Meanwhile, millions look for work with little hope of finding family-supporting jobs of the kind that always served as the underpinnings of our domestic economy. I ache for these people, not knowing what dreams there are that they can hold anymore to keep them pushing for better days ahead.

On this Labor Day, I choose to offer the following tale as a celebration of those who still find joy and sustenance in a full day's work; of those men and women who actually contribute their labors to the benefit of each of our communities on Main Street. A toast, if you will, to the Kowalczyks and the O'Neills and the Franks and the Pogos and the "kids" who still get up each day and offer their sweat and their labor and their lives for their own sense of self and for what they hope is a reasonable piece of the economic pie.

Solidarnosc! Here is "Kowalczyk's Hat": 

"Messenger of sympathy and love

Servant of parted friends

Consoler of the lonely

Bond of the scattered family

Enlarger of the common life

Carrier of news and knowledge

Instrument of trade and industry

Promoter of mutual acquaintance

of peace and goodwill

among men and nations."

Inscription on entrance to

The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum

2 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E.

Washington, D. C. 20013-7012

Kowalczyk showed up for work today wearing a hat. It was a wonderful hat, an Irish walking hat of the kind that is usually made of a herringbone fabric with a feather stuck in the hatband on the side.

Kowalczyk never wears a hat. Even in winter, his black hair is left slicked back close to his head as the only covering it requires.

Forklift operator Jim O'Neill stood close to me and spoke in a near-whisper while Kowalczyk pushed another load of mail onto his truck. "He can't be serious!" he hissed. "Does he really think that hat looks good on him?"

I just chuckled and shook my head, too busy getting my own truck loaded to stand and talk. But I think Kowalczyk knows exactly how the hat looks to the others on the loading dock. 

The guys on the loading dock all noticed Kowalczyk's hat. It stands to reason, really. Kowalczyk's hat didn't have a feather in the hatband, as it should. More importantly, it wasn't made of herringbone material. Instead, it glistened with the sheen of fake satin. And it was blue; a radioactive, neon kind of electric robin's egg blue that was intensified in some laboratory somewhere until it became a garish hue not found in nature.

Kowalczyk is a big man, around sixty years old, tall and broad shouldered with an ample midsection. His very long and spindly legs look ill equipped to support the rest of him, and these are always covered by baggy, black polyester slacks with cuffs that flow over the crepe soles on his black oxfords. A black, oversized t-shirt drapes loosely to cover him to mid-thigh. His clothes are clean, although the pants cuffs are frayed and dirty from brushing the floor.

Kowalczyk carries well the attitude of a grumpy old man. He has sad eyes, and jowls that seem to pull downward on the corners of his mouth. He is capable of fixing a glare that is almost breathtaking in its expression of contempt and displeasure and he uses this at times to good effect. It isn't that he is always as surly as he looks, but he takes entertainment in keeping others guessing if he is actually dyspeptic or if it's all for show. Among those who know him and have earned his respect, a withering look and a sarcastic verbal assault is quite often followed by a disarming smile that is genuine and completely lights up his face. In the contrast, he let's you know that "Hey! You're all right! I'm glad you're here."

I am among those who are frequent targets of his mischief.  "Hey, Jackass!" he yelled at me yesterday after spotting me talking to Eric--another driver--as a few cages of mail were delivered to my dock space. "You gonna' get that shit off the dock? Or you gonna' just let it get in the way of everyone else around here who's trying to get some work done?" And then he laughed, letting us know that all was well with him. It's just part of the entertainment that takes place every day on the dock.

The Downtown Milwaukee Post Office occupies a large city block and stands four stories tall. It's a key facility that serves as a regional hub in the mail distribution network. Remarkably, the truck loading docks are inside the building, on the second floor. Ramps lead into the east and west sides, and these are gaping openings into the building that allow fresh air to circulate throughout the space in both winter and summer.

