[This is an essay I used for an assignment where our prompt was a picture that we had. It's the first draft and has since been edited and revised. Maybe someday I will post it]
At the time it was still a door that meant something, though its message had changed. When I was a kid the building was the home of Singer Steel, the name by which most residents of the neighborhood still call it. Only the recent trendy residents call it “that warehouse.” The heavy industrial business was an imposing landmark on the northwest side of the heavily ethnic community that marked the outskirts of our culture. The men who worked there were dirty and sweaty and smoked. They stood on the abnormally wide, green-painted sidewalk outside the building on their breaks and though I was only seven or eight years old I distinctly remember these sweaty smoking men being heavy set and drinking from gold-colored cans that where dazzling under the sun during my summer vacation. It was their version of the three martini lunch. Not as glamorous, but to them it wasn’t any less earned.
As small children we were of course susceptible to any manner of no-good that our parents didn’t know we were already willing participants in and the warehouse was one of those things. It was on the same side of Random Road (no that isn’t a cop out, it’s the real name) as the playground which was just a little north down the street and around the bend but the stretch where Singer Steel sat was mostly forbidden to us on our sixteen inch bikes. Our parents always said it was because of the trucks that pulled in and out of the three garage doors like clownfish in an anemone. The three trucks owned by the company were all red flat beds. Two were International 4000’s, shiny, new, one longer than the other, and one was an older International S-1900 in a little rougher shape but the same length as the longer of the newer trucks. The shortest often used the third garage door that was separated from the main two by about 80 feet. I always imagined it as the little brother. They never seemed to go anywhere but were constantly shuffling things inside and rolling in or out as needed.
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