When I was 20 years old I took a job working for a manufacturer’s rep. My father was my boss and since we were the first father/son combination ever to show up at this company he was especially hard on me. He didn’t want anyone to think I was being favored. We were the representatives for the Northern Indiana Brass Company at the time. NIBCO makes copper fittings but we didn’t stock any of them. The factory would ship the goods directly to the wholesalers and my job was to keep track of who got what. I was a clerk. From nine until five I would look at factory-shipment records and make checkmarks on the customers’ orders. I sat at an old wooden desk and shuffled paper all day long. I had a mechanical calculator that was the size of a toaster oven. It chugged back and forth like an unbalanced washing machine. Day after day I processed paper, never really knowing what I was dealing with. I never got to meet the people who made, or bought, or installed this stuff.
One day I wandered out to the warehouse where the company kept a very small supply of copper fittings, which they used mostly for samples. I picked up a simple copper elbow and carried it back to my desk. I liked the way it blinked brown and shiny in the florescent light. That afternoon when the phone calls died down I found myself playing absentmindedly with that copper elbow. I stuck my pinkie through it and felt its smoothness. I remember wondering how they got it to be that smooth. I had never been to a factory. I could only wonder.
In the days that followed, and mostly out of boredom, I began to think more and more about that simple copper elbow. I picked it up and held it to my nose. Copper has a particular odor that’s unlike anything else. It reminded me of the taste I’d get in my mouth when I ran too hard on autumn days during touch football games. That simple copper elbow reminded me of friends who had moved away years before.
As the days went by I started to think about where the copper came from. I imagined a mine in Chile or some other exotic place I would probably never get to visit. Chile was in the news a lot back then and I read that they had copper. I thought of the men who went down into the earth and clawed the copper from the rocks. I imagined their skin to be as brown as the copper itself. I wondered what their lives were like, if they had wives and children, and if their children would someday work in the mines too.
