As my self-imposed deadline to post something weekly approached, and then passed, I was thinking about times when Pop had to work late. As an adult, I see how people work until late into the night before going home. Pop never just stayed at work until it was dark before coming home; he always came home for dinner with the family. At the time I never thought much about it, but now, I think it was actually a pretty remarkable thing.
There were times, though, that there was some deadline that he was up against that forced him to go back into the office. Fortunately, it wasn’t a regular occurrence, but there were occasions where he’d go back in and have to work some more, occasionally until the wee hours of the morning.
If I was lucky he would let me go with him. That was always a special treat, although I don’t know why. There wasn’t a lot to do at his work. His office was in the basement of an old building on campus and just had a desk and office equipment in it. It was mostly sitting and sometimes watching Pop update a schedule manually (this was before it was done on computers). He’d cut different pieces of tape with a razor blade and stick them on the timelines where they needed to go. If he needed some text, he would let me go type the words on the machine and bring them to him.
Sometimes he would send me to the vending machine to get us a can of Welches grape soda or a Grandmas molasses cookie. And we’d have a drink and a cookie together.
If he had a lot of work to do, I couldn’t stay up for all of that so he’d find something soft for me to put my head on and I’d go lie down under the desk and go to sleep until he was ready to go home. I think he probably got work done faster when I was sleeping because I wouldn’t be pestering him with questions. I bet that he was even faster at getting the text typed without me, even though he always let me feel like I was being useful.