When this building was constructed in the nineteen fifties, a lot of mail moved by railroad and nearly every passenger train in the country was dispatched with a mail car in which letters and packages were sorted as the train moved from one city to the next. The Hiawatha of the Chicago Northwestern line serviced Milwaukee back then, and the passenger terminal and rail yard took up all the space on the first floor. Amtrak now takes the space, but the mail moves mostly by truck since the advent of the interstate highway system.

Trucks--as many as one thousand per day--proceed along the south wall once they are inside the second story. The loading platform is an open, raised area that stretches along to the driver's left, and this is backed by a wall that closes off the entire area from the interior of the building. The traffic flow arrangement allows the trucks to back into the dock from the driver's side as opposed to the "blind-side." Drivers avoid blind-side backing in even the best of circumstances. With a tractor-trailer, backing to your right side is an exercise in backing up "blind" until you hit something. Hopefully it's the dock. It's more likely to be the truck next to you. It's never pretty, and so the layout of the space and the traffic pattern is arranged to make blind-side backing unnecessary.

Backing in on the driver's side is not a slam-dunk, either. A driver's competence is judged by his peers according to how well he operates in reverse gear. The four a.m. scheduled load time for the Star Routes is the only time of the day that all fifty docks are used simultaneously. Congestion is a given, but the patience of all can be pushed to the limits by a driver who can't find his way back into his dock.

Kowalczyk is the Dean of the Star Route Drivers. He's been here the longest--over thirty years--and he takes it as part of his job to "keep everyone in line," as he puts it. "Every outfit needs a ball-breaker," he once told me, and he is good at what he does.

"Hey, Beckerhead!" Kowalczyk yells, and Lenny Becker sticks his head out from the trailer seven stalls down from where Kowalczyk's truck is parked. It's the first we've heard from Kowalczyk so far this morning. I can't help but think he looks considerably less threatening than usual with that hat, which gleams like a glitter ball suspended over a prison yard.

"I didn't think you were ever going to get the Queen Mary up to the pier this morning." Kowalczyk growls at Becker. "Me and the boys finished three hands of sheepshead, and I lost every one of 'em just waiting for you to get backed in and get the hell outta' the way so the rest of us could get in here! What the fuck is up with that?""

"Aw, kiss my ass," Becker says, turning back into his trailer to hide. His lack of backing skills have now been duly noted for everyone to hear, as Kowalzcyk has done on a few previous occasions. Becker is a young kid; a relatively new driver. He'll renew his focus upon developing his skills until he is no longer treated as one of Kowalczyk's "steering wheel holders," subject to his abuse. Or he'll quit altogether, tired of the constant harangue from Kowalczyk that is offered for the benefit of the rest of us who suffer each morning, waiting to get into the dock while Becker thrashes about in his incompetence for all to see.

"The rest of us" are a disparate cast of characters. Most are truck drivers by trade who augment the Star Route to which we are assigned with other routes that fill out our workday. Some of these drivers are here to start their day, while most are night drivers like me who are here to perform this route as a way to close out their regular work routine.

I begin my shift each evening on the opposite end of the Star Route, bringing the mail into the Milwaukee Post Office from Mequon and Thiensville at the close of their business day. I then do two trips to the Madison Post Office, hauling mail between the two hubs before showing up here in the morning to finish my shift with a return to my assigned cities on the Star Route some twelve and a half hours after I began. I cover nearly four hundred miles a night, five nights a week. Whatever entertainment is offered from Kowalczyk and the others is therefore a welcome diversion that helps dispel the sleepiness that invariably threatens to overtake me in the early morning hours.

There are other drivers at the Milwaukee dock who work outside the industry. Bubbles Bement is a tavernkeeper. Josh Morgan is a minister at an Evangelical Christian Church. And Molly Pritchard is a housewife who used to drive school bus until the day she realized "some smartass high-schooler's going to die if I gotta' do this every day!" She's now quite happy hauling the mail part-time, twice a day. It's a varied assortment of characters; young, old, farmers, city slickers, hip hop gangstas and old hippies--and of course an assortment of Harley bikers and pretend cowboys. All come together each morning, and it's Kowalczyk who keeps everyone in line.

