Labor Days.

In spite of his quick wit and humorous stories, an island lobsterman I’ve gotten to know is easy to embarrass. So let’s call him “Bill.” About sixty, he’s big in manner and broad in girth, with the kind of red, deeply etched face of a man who’s spent his life outdoors. But it was his big slab of a hand held out in introduction when we first met that seemed to me most familiar. In its thick, blunt fingers deeply ridged with calluses, scars and nicks, in its rougher-than-sandpaper grip, I met hard work and physical labor. Of waking before light, year after year, with little complaint.

I can’t claim kinship to Bill nor to any lobsterman. No one in my family relies on the sea for his livelihood, faces the obstacles that such work, in cahoots with Mother Nature, routinely dishes up. No stories are mine of what I or any family member survived in a life-threatening oceanic encounter or even shared in any of the more mundane experiences universal to fishermen. There’s not a sea-faring bone in my body. And yet, in the working ethic of the best of the lobstermen such as Bill, these “cowboys of the sea” connect me to my family. To its carpenters, brick masons, welders, electricians and heavy equipment operators.

In Bill’s hand, I recognized my father.

All through my childhood, my father rose long before dawn, even on the many Chicago winter days when temperatures were too cold to pour concrete and held no promise that any side jobs might come through. During my high school years, from the bedroom I shared with my sister that was closest to the kitchen, I’d listen to him percolate the coffee, crack open the newspaper, his stockinged feet whispering against the floor. Like the father in Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” my father in the “blueblack cold” with “cracked hands that ached/from labor in the weekday weather made/ banked fires blaze.” Only then, “when the rooms were warm,” after he’d “driven out the cold,” he’d come to my door, tap, murmur my name into the dark.

For years, I didn’t know how to be grateful. I was often clumsy in the minutes we sat together in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure what to do with my embarrassment whenever, out of love and a father’s diminishing sense of usefulness, he offered to drive me to the bus stop in his dinged truck with its painted sign proclaiming to the world his name, our phone number, his cement mason status. On mornings too cold to refuse his offer, he’d encourage me to wait inside his idling truck until the bus came. But I almost always slipped out, hopefully unnoticed by the girls from another part of town, Doris with her science teacher father or Becky whose dad, a manager at a printing company, wore a suit and tie. And worked in a real office. Climbing down from my father’s truck, books hugged to chest, I barely waved good-bye.

I was still years away from discovering Hayden’s poem, and how, in my first reading, I was propelled to the dictionary by the usage of the poem’s last surprising word. In my desire for escape from my father’s truck, “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

Like my father, Bill is not a wage-earning employee of some conglomerate’s subsidiary, a “knowledge worker” in a technologically-rigged office even though his knowledge, of a different sort, is broad, possibly life-saving and often independent of electrical gadgetry. When Bill’s work day is done, there’s little question what he’s produced. As he pulls away from the Co-op’s scales, he knows immediately the results of his day’s labor. Such a man is likely competent in ways foreign to most of us. And to my father, too, but who, I’m convinced, is cut from the same cloth. Like Bill, he’s no stranger to manual labor. And just as Dad knows his way around a toolbox, I suspect Bill does, too.

Until a stroke partially crippled his right side late last spring, my father, at 82, still balked at calling a repairman from any of the trades, although his crawling around under one end of his house to investigate some potentially faulty wiring had become out of the question. About car engines I may know little, but I grew up with a father who was mechanic to his own cars, and mine. Our small, red brick bungalow was one he, my uncles and grandfather built, its yard like our neighbors’ staked with tall orange tiger lilies and beefsteak tomatoes and criss-crossed with clothes lines where men’s work clothes dried, each declaring which manual trade claimed which house. A far cry from the neighborhoods I’d years later come to live in, in houses where sisters didn’t have to share a bedroom or, with everyone else under the same roof, a single bathroom. Places where no one drove a truck except the hired help.

Back in my childhood’s bungalow, long before my body telegraphed to brain some impending discomfort, my father in anticipation and with well-stocked toolbox, addressed malfunction. With wood or wire, concrete or pipe, his hands perhaps dangerously linked to power saw or blow torch, he not just assembled or added a part but fixed and made, and with the same immediate satisfaction, I have to hope, as that of an electrician who flips a switch or a plumber who turns a valve. Or when an inert chunk of metal or block of wood jumps to life, or an engine coaxed from the dead sputters then roars. And with a competence unlike but also similar to that of Bill, who, though many of us struggle to squeeze our cars into a tight parking space or on a rainy Interstate pass an 18-wheeler heaving spray against our windshield, can, if caught in a plunging storm only briefly heralded on radar, steer his small boat safely back into harbor. As though born to it like a pelagic guillemot to the deep sea’s pitch and roll, he almost makes it look easy.

Privileged folks like my husband and me are able to spend summers on this island. To many of us, it’s a place where we feel most at home. In increasing numbers, after making money elsewhere, often while sitting in an office, we retire here. And we, too, are competent. We, too, do things with our hands. We rig our garages and shops, knowing, perhaps, our way around a table saw or under a hood. Perhaps we carve or weave. Or we keep chickens, grow vegetables in raised beds. For hours, we might spend time in our woods, chainsawing and splitting felled trees. But it’s when I see Bill or when from my window I watch my lobsterman neighbor with whom I share this road and who, when the light’s barely up and shedder season is upon us, hauls traps close to our shore, that I glimpse my father.

For so many years, it was as if I was working to put distance between me and my heritage, avoiding hammer and drill as though were I to pick one up I’d discover my hand felt too comfortably fitted around its grip. Instead, I wound up here. And, turns out, one part of the reason I feel so comfortable and at home on this island is because of men like Bill. Of whom in them I recognize.

Today is Labor Day. The signal for many of summer’s end. But also when this no-longer-young-girl who once bolted from an idling truck needs to say: Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Dad.