Joe of Glace Bay

Joe of Glace Bay

       Dulcimer Doug

eating we do regular

loving we do not

money’s in my memory

the rest i have forgot

Dulce is a food east coasters chew. Seaweed, it has in it salt, vitamins, minerals and telltale bits of fish and shelled creatures. The dietary supplements provided by this delicacy make it an all around nutritious addition to the individual’s healthy food intake. Manufacturers proceed by laying lines of it on docks in the sun and letting the wind dry it the way prairie farmers dry their windrows of cut grain. It is then packaged and shipped to market. A laborer first comes along each line and places boxes of ziplocks down at six foot intervals. Then packagers arrive who follow the line, filling the bags as full as they can stuff them. A picker-up comes with a wheel barrow and places all these filled plastic containers in a pickup at the end of the line. The pickup drives the load of market-ready dulce to the warehouse in town from which it is distributed to stores the length and breadth of the Maritimes.

       Joe was a picker-up. He wheeled the barrow that collected the packages. He chewed dulce as he plied his trade. At fifty-seven he felt glad to have work. Each morning he smiled as he dressed, thinking that this day he would provide. Unmarried, he still felt that he served well. Some feel a certain anxiety to produce children. This state in them causes much in their marriages, namely their concern over the mathematics of conception, their attentiveness to elders on all matters, especially the rearing of children, their opinions about work habits, their notions of personal hygiene, and their understanding of proper dress. Joe suffered from none of these delusions of permanence. Each day was its own event, skittering across the surface of its hours like ice on a hot stove.

       He was grand, was Joe, but he did not know it. He had been born to a Belgium prince and a Norwegian princess. Somewhere during his first five years, a madman had stolen him from his cradle and kept him till he reached the age of eleven. Something noble in him made him balk at the livelihood he was expected to make. One day, he decided never again to steal a purse or watch and instead hiked over the French countryside in search of adventure. And adventure he found. He had little trouble obtaining work aboard a vessel bound for foreign shores. Joe had no idea where it intended to travel, but little by little, as it plied the waves, he realized that its ultimate destination was the coast of North America. They stopped in Newfoundland and he jumped ship. He hid for weeks in haylofts and shelter belts until he deemed it safe to venture out. The first place he asked, he got work. This was the dulce factory. Here he had happily labored for twenty-seven years and now he barrowed his way up and down the lines of dry dulce with a manner grand and imperial to behold. He was Joe, the picker-up at Glace Bay. No one could deny him his joy.