At full operation, the loading dock in Milwaukee is a pretty tense place. It's crowded, with lots of people moving around and work getting done. For the drivers, it's an hour filled with short periods of hard, manual labor pushing heavy carts loaded with mail up ramps into trucks. These short bursts of activity are interspersed with longer periods of stand-around time. Drivers pace, anxious to get done and get out of there. Some stand around talking. Others--less sociable, perhaps, and who can blame them at such an early time of day?--stare off into space or maybe just at the clock and avoid making contact with others. There's a mix of personalities not unlike anything you might find in any community. But this congregation of saints and sinners; of solid citizens and misfits; of the clean and the unwashed; of scholars and imbeciles; is all tightly held within a small space, with everyone maintaining a keen focus on completing their tasks and getting down the road.

Kowalczyk and I are standing around talking, waiting for more mail to come off the freight elevators. He tells me he has a girlfriend.

"Nice hat!" I had said to begin the conversation, but Kowalczyk grunted and smiled only a bit in response to my expressed sarcasm. He obviously wasn't taking the bait to explain his choice of topper for the day, so I then talked about the Brewers game that was played last night, a comeback win against the Cardinals. Kowalczyk doesn't really like baseball and so he talked about his girlfriend, instead. She's his ex-girlfriend, actually, and it seems the whole thing ended badly but now they are friends.

"I think she'd marry me if I asked her to," he says. He then tells me she had just bought him a pick-up truck. His neighbor had it for sale and he liked it, so she just bought it and gave it to him. It's a Chevy S-10, he tells me, and it's a good runner and doesn't use a drop of oil.

I don't mention anything about the ugly incident from the day before, but I know it's on his mind. Sometimes, Kowalczyk misfires in his attempt to play the grumpy old man, and yesterday it almost blew up in his face.

JADTran is a contractor who holds a number of the Star Route Contracts, and their trucks and drivers are scattered up and down the dock. The Waukesha contract is probably the most difficult of the lot. It usually leaves with a one hundred percent load, and on most days the bulk of it seems to arrive on the dock within minutes of the scheduled five a.m. departure. As a result, a steady stream of drivers seem to take over the route only to quit within weeks as they find the work to be overwhelming and the schedule impossible to keep.

A new driver started the Waukesha route earlier this week. He's kind of a wiry guy, probably late twenties. He doesn't talk much, but I peg him to be a farm kid given the white forehead beneath the Renk's Seed gimme-cap on his head and the farmer tan showing from beneath the sleeves on his NASCAR t-shirts. Yesterday, the last of his mail had arrived--twelve rolling cages of mail, each one weighing over a thousand pounds. They all needed to be loaded within the next ten minutes for him to remain on schedule.

Sometimes, mail gets misplaced by the handlers on the dock so that the mail for one city will be left in the area of a truck that services a different city. It happens. No big deal. Yesterday, Kowalczyk discovered a cage full of Waukesha mail at his location, and used it as an opportunity to introduce himself to the new driver.

"Hey, JADTran!" Kowalczyk yelled down the dock. "You wanna' get your goddam mail off my dock?!?"

The kid looked in Kowalczyk's direction. "Are you talking to me?" he yelled, and there was certainly no note of humor in the voice.

Kowalczyk simply pointed to the cage and glared back at him. What happened next was nearly catastrophic, if not altogether unforeseen. Fistfights, physical threats, and other acts of violence are strictly prohibited by the Postal Service at any of their facilities, and a runaway hothead now threatened both men with the potential loss of their jobs.

The kid turned red in the face, and a look of rage infused every fiber of his being. He shoved aside the cage he had lined up to be loaded and stormed down the dock at a quick pace, working his lower jaw on clenched teeth. I apparently wasn't the only one who saw a fight coming, as O'Neill got off his forklift and stood between the two men. I hustled toward Kowalczyk, anxious to steer him out of harm's way.

