Our Neighbor:

Every family that lived in our court had an American truck with a union sticker on the back and as a kid I admired them the way I thought our soldiers must have admired Patton and Sherman tanks. You once told me that the Russians couldn’t take us, not with towns like ours full of iron, full of workers tempered by the fires of foundries and mills. It wasn’t the Russians that came; it was the contract, the strike, the rounds of layoffs that blistered until your number was called. I still remember you loading up to leave for the last time, the union sticker scraped off with a putty knife, the end of the white tarp draped over your truck bed flapping as you drove away.