My Totem
I read a column last month that said we should all have a totem, and we should carry that totem with us for a year and then give it to someone special in our lives as a gift.
A totem, in this case, is an object or symbol emblematic of a person, tribe or event that is special in our lives.
I have a totem, and though I rarely carry it on my person and have never thought about giving it to anyone, I’ve had it with me since the summer of 1968. Since 2002, it’s occupied a special place on my office desk, where I see it virtually every day.
My totem is a steel bolt.
It’s about 2 inches long, but there was a time, before I threw that pot, when it was at least an inch longer.
During my college years, I spent my summers running a turret lathe in a machine shop at Tractor Works, International Harvester’s sprawling plant on the Southwest Side of Chicago. I worked second or third shift and took as much overtime as I could get.
The plant was hot and the work was dirty and monotonous. The saving grace was that I earned enough in each of those long, hot summers to pay for college — that and the interesting characters I met who populated our machine shop. There were black and white veterans of World War II and Korea, Chetniks who toiled as slave laborers in German work camps, and Jews whose tattooed wrists identified them as survivors of the Nazi death camps. There was even a Lugan who hated Russians so much that he fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front.
I don’t think anyone ever called me Mike. The DPs called me “red one” and when they said it in their thick Eastern European accents, it sounded like “Dred-wan.” The American guys called me “Red” or “Scrap-maker,” which was what they called all the college boys. It was a term of endearment.
My job was to machine 30-pound cast iron “pots” on a turret lathe. Each pot was about 24 inches in diameter and, to my unskilled eye, they were the hubcaps bolted over the sprockets that turned the tracks on earthmovers. I machined five or six of these pots every day. I was careful not to do more because the union guy warned me that if I did, the job would be retimed and they guy who replaced me would have to work a full shift to earn what I did.
One day, late in the last summer of my career as a machinist, the pot I was turning came loose while rotating at a couple hundred rpm. It spun off the lathe, flew through the air and missed hitting me by less than a foot. As it broke away, it sheared off one of the bolts that held it in place. I put the top half of the bolt in my pocket and took it home.
That bolt is my totem.
Every time I look at it, I remember those long, hot summers and what motivated me to find work that had meaning and was rewarding in ways that weren’t just monetary. On a deeper level, it reminds me of young Mike: Mike the idealist with big dreams, ready to launch his career and write new chapters of his life. I still carry his spirit with me today.
If the totem that young Mike picked up off the shop floor after his near-accident 40-plus years ago had allowed him a glimpse of his life in the second decade of the 21st century, I don’t think he would have been disappointed.