Kowalczyk fired one more glare in the kid's direction, and then shoved the cage toward him. I then walked him toward his trailer, while O'Neill intercepted the kid by pushing the cage full of mail in the direction toward where the kid's truck was parked. The driver instinctively fell in alongside O'Neill to help, but then paused.

"Fuck you, you old man!" he yelled at Kowalczyk, turning toward him and me, now jabbing a finger in our direction as he spoke. "You EVER talk to me like that again, and I'll kick your ass! Understand?"

Kowalczyk said nothing as the other two worked their way down the dock, pushing their cartload of mail. It was embarrassing for Kowalczyk, and he struggled to overcome the mistake he had just made.

"Aw, fuck him if he can't take a joke," he grumbled to me. The other drivers all did their best to pretend they didn't notice what had just gone on, and Kowalczyk made himself pretty scarce the rest of the time before we all departed for our deliveries.

I wondered what today would bring, but I never guessed Kowalczyk would show up wearing a hat. And I certainly had no idea what it all meant, even as I found it to be quite amusing.

More mail arrived for Kowalczyk, and so he suspended our little chat about the girlfriend and the pickup truck and returned to his dock. From where I stand, I see that the overhead lights shine upon the fake satin covering Kowalczyk's hat. Bright blue light is reflected in flashes of brilliance not previously seen from that quarter. It creates an impression that a blue-light special has suddenly appeared in our midst. I mention this to Frank, who stands nearby and is the Postal Clerk charged with monitoring the activity on the dock.

Frank hates this place and thinks he should have retired last year when the Postal Service offered an early-pension buy-out. He doesn't really do much in terms of work; in fact, he carefully avoids ever touching the mail or doing anything else that isn't in his very limited job description. Frank carries a clipboard, a walkie-talkie, and a pen--nothing else. He never talks to anyone on the two-way radio, and no one ever calls him. It's presumed that he files his reports at the end of his shift, but it's also quite likely that no one ever does anything with them. Whoever might have ever been in charge of reviewing Frank's daily reports probably took the early buy-out, and it's doubtful they would have been replaced.

Frank grunts in response to my "blue light special" comment but doesn't look at me. Instead, he glances at Kowalczyk, looks at his clipboard, and then mutters something about our good fortune for the dearth of K-Mart shoppers hereabouts. He then moves on, careful to avoid the heavy lift of the smile that might threaten to overtake him if he stays.

O'Neill is back. He just kind of hangs around to hear what Frank had to say, all while making a show of rearranging some of the nearby cages filled with mail that clutter the dock. The mail handler looks at me and grins in response to Frank's comments. I explain to him that Frank is, of course, right about the shoppers. Women swarming to the beacon would be disappointed to find out there is nothing special being offered at Kowalczyk's location. In fact, they would probably be loudly berated and then scurry away under a barrage of insults and cussing. And laughter, too.

"Got that right!" O'Neill laughs, and he's off again in pursuit of the next load of mail to be brought to the dock from his assigned elevator.

All of this has been said loudly enough for Kowalczyk to hear, but I get no response. Except for the dressing down of Becker that occurred earlier, he remains uncharacteristically quiet.

I look at him and wonder about the hat. Where did he find such a thing? It's well constructed and was probably quite expensive when it was originally sold. It's really quite fashionable and chic, but in a mid-nineteen-seventies-disco-ish kind of way. Just where the hell was Kowalczyk when he came across this raffish piece of headware? What prompted him to think "Oh, yeah! Gotta' have it!"

"What!?" Kowalczyk screams at me as he catches me looking his way, staring at him. I tell him his hat has no feather.

Mike Mulligan jumps into the discussion. Mulligan is the driver who is backed in next to me, between me and Kowalczyk.  He services Belgium, Cedarburg, and Port Washington.

"Oh, he don't want no feather! Are you kidding me?"

