Letter from Slim Wolfe
Colorado Central – April 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear Martha and Ed,
For quite a number of years I’ve been happy to offer you these cantankerous musings on a regular basis and always far in advance of your deadlines. Granted my copy isn’t always word-perfect but it seems to strike a chord in at least some of your readers. Happy enough to make a public fool out of myself, I’ve never asked for pay. I assumed that monetary compensation would rightly be the reward of those who put some pains into creating a product of value, and usually the material printed in Colorado Central meets that criteria.
In your most recent edition, however, I found a couple of dubious entries which I must assume earned their authors at least the price of a decent bottle of something-or-other. In one case a full page about straightening out the errors in someone’s bills et cetera, in another case a couple of pages about having more than one job and suffering a cut and bleeding appendage.
My story would have been far better (and deserving at least twice the pay-per-word) since having cut myself quite early while changing blades on the planer, I had to work for six hours on my hands and knees laying rock and mortar and concrete in-fill in a race against an afternoon chill which would make mortar unworkable. It flat out never crossed my mind that anyone would care to hear such a mundane tale, much less pay me to relate it, but now I see I might have described the red ooze against the blue synthetic of the glove and the grey stone and the muddy boots and the weight of the wheelbarrow and all the other stuff I take for granted and turned it into dollars so I could purchase more fossil fuel and sally forth to another take-for-granted day.
Then there’s the tube of caulk I left on the customer’s heater, the color of the sky, and the feel of the earmuffs and whine of the saw … the shirt of the supermarket checker, man I could have been CASHING IN, DUDES!!!
But I’ll get even, you bet I will. I’ll grow old and be a burden on the state, and all you taxpayers who pocket a buck for run-of-the-mill whatevers will have to carry my shaggy behind down the road a bit. Ha!
Yours for Solidarity forever, equal pay, and chickens that lay
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
P.S.: I mean, this letter-writing is getting more hazardous daily. Just last week I got a voice-mail from another publication asking me to verify that I had written a letter, so, like a dutiful automaton, I returned the call, endured the three-minute spiel on the machine, and at the beep left my message, which of course didn’t verify anything that I could see, since I could have signed my letter Ed Quillen and verified myself as Quillen and no one would have been the wiser. Say, now there’s a hundred words in this post script, maybe, and at a nickel a word, oh, and did I tell you….
