Willy Loman's twin
by Glen Sorestad
[ poetry - may 09 ]
At sixty my father was all used up.
In 1947 at fifty-one he embarked
on a new career as a salesman,
driving an always-second-hand sedan
in billowing clouds of gravel dust
along highways and roads of Saskatchewan.
It was not that my father was
unaccustomed to life hunched behind
the steering wheel of any vehicle,
having run the gauntlet in his bachelor days
from a Chicago taxi to lumbering gravel
and gravelly lumber trucks. The road
had been his home for over twenty years.
But a Loman-esque town-to-town drummer,
beating the dirt roads for sales is much
more than mere steering and though
my father must have had his nose
rubbed in this realization many times,
he never dropped a word about
how soul-destroying it must have been
for a man of fifty-one to become
what was expected of a travelling salesman
in largely rural Saskatchewan of 1950.
At sixty my father was all used up.
Fuller brushes, first. Then Electrolux
vacuum cleaners, one dusty farm home
to another. Then Nutty Club confections.
My father tried his best to become
the glib raconteur, a man with a smile
you could see a mile, a man who
could sell milk to a dairy maid.
He tried. But it wasn't who he was.
At fifty-one his tongue became more
important to him than his eyes
on the road, hands on the wheel.
Salesmen of the day worked
for minimal or no salaries or expenses -
relying on commissions on their sales
to cover their expenses and bring
something home to their families
at week's end. My mother worked
as a cook in a school dormitory
and her salary paid our household bills.
Father struggled to meet car payments.
On some sharp gravel curve my father
lost his cheerful smile as the road drove
him into a gritty cloud of depression.
By sixty my father was all used up.
If he'd had a life insurance policy
my father might well have been given
to Willy Loman thoughts about a man
being worth more dead than alive.
When he turned sixty, I was seventeen
a high school grad working in a prairie bank.
I couldn't fathom the torment my father
was enduring. Even when he died
at sixty-three, it would take years before
I could appreciate how devastating it was
for him to try to become, late in his life,
something he was never meant to be,
something he never wanted to be,
something that left him empty and spent,
a potato chip bag tossed from a car window.