Mulligan often entertains us all with over-the-top theatrics when there is a break in the action. Sometimes, he's Shakespeare and he'll launch into a soliloquy that sounds both Elizabethan and profane, with a few couplets thrown in for good measure. Other times, he might channel Patrick Henry, or maybe Winston Churchill, or even Karl Malden from On the Waterfront, which is one of my personal favorites. And his Ghandi is perfect! Nearly all work comes to a stop when he plays Ghandi. People lean in close to hear the words being spoken as Mulligan-Ghandi exhorts us all to just say "to hell with it!" and join with him in a salt march to the sea.

Having gotten everyone's attention, Mulligan now musses his hair up before jumping atop the nearest pile of empty pallets that will serve as his stage. Looking at the thin hair now arranged in a comb-over atop his bald head, I'm guessing that today we are getting Clarence Darrow.

"Ladies and Gentleman, I put to you the case that if Kowalczyk, here, places a feather in that hat, he'll be just like all the rest of those old farts in funny hats."

Mulligan raises himself to his full height--around six foot two--before continuing in a theatrical voice, using gestures, perfect diction, and everything. "Aw, you know the kind." he snarls, and a wicked sneer crosses his face. "Driving a Buick LeSaber, or maybe one of them Taurus station wagons. Down at the park by the lake. Piles of stale bread in clear plastic garbage bags shoved in the back, 'midst the other clear plastic bags filled with aluminum cans for recycling.  Sitting sideways with the door open on the driver's side, feet on the ground, feeding the ducks and geese. The same ones--Yes! The very same ones!--that shit all over the playground equipment and the picnic tables. That's him. That's Kowalczyk, telling the neighbors and the cops who complain to 'Go to hell! I'll feed these sonsabitches anytime and anywhere I want to! Go away! Leave me alone!'"

Mulligan pauses for effect, his head swiveling to cast a glaring eye in every direction; his right thumb hooked into his imaginary suspenders at his breast. I was right. It's Clarence Darrow.

"This man--Kowalczyk--he wants no feather in his hat!" says he in summation, pointing his finger and waving it at Kowalczyk.  The finger now stabs and wags at the heavens. "Nay, the world is not such a place that could withstand the insult of Mr. Kowalczyk receiving a feather in his cap!"

Kowalczyk pretends he doesn't hear any of this, but is chuckling as he goes about his business of loading the mail onto his truck. Shamika stopped nearby to watch this performance from her forklift, and she now leads a smattering of applause for Mulligan's performance. He looks around to take it all in, and then bows for the audience.

I glance down the dock toward where the Waukesha driver stands. He isn't smiling. He has only a few carts to load on his nearly empty truck and he makes himself busy with that, ignoring everything else happening on the dock.

All activities throughout the building are now geared toward getting the mail off the machines that sort it--all the letters, magazines, advertisers, and small parcels that have arrived at the plant from any and all corners of the world. Hundreds of tons of mail accumulate during the day, every day. It is sorted and stored throughout the building long into the night and early morning, waiting to be loaded onto our trucks. The mail is then dispatched aboard these trucks to the local post offices where the carriers will make the final sort before delivering it door to door.

The mail handlers shuttle the mail down to the loading docks where Kowalczyk and I and the other drivers and their trucks await. Forklifts and tow motors and operators and mail handlers and supervisors all scurry about among the rolling cages and pallets that clutter the dock. It's the gathering of a storm surge that bursts upon the streets every morning, just before daybreak.

The flow of the mail inside the building is now reduced to a trickle as the last of the freight is rounded up and dispatched to the docks. The drivers wait in anticipation of the "All Clear!" to be hollered by the foreman, talking and joking among themselves to pass the time. All fifty trucks will leave the building at once, some by the front exit and others to the rear. It's a raucous storm that occurs every morning precisely at five a. m. as this rag-tag fleet of trucks and drivers spill out onto the surface streets in downtown Milwaukee.

