Our 2003 Yukon XL drips oil. The rear engine seal in the 5.3 litre V-8 is notorious for leaking. Expensive to fix. So it drips oil. Not much but over time it can accumulate. We always park it in the same place. Back part of the driveway. Yesterday Ruth took it on an errand. Walking by it’s greasy parking spot, I noticed there was a build up of thickly congealed oil on the driveway. The neighbour’s wheat straw-like, genetically-engineered grass clippings was trapped in black ooze. Yuck.
There is was: Time to act. "Scrape it up, you should," whispered Yoda. I nodded. It was wise. I knew what I needed but could I place my grubby hands on it? I flipped on the light and fished in the utility closet. Dangerous duty. All sorts of shovels, tools and large implements hanging around the wall edges waiting to fall on your head. But there it was. The tool of choice. The flat blade shovel. Terrible for digging. But for scraping? Nothing better. I struggled to reach back and release it from it’s two pronged hanger, just dodging a metal, one armed, dandelion plucker that released itself from its perch at my shoulder. Barely injured, I wrestled the would-be concrete grader down and admired it’s hefty utility. This would do it. I found a piece of cardboard to use for a reverse trowel and a bag to seal it all up. I set the cardboard contiguous to the muck and began a forward scraping of the concrete. Each scrape captured a layer of ooze. I had to bear down to get it scraped close to the concrete. I had to use a smaller shovel to scrape the muck from the surface of the flat blade onto the make shift trowel. I worked at it for a few minutes, scraping and scraping then stopped staring at the straight edge of the shovel blade. My shovel, though several years old, was 100% intact.
At this point I was dumb struck. I could see back 40 years. Standing next to me was Louisiana Transit’s Utility Man, TJ Howard. He showed me the end of his flat blade shovel with a smile. The blade was shiny and no longer flat. It was also thinner inches from the edge toward the handle. The size of his blade had been reduced to less than 50% of original. He was asking me to pick up a new flat blade shovel from Harahan Hardware. He had gotten his so worn down, shinier, thinner, smoother and more rounded, that he couldn’t get much grime up from the floor any more.
It took me a second or two to register what I was seeing and re-seeing 40 years hence. TJ… had… worn… the steel blade of his shovel to less than 50% of it’s original size by a daily scraping of the concrete floor of our shop to remove built up oil which had dripped and been spilled from our bus fleet. There was a daily build up of dripped oil which TJ scraped up every morning before performing tire change duties. You could hear the sound every morning as he scraped and scraped the floor to remove the built up oil muck.
Then the backward vision expanded. He was first in before the crack of dawn to bump all the bus tires to look for flats. He single handed broke down about 200 bus tires with a tire tool and hammer and remounted tires on rims with HAND TOOLS. After over a decade and after receiving federal funding, we got TJ a hydraulic tire mounting aid but prior to that he did it with hand tools. By himself. Bus tires. When he took vacation, we had to have 3 guys working together to do the job of one TJ. I worked with him to mount bus stop signs throughout the parish. His hands were large, powerful and rugged. He had never used gloves because they fell into nothingness in a couple of days. His hands were tougher than leather. He came in, on time, day after day, year after year and decade after decade. He was as automatic as a human being can be. He was the ultimate grinder. Tough job. Fine. Complain? Never. Cold? So what? Go on the road to change out a flat tire on the highway, in traffic? No problem. Rain? Sure, why not. I’d like to compare him to a machine but machines break. Shovels wear down to a nub. TJ was made of sterner stuff.
I blinked my eyes and was returned to the present, shovel still in hand. I scraped up some more oil muck and looked at the edge of my shovel and tried to imagine how many scrapes it would take to wear down the blade to less than 50% of the original and I couldn’t imagine it. Just trying to imagine making it shiny and thinner, much less worn down that far. I couldn’t do it. It's not just that I couldn't actually wear it down that far, I just couldn't even imagine what it would take to do it. I’ve known grinders before. But I’ve never known anybody like TJ. Not before. Not since.
Thomas Howard, I raise a toast to you, wherever you are. You always were and always will be: The Man.
