer of my sophomore year had turned me