You can smell the ozone that hangs in the warm, moist air following an early morning rainfall. It enters into the loading area on a slight breeze that freshens the air even as it spreads a little chill. The streets glisten outside and water drips from the late-to-arrive trucks where they stand at the docks after having run through the rain to get here. The traffic-way inside the building remains wet from where the truck tires shed water as they approached their assigned stalls, and the remains of the morning shower drip from the rigs and perfectly outline their position on the concrete floor beneath them where they are parked.

The light rain has dissipated and the skies are now clear. The dawn appears through the large opening on the east side of the loading area. It shows as a sliver of light on the horizon that will lift upward and quickly gain on us like a tidal wave over Lake Michigan. A tension among the drivers builds as the trucks become full with the mail to be delivered. Everyone grows anxious to get started.

It's a flood of mail that's about to be sent forth, and before the sun goes down nearly every home and business in southeastern Wisconsin will be touched by it as it surges inland to arrive at their doorstep. Upon their release, the drivers behind the wheels of these rigs will slam through their gears, causing their trucks to rush forward just ahead of the daylight that is about to wash over the cavernous streets. The noise and the commotion always occurs as a surge that will all mightily overwhelm the downtown grid. Trucks in bunches will fill the streets, racing toward one of the many entrance ramps at the Marquette Interchange, sluicing onto the proper interstate highway that will send them coursing toward their specific destination. Some will head north on I-43. Others, south. The rest will take the ramp that sends them onto I-94 west. And then a peacefully eerie quiet will visit downtown once again as the first of the day's commuters slowly begin filling the streets. These drivers in their automobiles will hold coffee mugs in their hand as they float quietly in on the backwash from the highway.

"Hey! Let's get the show on the road!" demands Kowalczyk, yelling at the nearest available clerk. The clerk ignores him, knowing we are still minutes away from the appointed time of release. He also knows--as most certainly does Kowalczyk--that he isn't finished loading his mail. Kowalczyk still has one cage coming, and he is just blowing off steam. Now, he saunters toward the men's room at the far end of the dock, as is his usual routine at this time every morning.

There's a clattering of noise on the dock as three tow-motors and their operators burst through the doorway from inside. Each pulls three cages filled with mail, all with printed headers on them that show they are destined for Waukesha. Another tow motor with another three cages follows closely behind. They overtake and roll past Kowalczyk, who doesn't seem to notice, and then stop at the JADTran kid's dock where they pile up behind the truck. The mail is left there in a jumbled mess that nearly blocks the dock altogether.

The kid looks wholly exasperated at the mess of mail that now needs to be loaded. As he spots Kowalczyk coming, the look changes to a fit of anger and he quickly grabs a cage to turn it toward the truck. The pathway is now completely blocked as the kid gets into position behind the cage to push it onboard. Kowalczyk pauses close by but says nothing.

The ramp into the truck is short, but there is a substantial incline. It's a common exercise to get a run at the ramp when pushing a cage to gain some momentum that will help carry it over the hump. The kid is denied this opportunity, however, by the closeness of the other cages waiting to be loaded. Instead he leans hard into the heavy cage and lunges forward.

The cart surges up the ramp, but it suddenly veers to the right. The right front caster-wheel underneath the cage collapsed as it hit the ramp, and the kid is now at risk of dropping the errant cart off the ramp on that side where it will most assuredly tip over and collapse to the floor. Kowalczyk is suddenly at risk of being squashed where he stands. He sees what's happening and jumps aside in response. If it goes, there's no point trying to stop it from tumbling. It's simply too heavy to arrest its movement if it drops the broken wheel over the edge of the ramp as threatened and begins a dramatic crash to the floor.

In a quick move, the kid jerks back on the handle to stop it's forward progress. The cart now reverses course, backing the kid up as it surges back down the ramp toward the dock. Everyone is watching, now, and an audible gasp is heard along with a couple shouts. The kid is about to be power-driven into the other cages that wait nearby to be loaded.

