My Father's Eightieth Birthday 2 Poem by Denis Mair

2
He set the wheels in motion:
Planting the seed, implanting the code,
Loops of energy transfer, metabolic pathways, enzyme cascades;
Tensegrity structures of actin fiber
shift and open each area of the DNA supercoil;
Helixes unwinding at 100 r.p.m. to be replicated for dividing cells.
Love, to join the pieces of new life;
Warm concern to foster it;
Food to nourish it;
Dialogue to educate it;
Letting go to let it find its way.

He set the wheels in motion:
Prowling auctions for the old solid Pratt & Whitney lathes,
Re-cutting the ruined gear assemblies,
Cajoling salesmen for bar stock: "A fair price for a small shop."
After retirement he helped two machine shops get their operations running,
At 79 he left Ohio, but they are still in business.

He set the wheels in motion:
Young people came to learn machining,
They could not serve a long apprenticeship.
His craft was replaced by engineers
at magnetic-tape work stations.
But still there was a need for specialty shops,
for small runs and precision.
He walked his young partners through the whole operation,
Verbalizing it all in his not-so-simple blend
OfMachinist's Blue Book and Mark Twain.
His young workers learned the basic skills
And if there was time, and work was sailing along
He shared with them his harvest of reflection,
His vision of buffering needs against each other,
To stand and not be slave to one or two.
Quite a few Canton kids from the 60s through the 80s
Learned a richer strain of words from his everyday speech.
He has left the machine shop down on South Cherry,
But his turns of phrase and thoughts are still spoken.

He set the wheels in motion:
From working with rolling mills he knew the market.
Guide rolls get banged up when rolling bar-steel,
They are hard to polish after heat anneals the surface.
He experimented with ceramic tool bits, new carbides from Japan,
He devised a gradated system, cutting used rolls to smaller sizes.
He used hard-to-cut steels that would last in the rolling mills.
He taught beginners to do it all:
He was only a mentor, the old lathe man;
Now in a good year E.M.Bair grosses two million.

He sets the wheels in motion:
A few of the people he worked with were troubled,
He worked alone with an ex-con who had killed a man.
One day two women came looking for work,
His boss did not like the way they talked.
They were wizards at electronics, they impressed him.
He went to see their lab; he offered to invest in their work,
If only they would get away from the shady side of things
and make good use of their talents.
But the investments became habitual, the women came to expect it.
There was less and less talk of repayment.
They bound him emotionally, then made him their fool.
They tried to wedge themselves between him and his family.
One was the disowned daughter of a prominent minister,
She did advanced tinkering, read electronics tomes,
But never lived up to her scientific talent;
She was too defiant ever to work with people.
She collected big guns and neo-Nazi hate books.
He knew what they were doing to him,
And the bonds they tightened on him
were painful to an old man.
Terrible things would happen, not just to him,
if he forced himself free.
And he believed he could change their hearts,
With childlike trust he affirmed their goodness.
It was HINTS OF GUNS IN HANDBAGS versus
"I know the positive things inside you, Honey."
Anyone who wished for decent human life
Would have loved him for his kindness,
But their contempt was all the greater, for the way he
"bent over and took it."
In the end his giving was twisted to the purposes they chose;
He too was guilty of what Buddhists call "impure giving, "
A very sticky and hard to judge karma!
This too was among the wheels he set turning.

But all of those he helped are not about to quibble.
Everyone remembers his great efforts with gratitude.
For many years he worked alone near the old family center,
At 78 he grew deathly ill, tried to keep living alone,
But his daughter showed that she, after all,
is from the old, old country.
She prepared her yard with seventy varieties of herb and flower,
Put in three raised beds of vegetables;
To give the garden magic, she brought elk manure from a hiking trip
And elephant manure from the zoo;
Her husband rooted out kudzu with groans instead of parathion;
Lushness enough to summon landscape angels,
To greet the man she kidnapped from his modern isolation
and brought home.

She held an 80th birthday bash;
She hired a Mae West to sit on the old man's lap.
The Mae West was young and skinny, a moonlighting drama major.
An assemblage of guests from all manner of places
Hushed to hear his comebacks to her flirting.
He juggled complements to her eternal womanhood
With reassurances that she was a good performer.
My Chinese friends were charmed by the Mae West's pouting voice,
a bit like Beijing opera;
A Persian dancer was moved by his "balance"- -
I told her he had often worked with young people.
All the twenty-something, thirty-something revelers
were heightened in their youth
By seeing him so much at home in his own life stage.

Now the old man sits in his room,
Reads detective books and articles on biology,
Takes short walks, watches for daughter to come home,
Helps a grandson study words for the G.R.E.
Sons come to visit; his granddaughter brings teenage news.
Let us hope his sons make decent lives for themselves,
So they can gather round him in an un-tormented circle,
And smile on the completion of this cycle.

Like a true philosopher he meets oblivion with eyes open,
His presence is going off into the many wheels turning.