A love letter to the working class, from Gwen Frisbie-Fulton

It started in the back seat of my family’s Jeep Cherokee, the one with the broken AC and vinyl seats that stuck to my thighs in the late summer heat.

After school we would wait, all the doors flung open, for my dad to get off work. My mother reading in the front seat, her book propped up on her knees; my brother stretched across the bench seat trying to put his dirty socks on my back. I am doing my homework on the floorboard, sweeping pencil shavings and dog hair out onto the gravel, the sound of hammering and table saws whirring in the distance.

Then my dad would come, plaid shirt and jeans, his head sweaty from his hard hat. He’d take the keys from my mom and steer the Jeep out to the highway. As we picked up speed, the humid Virginia air would rush into the car off the hot asphalt, catching a scent of my dad, sawdust, and blueprint ammonia, and send it back to me.

This is my love letter to the working class.

This is my love letter to the construction workers, the chippies and pavers, mudders and tapers, dancing high on their stilts, the Eagles and Juan Gabriel playing on the bright yellow Dewalt radio; my love letter to the painter who smiles and slaps the new guy on the back, laughing “looks good from my house!”

This is my love letter to the waitresses, to the cooks wearing no-slip shoes, and the dishwashers who learn all the lyrics to Outta My Mind while slinging plates in the pit with their headphones on. It’s to order tickets and tipped wage, running dishes, and stocking the low boy; to the milk crate holding the door for a smoke break.

It’s a love letter to the daycare workers, affixing bandaids and distributing apple slices, rhymes, and clean-up songs, who lock up the center after dark, put the garbage in the dumpster, and make their way across the city to tuck their own children into bed.

It’s a love letter to the orderlies hauling canvass bags of linens out to the truck bay, the officer workers sitting at gray laminate desks doing coding and billing, the grandparents who pin photos up in their cubical from that treasured weekend on the Enchantment of the Seas, the nurses who drink Diet Coke through the night, the CNAs who bring romance novels to their homebound clients.

This is a love letter to the small-town bartenders who listen to our stories and tell us when it’s time to head home; to my friend the tattoo artist who drives Uber at night waiting for his band to get big; to my son’s teacher working the register at World Market during the Christmas holiday; to my neighbor stocking the Food Lion shelves as a second job to pay for his mother’s prescriptions. It’s to the teachers rewriting the lesson plan, the landscaper re-watering the lawn, the cook reheating the duchess potatoes, parsley on the side.

This is a love letter to you, as you are because politicians will claim you, songwriters will herald you, and pundits will devour you whole, but you rarely see yourself. A love letter to you because you are scapegoated, blamed for the backwardness of policy, for ten thousand years of history; or you because you “vote against your own interests,” because they say you are uneducated, because they call you a redneck, an illegal, a baby mama because you promised me that you are saving up for a little break, maybe a few days at the shore, someday.

So, this is a love letter to the nail techs and hairdressers, the fabricators and upholsterers, the machinists and gear jammers, those driving over the road trying to get home to see the kids. It’s to the pickers and shippers packing skids, to the scuds and pacers, to the mom working the front desk at the Corpus Christi Microtell who puts her homework away when she runs my credit card and gets me a key.

It’s a love letter against all odds. A love letter written despite back rent due, broken washers, waiting on payday. A love letter composed with the sweet memories of hand-me-downs and potlucks, a day off at the lake, a church fish fry, checking in on the neighbor’s kids on a snow day. It’s a love letter made tender by the barista who shares her tips, by the store clerk who knows your brand of cigarettes, by the woman who sells pupusas and gives you extra curtido because she knows your mama, and by the big trampoline put together by all your uncles so every kid in the neighborhood can play.

It’s a love letter to bus routes and subway lines, to the access roads and drainage ditches, to the punch clock and piss tests, to the Dodge Dakotas and Chevy Colbalts that are “hardly broken in,” to work gloves and all hands inside them.

This commentary was shared with permission of the author, Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, whose Substack, “Working Class Storytelling,” is one of our favorites. Gwen also writes a monthly opinion column exclusively for us, too, so be sure to keep an eye out for it here.