Kowalczyk reacts quickly. He jumps in alongside the kid and leans his shoulder into the cage, planting his feet in a way to gain maximum leverage. The cart stops just short of making a pressed meat sandwich of the two men. Then, with an explosive push and a grunt, Kowalczyk forces the cart to reverse direction yet again, and it sails noisily back up the ramp, over the hump, and into the truck.

The kid looks at Kowalczyk, and there is still horror in his eyes over what has just happened. The whole incident took only a few seconds, but he realizes just how close to being totally out-of-control he was in the moments the cart took over as a menacing beast threatening to do bodily harm.

Kowalczyk says nothing. He grabs the next cart and pushes it onto the truck. Then another. The kid has to move quickly just to get the carts all staged properly within the truck while leaving room for Kowalczyk to get the next one onboard.

Kowalczyk hasn't even acknowledged the kids presence as he breaks into a sweat getting the mess of mail off the dock and into the truck. After the last cage is loaded, he turns back toward his own truck and walks away. There's no more time left for a trip to the bathroom, and the mail handlers have left the last cage on the dock for Kowalczyk to load before leaving.

"Hey, Kowalczyk!" yells the kid, and there's a bit of brass in the voice. Kowalczyk pauses and turns back in his direction, spotting the kid where he stands at the opening into his trailer. Kowalczyk says nothing but just raises an eyebrow in response, awaiting whatever it is the kid has to say.

"Thanks!" the kid says, and there's no mistaking the note of sincerity in the voice. "Thanks for helping out. It's really appreciated."

Kowalczyk nods and raises his hand slightly before turning. "No problem," he mutters as he heads back down the dock.

"Oh, and Kowalczyk!" the kid yells. "One more thing!"

Kowalczyk again stops and turns.

"Nice fucking hat!" The kid yells, loud enough for everyone to hear. There's a sneer written plainly across his face and in his voice, as well. "Does your mother always dress you like that when she sends you out in public?"

For just a moment, there's a look of surprised bewilderment on Kowalczyk's face. He then sees the kid break into a wide grin. It's a warm, welcoming smile of a kind we've all seen before and fully recognize; the kind that says "Hey! You're all right! I'm glad you're here!"

Kowalczyk waves his hand in acknowledgment and turns toward his truck once again. As he approaches me, I notice a look of accomplishment about him. He winks at me in passing, and mutters with a nod of his head "Good kid. Gonna' be all right."

As Kowalczyk gets back to his truck, he moves to get the last cage loaded. "Pogo" Mortenson is a driver who covers Pewaukee and Delafield. Pogo didn't see anything of what just happened from his spot a long way down the dock, and he is running a bit late. He pauses for just a moment as he hurries down the dock to sign for and pick up his registered mail. "Hey, Kowalczyk!" he yells. "You run over a clown this morning on the way in to work and steal his hat?"

"Kiss my ass!" barks Kowalczyk. Pogo just shrugs and walks on, having said his piece. Kowalczyk laughs, then, and the sound of his laughter reverberates down the near-empty dock. He looks right at me and winks as he pushes his hat tighter onto his head with his right hand before moving into position to gain leverage on a heavy cart to be loaded. He then pauses one more time, first glaring at me and then grinning mischievously as he leans into a cart load of mail. I simply stand there, smiling.

"What!?" he yells, pretending to be perplexed. Without waiting for response he lunges forward and disappears into his truck, pushing his last cartload of mail ahead of him.

I assume we've probably seen the last of Kowalczyk's hat. We are finished here for today. In another two minutes, the foreman will bark the "All clear!" The overhead door is slid closed on my trailer, and it makes a familiar thump and metallic clank as the latch is set. I bend to install the padlock and then stand free in anticipation of the final call. The dock is virtually empty of all mail, and only a few mail handlers slowly move about looking for quitting time in the absence of anything else to do. I look up and down the dock and see the whole collection of drivers standing by their trucks, pacing and fretting as they await the word to leave. We're ready to go. It's time to get the show on the road.