Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

City Light and Power: Views of My Grandfather Walking

22 City Light and Power VIEWS OF MY GRANDFATHER WALKING In 1930, my grandfather was working on the railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad to be exact, or “the Pennsy” as he and the rest of Fort Wayne called the PRR. He was then a management trainee, learning the workings of the company by working various jobs in each of the company’s divisions. That day in 1930 he was a trackwalker, walking track, gandy dancing minor repairs. His supervisor sidled up to him as he inspected a frog at a junction on the west side. “Jim,” the man said to my grandfather, “times are tough. We have to lay you off for a few months.” The railroad called him back in 1941. Way before then, my grandfather had found a job working as an orderly at the Irene Byron Sanitarium north of town where he would wheel the TB patients onto the screened-in porches even in the middle of the winter. He’d sometimes take the interurban to and from the hospital grounds, where he would spend the week in a dorm, returning home to the house on Oakland Street to stay a day with his wife and daughter, my mother, who called him Jim and had to be reminded this stranger was her father. Often he’d walk back and forth to save the fare, following the interurban roadbed, inspecting those tracks for free. He was happy when he had the chance to work closer to home and took a job work- City Light and Power 23 ing in the city for the city. When the railroad called him back in 1941, my grandfather had five years under his tool belt reading meters for City Light. He saw no reason to go back, a decade later, to resume his training for the trains. I hardly remember it now after all these years. It was there at the end of Calhoun Street, arching over the road between the Allen County Jail and the box factory—the City Light sign. A lacy grid of steel girders supported the neon tubing. It looked in my memory like a precarious mesh of rusted struts and guy wires you could easily see through. Could you see too, in the distance, the blocky powerhouse on North Clinton across the river near Lawton Park? You could surely see the smoke billowing from its stacks, the superstructure of the sign back downtown a kind of frame, a parable of power. At night the arching cantilevered metal disappeared in the dark. There floating above the street was the City Light logo, an asymmetric illuminated crossword, the vertical C-I-T-Y intersecting the horizontal L-I-G-H-T, pivoting on the single i both words shared. And emanating from that crisscrossed core, zigzagging bolts of lightning bisected the right angles of the words. I remember them flashing, those bolts, but I can’t be sure. I can’t forget the illusion of those letters floating above Fort Wayne, stitched and twitching against the velvet of the night sky, or its simple message of a C-I-T-Y of light, of L-I-G-H-T all lit up. My grandfather walked to work to work a job that required walking. He read meters. He walked each day from his house in North Highlands near Hamilton Park a few blocks over from Oakland Street where the family had moved, always stopping on his way downtown at Precious Blood to say a quick prayer in the rear pews of the church, light an old-fashioned candle in the narthex, then walk the rest of the way to the office on Lafayette Street south of the Wabash tracks. I told him once about a story I read called “The End of the Mechanical Age” by Donald Barthelme in which God appears as a character. And how is God depicted? As a meter reader sporting coveralls (like my grandfather ) with His flashlight poking out of the back pocket (like my grandfather’s). In the story, God was reading the quantity of grace in the world as he went door-to-door. There is something intimate and omniscient to the job my grandfather performed. Because he walked everywhere, the size of the city retreated back down to a human dimension, a human scale, as he transversed it. There is only so much distance one can cover on foot...