Constructing #2

My mother is a thirty-year veteran of the construction business. She was worked all over America and she is now in Macon Georgia where she has been for a month. My mother was born in October of 1948 so she is now 58 and in excellent health. If you were to ask my mother what she does for a living she would proudly tell you that she is a pipe welder. She has built all kinds of thing from a boiler for the new Nashville courthouse, to a chiller unit for a super computer that circulate liquid nitrogen.
Being a woman pipe welder in the seventies was not an easy task. She had to endure all kinds of harassment and discrimination. I believe my mother has heard it all, she sometime tells me jokes that I would have never said to her. Sometimes my mother will go out of town to work and end up working for some asshole and end up dragging up, this has not happened for a while since she has worked for the same company for the last seven or so years. Here is an interesting story; in the seventy she sometimes found it hard to get a job being a woman and all. So she would have my father (whom was a pipe welder as well) call and talk to the man in charge of hiring people and tell him that he had a "jam up welder traveling with him" and then he would refer to my mother as L.K. Myers so the man on the phone would not get wise to the fact that he had just hired a woman. I remember a couple times packing everything up and moving to a different town just to have some sexist jackass say that he was not going to hire my mother and then having to repack everything and drive back home. The silver liner is that the company would still have to pay travel time to both of them and that all those good-old-boys probably ended up getting theirs.
I sometimes-meet people that say they were army brats when they were kids a moved from base to base with their family. I know exactly where they are coming from, growing up I lived in so many cities and states that I still do not know everyone of them. Sometimes my mother will say, "Do you remember living here or do you remember living in this kind of house or that kind of place" and to that I will say " did I ah... I do not know...no I guess not". I went from kindergarten to the ninth with out ever finishing one whole grade in the same school except once. My parents built a paper mill in Perry Florida and we were there for almost two years so that is the exclusion. I kind of lucked out in high school; my parents built the Tyson Chicken factory in Henderson and that took three years so we (my brother and I) got to finish out high school in the same city.