The End

Well, here we are: the last full day of work at the plant. It was announced in an all-employee meeting (with donuts and coffee) that we would be working until today. Then tomorrow morning we will be here, though I can't really imagine what kind of work is going to get done. At 11:00 is a catered lunch (hey, thanks for copy-catting the employee's club's lunch the following day, guys!) and then we are free to go. Actually, we can go before having lunch if we want, but what will pass for retirement parties will be afterward. I hope that others' families will attend, since my entire entourage plans to be there. I have no problem with them being there, but I'll feel bad if I dragged them all there and no one else came. At least we can walk around and see the place before leaving. On Friday we are having our employees club lunch at the clubhouse. Several people who previously said they weren't coming have now said they are, but it will remain to be seen how long we will be eating leftovers. It could be quite awhile, since we bought food for 100. Right now I'm emptying the stockroom carousel, taking out the things that they didn't know were there. They think they want to look through them and decide what to do with everything, but I say dump it. If they haven't known it was there anyway, it won't hurt for it to be gone. Later I have to dump our trash for the last time, saying a final goodbye to Dusty, the dead bird that nearly scared me out of my wits when I came across him, up close and personal, on an overtime Saturday a few weeks ago. When I dumped the trash a few days after encountering him, he stuck to the container and came back to the area with me, and we haven't tried to get rid of him since. (We named him Dusty because, well, he is.) Looking over the last couple of months, I have to say that I have had more fun and laughed more than at any other time in my years here. It's been loose and silly, but we have also gotten done what needed to be done. I'm trying not to think about walking out of here tomorrow, knowing that I will lose touch with most of these people even if I try not to. Of course, with some people, it will be a blessing to never see them again. My list of those people has grown through the weeks. Dad asked me last night why we kept killing ourselves with overtime, trying to get everything done. Why did we care? I don't know. I guess I'd rather be busy than bored. Then on the news there was a film clip of Maria Shriver, speaking at a women's conference, talking about the upcoming end of her career as first lady of California. She said she had worried about what comes next, what she will do after that. Then she realized that her mother would have told her, "It's OK to not know what will come next. Right now you still have a job to do. You need to finish it properly, and then you will know what comes next." Those aren't the exact words she said but I think that's why we have done what we have done, and why we have worked so hard when others slacked off. We still had a job to do, and we needed to finish it properly. We have tried.

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